Free Mammoth by John Varley Page A

Christian held up the shrink-wrapped box and regarded the toy robot inside. It was a rare Bandai X-56 MechaMan, one of the earliest plastic toy robots to become really expensive, mainly because of the extremely limited production run. Howard wasn’t a big fan of plastic. Like most serious robot collectors he went for the older tin models most of the time. But he liked the X-56, and he didn’t have one.
    This was the best-known example, and naturally it was sitting on the table of the unquestioned mogul of collectible toys, a man who called himself Radicon.
    The table was near the door to a small side room off the main floor of the Anaheim Convention Center that housed the several dozen most exclusive dealers attending the annual National Toy Collectors Convention—the Nat-Toy—a gathering Howard had not missed in fifteen years. To get into this room you had to know someone, or someone had to know your net worth and credit rating. Toys had changed hands in this room for well over one million dollars.
    Naturally, Howard Christian was always welcome. These dealers would, in fact, have been happy to grant him a private showing for as long as he wished, but Howard didn’t enjoy that. Part of the fun of a convention, swap meet, or even a garage sale was elbowing through the crowds, looking for the undiscovered gem. Of course, he knew there would be no discovery here. Every person in this room could quote the last known price for any of the top one thousand rarities without having to get out a catalog. You would pay top dollar here, but you would get top quality.
    He turned the box over in his hand. One of several problems with plastic toys was that they had started showing up atthe same time manufacturers began packaging most of their wares in boxes with clear plastic windows so you could actually see the toy inside. Typically, the box would then be either wrapped in cellophane or shrink-wrapped in a more flexible plastic.
    This X-56 was NRFB, and bagged in Radicon’s own protective wrapper as well, so no fingerprints could mar the original material. Because, though “never removed from box” was not the only criterion for collectability, it was incredibly important. Early in Howard’s collecting career he had paid thirty thousand dollars for a 1950s tin toy, took it home, unwrapped it, and threw away the box. He was stunned to learn, a few weeks later, that the value of the item was now about four thousand dollars. Which meant he could now never show it. Not that he minded losing the twenty-six thousand so much…but if he
showed
it without the box, people would realize he no longer
had
the box—it was the only possible explanation. And he didn’t want to look like a sap.
    Most collectors would not view the presence of original wrapping as a drawback to a toy. They would happily put it on their shelf, or more likely in their climate-controlled sealed exhibition case with the laser alarm system, and smugly check the catalogs every few months to see how it was appreciating.
    But when a toy is encased in shrink-wrap you can’t get it out without running the seal, and if you can’t get it out without ruining the seal, and if you can’t get it out of the box, you can’t…well, you can’t
play
with it.
    Not actually play, Howard thought. Not like children play. There would be no bashing and tossing and stomping, no battles staged, no leaving it out in the rain in the sandbox. It’s just that, when he got something like a toy robot, he wanted to put a battery in it, turn it on, and watch it do its thing. Otherwise, why collect? Investment, so important to the majority of his fellow fanatics, was low on Howard’s list of priorities.
    He did have a curator on his staff who was very clever with these things. When the man was done repackaging an item, very few experts could tell it had ever been tampered with.
    But a few could, and many of them were in this room.
    It was a pretty problem.
    Howard noticed Warburton had