"Well? Explain!"

"Uncle Isadore had it set up," I told him, using the same patiently impatient tone he used on me. "He knew I'd recognize that lead coin. There was a cuff link in it."

"A cuff link!"

"A studs and neck clasp man has to know about cuff links, too. This happens to be an expensive cuff link, but worth only about a year's salary, not a million dollars. They're held together by a jazzed-up electromagnetic force rather than by a clasp. This force is so strong it would take a derrick to pull them apart. The idea is to keep you from losing one. If you drop it to the floor, you just wave the mate around a little and it pops up through the air."

"How do you get them apart?"

"Just slip them sideways, like a magnet. You can sheathe them in lead, like the one I found, to cut down the attraction. This is how they're packaged. You don't know about them because they're not advertised—that keeps them a luxury item, you know."

"So your Uncle Isadore pasted one of them on the port button."

"He didn't have to paste. All he had to do was stick it on. All I had to do was line up the mate to it and the attractive force pushed the button."

"That's very neat," Rene said. "But why the hell didn't he just leave the port open? He'd hardly do this sort of thing with his dying gasp."

"I'm not sure," I admitted. "As a matter of fact, I wonder why he radared me if he really wanted to be rescued. He had plenty of friends who could rescue him more reliably."

I had an inkling of what had been on Uncle Isadore's mind. Although Uncle Izzy had had three—or was it four?—wives, he'd very carefully had no children. And it had occurred to him at an advanced age to take an interest in me.

He'd sent me through two years of general studies and reluctantly let me specialize in studs and neck clasps.

"You were a grilch hop expert in Middle School," he had told me. "How come you're getting so stuffy?"

"Because I can't be an adolescent all my life, Uncle Isadore," I had replied stiffly. "I would like to get into some solid line of work and be a good citizen."

"Phooey!" he'd said. But he had let me do what I'd wanted. It 

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