"You didn't want the ship to come down here, did you?" she asked.
"No. I wanted it to follow the signals of Van Ostrand's confederate. It would have burned when they opened the inner airlock, anyway. What did you do to bring it down here?"
"If you were the cat, sweetheart, you saw what I did." She looked suddenly very coy.
"You mean that bit with the head, when you tried to nudge the second hand? I don't quite see—"
"Magnetic handcuffs and bobby pins," she said.
Then I got it. Even a genius like me can see the obvious when you draw him a picture of it. She'd magnetized a bobby pin and let it stick to the second hand of the clock. The weight of it had been just enough to cause the clock to run fast when the hand was dropping from "12" to "6", and make it run slow when it was trying to go up the other side. The two cancelled each other out, so it was always almost correct when it was pointing straight up. But it took it only twenty seconds to get to the "6", and about forty to reach the "12".
"Very clever," I said. "I'm glad you didn't kill me with it. Once I get the sigma receiver-sender down to manageable size, we won't have to worry about either of us not knowing what the other is up to."
"Well, you're not going to work on it just yet," she said emphatically. "First you'll have to establish your new identity. And then you'll have to marry me again. Nikki Varden is a very respectable and unspoiled girl."
I thought of all the years that I had lain in that tomb, while, due to the sex-linked differences in the rejuvenation process of immortality, my wife had been fully alive. And I thought of men like Bob North who tried to push themselves onto helpless women. And then I realized that Nikki was not quite helpless. Respectable and unspoiled?
"She'd better be," I said.