The lava lamp sold for seventeen dollars twenty-five, which was on the very low end of the range of sums Ling was willing to pay for it. Then again, the vendor didn’t have a clue it would be worth a millionfold in half an eon’s time.
Of course Ling still had to hope he wouldn’t notice that the money was first issued some ten years from here. Bank notes of this era were hard to come by of late, so she’d had to dip into her eighties cash reserve. The vendor held the bills to the light one by one, making Ling sweat, but he didn’t catch the impossible future date.
“Enjoy the lamp, miss.”
Ling had been doing this for six years now and she still enjoyed it immensely, despite the motion sickness that wreaked havoc on her body after each time jump. The wealthy Chinese businessman who employed her could just have printed out a pristine copy and nobody would have noticed the difference. But to have the genuine, centuries old article on display, was worth good money. And Ling was all too willing to cash.
“Isn’t it marvellous?” the businessman asked her as he put the lamp on his mantelpiece. “Only a mind on acid would come up with a thing like this. Were we really that spaced out back then? Could you actually smell the pot in the air?”
“Yes,” she lied. The more she played on his nostalgia, the more he would be inclined to continue using her services.
***
After she’d stacked away the money, she whipped out her electronic notepad and started concocting the narrative details of her next trip to the past.
Her 3D printer was already hard at work at the third century BC Greek amphora.
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