"Maybe," said Jack doubtfully. "How did you guess all this?"
"A little deduction. I had some conversations with Edigo while I was shopping there. He said he just dug that basement as the lower floor of his new fifty-story building; but actually that basement's been there for years and is supposed to be empty. It belongs to old man Caswell, who owns the building the Eat-A-Bite's in, and God knows how he's going to react if he ever walks into it and finds that store. And it's not just that. The costumes, the strange objects they have for sale, even that peculiar accent."
"How far in the future?" asked Jack.
"I don't know. Pretty far, I expect. How much interest does that bank account draw? You know, the one in their name, where we've been depositing the money for the things we bought?"
"Three per cent, I think, compounded quarterly."
"It would have to be compounded to amount to anything in a couple of hundred years or so."
"I still don't get it. Why do they sell things so cheap? Will prices be that much lower in the future?"
"Probably a lot higher," said Ken. "They don't even use the same sort of money we do—that's why they don't just ask us to make deposits of their own money for them. But they can afford to sell us at these ridiculously low prices because the deposits in their name draw compound interest and build up to a lot higher than the value of the merchandise in the future—their time. I expect every dime we deposit for them means a hundred dollars or more to them in their equivalent of our money."
"I just don't see that," said Jack. "We're in their past. How could they have us deposit money to build up for them, unless, to them, the deposits are already there?"