The stranger stood by the stove and glanced at Mooney warily. Mooney stood six feet, but this man was bigger. The silvery sort of thing he had on covered his legs as far as the feet, and he wore no shoes. It covered his body and his arms, and he had silvery gloves on his hands. It stopped at the neck, in a collar of what looked like pure silver, but could not have been because it gave with every breath the man took and every tensed muscle or tendon in his neck. His head was bare and his hair was black, cut very short. He was carrying something flat and shiny by a molded handle. If it had been made of pigskin, it would have resembled a junior executive's briefcase. The man said explosively: "You will help me." Mooney cleared his throat. "Listen, I don't know what you want, but this is my house and--" "You will help me," the man said positively. "I will pay you. Very well?" He had a peculiar way of parting his sentences in the middle, but Mooney didn't care about that. He suddenly cared about one thing and that was the word "pay." "What do you want me to do?" The angry-eyed man ran his gloved hands across his head and sluiced drops of water onto the scuffed linoleum and the bedding of the cot Mooney had dragged into the kitchen. He said irritably: "I am a wayfarer who needs a. Guide? I will pay you for your assistance." The question that rose to Mooney's lips was "How much?" but he fought it back. Instead, he asked, "Where do you want to go?" "One moment." The stranger sat damply on the edge of Mooney's cot and, click-snap, the shiny sort of briefcase opened itself in his hands. He took out a flat round thing like a mirror and looked into it, squeezing it by the edges, and holding it this way and that. Finally he said: "I must go to Wednesday, the twenty-sixth of December, at--" He tilted the little round thing again. "Brooklyn?" he finished triumphantly. Mooney said, after a second: "That's a funny way to put it." "Question?" "I mean," said Mooney, "I know where Brooklyn is and I know _when_ the twenty-sixth of December is--it's next week--but you have to admit that that's an odd way of putting it. I mean you don't _go_ anywhere in time." The wet man turned his pale eyes on Mooney. "Perhaps you are. Wrong?" II Mooney stared at his napping guest in a mood of wonder and fear and delight. Time traveler! But it was hard to doubt the pale-eyed man. He had said he was from the future and he mentioned a date that made Mooney gasp. He had said: "When you speak to me, you must know that my. Name? Is Harse." And then he had curled up on the floor, surrounding his shiny briefcase like a mother cat around a kitten, and begun dozing alertly. But not before he showed Mooney just what it was he proposed to pay him with.