Atomic Commercial Enterprise
Commission. Warning: Permit only an accredited employee of this company
to touch wiring._

Travail snorted. "Accredited employee, my foot! I know as much about
these things as they do."

He went into the kitchen and returned with a screwdriver. While Sutter
looked on with apprehensive eyes, he began to tinker with the wiring.
Suddenly there was a dull report and a flash of flame. Travail jerked
his arm back as a thin streamer of smoke and the smell of burning
insulation entered the room.

"You've broken it," said Sutter accusingly.

But his voice died abruptly as the screen flared into light and a low
hum sounded behind the panel. An instant later the light became subdued
and a streak of tawny yellow took form. The yellow slowly coalesced into
a sandy stretch of beach with long rolling swells washing up on it, to
recede in a smother of foam. Through the amplifier came the muted roar
of the breakers and the low soughing of the wind.

"Well, we got something at any rate," Travail said. "I wonder what it
is."

Sutter stared, fascinated. The view of the beach seemed to come into
sharper focus as he watched, and he saw now that it was an incredibly
lonely scene, with the sea stretching away to a vanishing point and a
stand of stunted spruce flanking the width of sand. But what caught his
eye and held him almost in a trance was the array of objects littering
the sand at the water's edge.

They were shells. Not the prosaic commonplace shells usually found on a
New England shore nor even the brighter colored, more intricately formed
shells of tropic seas. These were shells he had never seen before, even
in library collections. Alien and soft-hued and lovely shells that
caused his collector's heart to jump wildly. He saw a delicate
star-shaped thing that might have been fashioned of porcelain and
enameled with the brush of the Mings. He saw spiral coverings from
uncatalogued cephalopods, many chambered and many hued. He saw shells of
a thousand shapes and designs, all incredibly beautiful....

Sutter forgot everything else as he sat there staring at that
collector's paradise.

"I'll see if I can get something else," said Travail.

"No!" said Sutter quickly. "Don't touch it!"

He continued to stare hungrily at the alien shells until suddenly the
scene before him grew dim, then faded completely away.

Travail laughed shortly. "Somebody sold you a fluke. This set must be an
off brand. I