here was this package. At first glance it looked like one of those cereal samples manufacturers have been everlastingly sending through since postal rates dropped after cost of the potrays had been amortized. But cereal samples don’t come through at midday; they’re night traffic stuff.

The package was light, its wrapping curiously smooth. There was an envelope attached with my correct name and potray number. Whoever had mailed it must be in C. I. or must know someone in C. I. who knew where I was.

The postmark was blurred but I could make out that it had been cast from Grand Central. Time didn’t matter. It couldn’t have been cast more than a microsecond earlier.

The envelope contained a card upon which was typed:

“Caution! Site on cylinder of 2 ft. radius and 6 ft. height. Unwrap at armslength.”

Now what? A practical joke? If so, it must be Benson’s work. He’s played plenty, from pumping hydrogen sulphide (that’s rotten egg gas, as you know) into the air-conditioning system at high school to calling a gynecologist to the launching stage at the Sands to sever an umbilical cord which he neglected to say was on a Viking rocket.

I followed the instructions. As I bent back the first fold of the strange wrapping it came alive, unfolding itself with incredible swiftness.

Something burst forth like a freed djinn—almost instantaneously lengthening, spreading—a thing with beetling brows, low, broad forehead, prognathous jaw, and a hunched, brutally muscular body, with a great club over its swollen shoulder.

I went precipitously backward over a coffee table.

It stabilized, a dead mockery, replica of a Neanderthal.

A placard hung on its chest. I read this:

“Even some of the early huntsmen weren’t successful. Abandon the chase, Monk. I’ve things to do and this—your blood brother, no doubt—couldn’t catch me any more than you can!”

Which positively infuriated me.

Do you blame me?

A few cussing, cussed minutes later I realized what Al Benson had apparently done: solved the torchship’s fuel problem.

Oh, I’d seen Klein bottles and Mobius strips and other things that twist in on themselves and into other dimensions, twisting into microcosms and macrocosms—into elsewhere, in any event. And here I had visual evidence that Benson had had something nearly six feet tall and certainly two feet in breadth enclosed in a nearly weightless carton less than eight inches on the side!

Sufficient fuel for a Marstrip? Just wrap it up!

The stereo’s audio was saying: “… from the Museum of Natural History. Curators are compiling a list of the missing exhibits which we will reveal to you on this channel as soon as it’s available. Now we switch to Dick Joy at City Hall with news of the latest exhibit found. Come in, Dick!”

On the steps of City Hall was a full size replica of a mastodon over whose massive back was draped a banner bearing the slogan: “The Universal Party is for you! Don’t return to prehistory with Cadigan! Re-elect President Ollie James and go to the stars!”

And there was a closeup of Mayor Cadigan standing pompous and wrathful—and looking very diminutive—behind the emblem of his opposition party.

Dick Joy was saying, “Eyewitnesses claim that this replica—obviously one of the items stolen from the Museum of Natural History—suddenly materialized here. Immediately prior to the alleged materialization a man—whose photograph we show now—ostensibly bent down to tie a shoelace, setting a shoebox beside him. He left the box, walking off into the gathering crowd, and this mastodon seemed to spring into being where the shoebox had been.

“The mastodon replica has been examined. A report just handed me says it is definitely that from the Museum and that it could not conceivably have been contained in a shoebox. It’s