liot took a deep, shaky breath. "I could see right away
it was different. You see I'm an electrical engineer. I had opened it
once before, to put in a new battery. I had a fairly good idea how it
should look." Elliot hesitated. "Commissioner, it had been _changed_.
A lot of the wiring was different. Moved around. Relays connected
differently. Some parts were missing. New parts had been jury rigged
out of old. Then I discovered the thing that made me call Security.
The vidsender--it really _worked_."

"Worked?"

"You see, it never was anything more than a toy. With a range of a few
city blocks. So the kids could call back and forth from their rooms.
Like a sort of portable vidscreen. Commissioner, I tried out the
vidsender, pushing the call button and speaking into the microphone.
I--I got a ship of the line. A battleship, operating beyond Proxima
Centaurus--over eight light years away. As far out as the actual
vidsenders operate. Then I called Security. Right away."

For a time Reinhart was silent. Finally he tapped the box lying on the
desk. "You got a ship of the line--with _this_?"

"That's right."

"How big are the regular vidsenders?"

Dixon supplied the information. "As big as a twenty-ton safe."

"That's what I thought." Reinhart waved his hand impatiently. "All
right, Elliot. Thanks for turning the information over to us. That's
all."

Security police led Elliot outside the office.

Reinhart and Dixon looked at each other. "This is bad," Reinhart said
harshly. "He has some ability, some kind of mechanical ability.
Genius, perhaps, to do a thing like this. Look at the period he came
from, Dixon. The early part of the twentieth century. Before the wars
began. That was a unique period. There was a certain vitality, a
certain ability. It was a period of incredible growth and discovery.
Edison. Pasteur. Burbank. The Wright brothers. Inventions and
machines. People had an uncanny ability with machines. A kind of
intuition about machines--which we don't have."

"You mean--"

"I mean a person like this coming into our own time is bad in itself,
war or no war. He's too different. He's oriented along different
lines. He has abilities we lack. This fixing skill of his. It throws
us off, out of kilter. And with the war....

"Now I'm beginning to understand why the SRB machines couldn't factor
him. It's impossible for us to understand this kind of person. Winslow
says he asked for work, any kind of work. The