Winant shook his head. "Poor Uncle Ivor," he said commiseratingly. "The last time he got away from us he thought he was Mahatma Ghandi, and tried to buy a bus ticket from Cincinnati to New Delhi, India. I found him, finally, in Evansville, Indiana. It's amazing how he got this far south, but then a mentally-unbalanced person can do surprising things, sometimes."
The sheriff snorted. "Unbalanced, hell," he said. "The old coot's crazy as a bed-bug. Just got in from Mars, he says, and he wants the president of the United States—on the double!"
He unlocked the door and Winant went inside.
"It's all right now, Uncle Ivor," he said gently. The old man raised a wrinkled, leathery face and stared at him uncomprehendingly. "Let's go over to my hotel and get a good meal and a hot bath," Winant urged. "Then we'll go home again. Ready, now?"
A few minutes later in the jail office the sheriff pocketed the bill Winant gave him and handed over a small lacquered metal box that was surprisingly heavy for its size.
"Here's your uncle's radio," he said. "New-fangled model, I reckon. I couldn't make head nor tail of it, so I just left it alone."
Winant lifted the hinged cover and looked inside the box at the neat array of tiny meters and knobs that covered the control panel.
"A wise decision, sheriff," he said dryly. "Wiser, perhaps, than you'll ever know."
The old man stood in the center of Winant's hotel room, the sheriff's ill-fitting denims hanging on his slight frame like the castoff clothing of a scare-crow.