"I can show you exactly."
He pointed to a spot next to the entrance port. I wet my finger and made a mark in the dust so I could get it just right. Then I found a sharp stone and cut around the edges of the lead. As I slipped off the back half of the coinlike affair, I clapped it over the finger mark.
The entrance port swung open.
If I'd had a feather, I would have taken great pleasure in knocking Rene over with it.
"It'd be worth a million dollars," he breathed, "to know how you did that."
"Oh, a lot less than that," I said airily.
"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."