d not
been in good working order for more than a year. The olfactory control
had jammed last week while he was watching a Sumatran tribal ceremony,
inland from Soerabaja, and he had been unable to smell the backdrop
frangipani blossoms. It was time he bought a new set....

Sutter touched a stud and the electric runabout coasted to a halt. As he
climbed out of the car and walked across the highway toward the stand,
he thought for a moment there was something wrong with his contact
lenses or perhaps his eyes.

The stand and the sign above it appeared to waver uncertainly, to become
disjointed as though viewed through uneven glass. But the effect passed
and Sutter approached the stand and nodded to the individual tilted back
in a chair beside it.

He was a rawboned man with a thatch of thick black hair and small watery
eyes. He was dressed, oddly enough, in a pair of tight-fitting trousers
of white lawn, a flaming red tunic and a yellow cummerbund.

"Yes, sir," he said. "Can I show you something in a new TV?"

"Where are they?" asked Sutter, surveying the empty stand.

"Out back," replied the man. "Just a minute and I'll show you."

He rose lazily from his chair and led the way around to the rear of the
stand. Sutter could have sworn he had seen an apple orchard behind the
structure as he rode up, but he must have been mistaken for now he saw a
low-roofed, aluminum-walled building there, huge doors open on one side.
It looked, he thought, somewhat like a hangar....

Two hours later Sutter arrived back at his home in town. He parked the
car, went around to the rear compartment, lifted out a large packing
case and carried it to his sitting room. There, with the aid of hammer
and crowbar, he stripped away the protective boards and then trundled
the cabinet to an unoccupied corner.

It was certainly a unique TV set. A very new model, the salesman had
said. The cabinet was shaped like a delta with a cube surmounted on the
pointed end of the triangle. The cube held the screen, the triangle, the
controls. Finished in a subdued ochre color, the set captured the light
of the dying day that filtered through the bay window and gleamed with a
soft radiance.

Sutter looked at the control panel and his smile of satisfaction faded
somewhat. It looked a little complicated....

Instead of the usual knobs there were five small spoked wheels, each
closely calibrated in lavender with resilient studs that seemed to be
made of plus