Marilyn laughed. "No, not rich—far from it. We operate a restaurant and that's our stock you see."
"Oh, doll-o! I should not have eaten so much. What do you charge for a meal like that?"
"We would get three and a half for each order," I said, diplomatically not mentioning all his side orders, "although we don't get much carriage trade here. But don't let it worry you. Nothing's too good for a guest from the future."
"Three and a half?" He looked amazed. "Why, such a feed would bring twenty-five or thirty where I come from—if you could find it! Let me pay, o-daddy-friend, at least your price."
And he pulled out some bills. I started to push them back, for of course I wasn't going to spoil this great moment in my life by asking a traveler from the future to pay for a meal.
But then I saw what he was trying to give me.
I picked up the bills and stared. Marilyn's head was over my shoulder and she was staring just as hard. She took one out of my hand.
"It's not real," she said. "There's not that much money in the world."
She had the five. I had the ones. The five-thousand and the one-thousand-dollar bills, that is. I looked up at Solid Chuck Richards.
"When you said that meal would cost twenty-five or thirty, did you mean twenty-five or thirty thousand?"