Hamilton had seen him once, for a few minutes, in a newscast. He spoke with a barbarous accent and was dressed in his ancient costume, baggy pantaloons described by the interlocutor as "plus fours" and a shapeless knitted garment which covered his chest and arms. None of which prepared Hamilton for the reception of a stat relating to J. Darlington Smith.

"Greetings," it began, etc. etc. The gist of it was that the interlocutor appointed by the Institution as temporary guardian for Smith desired that Hamilton grant the favor of an hour of his no-doubt valuable time to Smith. No explanation.

In his bemused frame of mind his first impulse was to ignore it. Then he recalled that such an act would not have fitted his former, pre-intrigue, conduct. He would have seen the barbarian, from sheer curiosity.

Now was as good a time as any. He called the Institution, got hold of the interlocutor, and arranged for Smith to come to his apartment at once. As an afterthought he called Monroe-Alpha, he having remembered his friend's romantic interest in Smith. He explained what was about to take place. "I thought you might like to meet your primitive hero."

"My hero? What do you mean?"

"I thought you were telling me what a bucolic paradise he came from?"

"Oh, that! Slight mistake in dates. Smith is from 1926. It seems that gadgeting was beginning to spoil the culture, even then."

"Then you wouldn't be interested in seeing him?"

"Oh, I think I would. It was a transition period. He may have seen something of the old culture with his own eyes. I'll be over, but I may be a little late."

"Fine. Long life." He cleared without waiting for a reply. Smith showed up promptly, alone. He was dressed, rather badly, in modern clothes, but was unarmed.

"I'm John Darlington Smith, " he began.

Hamilton hesitated for a moment at the sight of the brassard, then decided to treat him as an equal. Discrimination, he felt, under the circumstances would be sheer unkindness. "I am honored that you visit me, sir."

"Not at all. Awfully good of you, and so forth."

"I had expected that there would be someone with you."

"Oh, you mean my nursemaid." He grinned boyishly. He was, Hamilton decided, perhaps ten years younger than Hamilton himself-discounting the years he had spent in stasis. "I'm beginning to manage the lingo all right, well enough to get around."

"I suppose so, " Hamilton agreed. "Both lingos are basically Anglic."

"It's not so difficult. I wish lingo were the only trouble I had."

Hamilton was a little at a loss as to how to handle him. It was utterly inurbane to display interest in a stranger's personal affairs, dangerous, if the stranger were an armed citizen. But this lad seemed to invite friendly interest. "What is troubling you, sir?"

"Well, lots of things, hard to define. Everything is different."

"Didn't you expect things to be different?"

"I didn't expect anything. I didn't expect to come to ... to now."

"Eh? I understand that-never mind. Do you mean that you did not know that you were entering the 'stasis'?"

"I did and I didn't."

"What do you mean?"

"Well... Listen, do you think you could stand a long story? I've told this story about forty-eleven times, and I know it doesn't do any good to try to shorten it. They just don't understand."

"Go ahead."

"Well, I'd better go back a little. I graduated from Eastern U in the spring of '26 and-"

"You what?"

"Oh, dear! You see in those days the schools-"

"Sorry. Just tell it your own way. Anything I can't pick up I'll ask you about later."

"Maybe that would be better. I had a pretty good job offered to me, selling bonds-one of the best houses on the Street. I was pretty well known-All-American back two seasons." Hamilton restrained himself, and made about four mental notes.

"That's an athletic honor, " Smith explained hastily. "You'll understand. I don't want you to think I was a football bum, though. To be sure the fraternity helped me a little, but I worked for every cent I got. Worked summers, too. And I studied. My major was Efficiency Engineering. I had a pretty thorough education in business, finance, economics, salesmanship. It's true that I got my job because Grantland Rice picked me-I mean football helped a lot to make me well known-but I was prepared to be an asset to any firm that hired me. You see that, don't you?"

"Oh, most certainly!"

"It's important, because it has a bearing on what happened afterwards. I wasn't working on my second million but I was getting along. Things were slick enough. The night it happened I was celebrating a little-with reason. I had unloaded an allotment of South American Republics-"

"Eh?"

"Bonds. It seemed like a good time to throw a party. It was a Saturday night, so everybody started out with the dinner-dance at the country club. It was the usual thing. I looked over the flappers for a while, didn't see one I wanted to dance with, and wandered into the locker room, looking for a drink. The attendant used to sell it to people he could trust."

"Which reminds me, " said Hamilton, and returned a moment later with glasses and refreshment.

"Thanks. His gin was pure bathtub, but usually reliable. Maybe it wasn't, that night. Or maybe I should have eaten dinner. Anyhow, I found myself listening to an argument that was going on in one end of the room. One of these parlor bolsheviks was holding forth-maybe you still have the type? Attack anything, just so long as it was respectable and decent."

Hamilton smiled.

"You do, eh? He was one of 'em. Read nothing but the American Mercury and Jurgen and then knew it all. I'm not narrow-minded. I read those things, too, but I didn't have to believe 'em. I read the Literary Digest, too, and the Times, something they would never do. To get on, he was panning the Administration and predicting that the whole country was about to go to the bow-wows... go to pieces. He didn't like the Gold Standard, he didn't like Wall Street, he thought we ought to write off the War Debts.

"I could see that some of our better members were getting pretty sick of it, so I jumped in. "They hired the money, didn't they, ' I told him.

"He grinned at me-sneered I should say. 'I suppose you voted for him.'

"'I certainly did, ' I answered, which was not strictly true; I hadn't gotten around to registering, such things coming in the middle of the football season. But I wasn't going to let him get away with sneering at Mr. Coolidge. 'I suppose you voted for Davis.'

"'Not likely, ' he says. 'I voted for Norman Thomas. '

"Well, that burned me up. 'See here, ' I said, 'the proper place for people like you is in Red Russia. You're probably an atheist, to boot. You have the advantage of living in the greater period in the history of the greatest country in history. We've got an Administration in Washington that understands business. We're back to normalcy and we're going to stay that way. We don't need you rocking the boat. We are levelled off on a plateau of permanent prosperity. Take it from me-Don't Sell America Short!'" I got quite a burst of applause.

"'You seem pretty sure of that,' he says, weakly.

"'I ought to be,' I told him. 'I'm in the Street. '

"'Then there is no point in me arguing,' he said, and just walked out.

"Somebody poured me another drink, and we got to talking. He was a pleasant, portly chap, looking like a banker or a broker. I didn't recognize him, but I believe in establishing contacts. 'Let me introduce myself, ' he said. 'My name is Thadeus Johnson.'

"I told him mine."

"'Well, Mr. Smith, ' he said, 'you seem to have confidence in the future of our country.'

"I told him I certainly did.

"'Confident enough to bet on it?'

"'At any odds you want to name, money, marbles, or chalk.'