As he unlocked the door of his room he was surprised by an unmade bed telling with rumpled stoicism of a chambermaid who’d never come. This hadn’t happened before—Of course! He’d never locked his room before. The girl must have thought he wanted privacy.
Maybe he had.
Aunt Maggie’s ties glittered obscenely at the foot of the bed. He chucked them into the closet as he removed his hat and coat. Then he went over to the washstand and washed his hands, slowly. He turned around.
This was it. At last the great cubical bulk that had been lurking quietly in the corner of his vision was squarely before him. It was there and it undoubtedly contained all the outlandish collection he remembered.
“Open,” he said, and the box opened.
The book, still open to the metallic table of contents, was lying at the bottom of the box. Part of it had slipped into the chamber of a strange piece of apparatus. Sam picked both out gingerly.
He slipped the book out and noticed the apparatus consisted mostly of some sort of binoculars, supported by a coil and tube arrangement and bearing on a flat green plate. He turned it over. The underside was lettered in the same streaky way as the book. Combination Electron Microscope and Workbench.
Very carefully he placed it on the floor. One by one, he removed the other items, from the Junior Biocalibrator to the Jiffy Vitalizer. Very respectfully he ranged against the box in five multi-colored rows the phials of lymph and the jars of basic cartilage. The walls of the chest were lined with indescribably thin and wrinkled sheets; a slight pressure along their edges expanded them into three-dimensional outlines of human organs whose shape and size could be varied with pinching any part of their surface—most indubitably molds.
Quite an assortment. If there was anything solidly scientific to it, that box might mean unimaginable wealth. Or some very useful publicity. Or—well, it should mean something!
If there was anything solidly scientific to it.