The Ghost of a Model T: And Other Stories Read online

  Packer rolled the wad of leaf across his tongue, sucking out the last faded dregs of its tantalizing flavor.

  If a man could make a deal for a good-sized shipment of the leaf, he thought, he could make a fortune on it. Packaged in small units, like packs of gum, it would go like hot cakes here on Earth. He had tried to bring up the subject with Pug, but had done no more than confuse and perplex the good Unukian who, for some unfathomable reason, could not conceive of any commerce that went beyond the confines of simple barter to meet the personal needs of the bargaining individuals.

  The doorbell chimed and Packer went to answer it.

  It was Tony Camper.

  “Hi, Uncle Clyde,” said Tony breezily.

  Packer held the door open grudgingly.

  “Since you are here,” he said, “you might as well come in.”

  Tony stepped in and tilted his hat back on his head. He looked the apartment over with an appraising eye.

  “Some day, Unk,” he said, “you should get this place shoveled out. I don’t see how you stand it.”

  “I manage it quite well,” Packer informed him tartly. “Some day I’ll get around to straightening up a bit.”

  “I should hope you do,” said Tony.

  “My boy,” said Packer, with a trace of pride, “I think that I can say, without fear of contradiction, that I have one of the finest collections of out-star stamps that anyone can boast. Some day, when I get them all in albums –”

  “You’ll never make it, Unk. It’ll just keep piling up. It comes in faster than you can sort it out.”

  He reached out a foot and nudged the bag beside the desk.

  “Like this,” he said. “This is a new one, isn’t it?”

  “It just came in,” admitted Packer. “Haven’t gotten around as yet to figuring out exactly where it’s from.”

  “Well, that is fine,” said Tony. “Keep on having fun. You’ll outlive us all.”

  “Sure, I will,” said Packer testily. “What is it that you want?”

  “Not a thing, Unk. Just dropped in to say hello and to remind you you’re coming up to Hudson’s to spend the week-end with us. Ann insisted that I drop around and nudge you. The kids have been counting the days –”

  “I would have remembered it,” lied Packer, who had quite forgotten it.

  “I could drop around and pick you up. Three this afternoon?”

  “No, Tony, don’t bother. I’ll catch a stratocab. I couldn’t leave that early. I have things to do.”

  “I bet you have,” said Tony.

  He moved toward the door.

  “You won’t forget,” he cautioned.

  “No, of course I won’t,” snapped Packer.

  “Ann would be plenty sore if you did. She’s fixing everything you like.”

  Packer grunted at him.

  “Dinner at seven,” said Tony cheerfully.

  “Sure, Tony. I’ll be there.”

  “See you, Unk,” said Tony, and was gone.

  Young whippersnapper, Packer told himself. Wonder what he’s up to now. Always got a new deal cooking, never quite making out on it. Just keeps scraping along.

  He stumped back to the desk.

  Figures he’ll be getting my money when I die, he thought. The little that I have. Well, I’ll fool him. I’ll spend every cent of it. I’ll manage to live long enough for that.

  He sat down and picked up one of the letters, slit it open with his pocketknife and dumped out its contents on the one small bare spot on the desk in front of him.

  He snapped on the desk lamp and pulled it close. He bent above the stamps.

  Pretty fair lot, he thought. That one there from Rho Geminorum XII, or was it XVI, was a fine example of the modern classic—designed with delicacy and imagination, engraved with loving care and exactitude, laid on paper of the highest quality, printed with the highest technical precision.

  He hunted for his stamp tongs and failed to find them. He opened the desk drawer and rummaged through the tangled rat’s-nest he found inside it. He got down on his hands and knees and searched beneath the desk.

  He didn’t find the tongs.

  He got back, puffing, into his chair, and sat there angrily.

  Always losing tongs, he thought. I bet this is the twentieth pair I’ve lost. Just can’t keep track of them, damn ’em!

  The door chimed.

  “Well, come on in!” Packer yelled in wrath.

  A mouselike little man came in and closed the door gently behind him. He stood timidly just inside, twirling his hat between his hands.

  “You Mr. Packer, sir?”

  “Yes, sure I am,” yelled Packer. “Who did you expect to find here?”

  “Well, sir,” said the man, advancing a few careful steps into the room, “I am Jason Pickering. You may have heard of me.”

  “Pickering?” said Packer. “Pickering? Oh, sure, I’ve heard of you. You’re the one who specializes in Polaris.”

  “That is right,” admitted Pickering, mincing just a little. “I am gratified that you –”

  “Not at all,” said Packer, getting up to shake his hand. “I’m the one who’s honored.”

  He bent and swept two albums and three shoe boxes off a chair. One of the shoe boxes tipped over and a mound of stamps poured out.

  “Please have a chair, Mr. Pickering,” Packer said majestically.

  Pickering, his eyes popping slightly, sat down gingerly on the edge of the swept-clean chair.

  “My, my,” he said, his eyes taking in the litter that filled the apartment, “you seem to have a lot of stuff here. Undoubtedly, however, you can lay your hands on anything you want.”

  “Not a chance,” said Packer, sitting down again. “I have no idea whatsoever what I have.”

  Pickering tittered. “Then, sir, you may well be in for some wonderful surprises.”

  “I’m never surprised at anything,” said Packer loftily.

  “Well, on to business,” said Pickering. “I do not mean to waste your time. I was wondering if it were possible you might have Polaris 17b on cover. It’s quite an elusive number, even off cover, and I know of not a single instance of one that’s tied to cover. But someone was telling me that perhaps you might have one tucked away.”

  “Let me see, now,” said Packer. He leaned back in his chair and leafed catalogue pages rapidly through his mind. And suddenly he had it—Polaris 17b—a tiny stamp, almost a midget stamp, bright blue with a tiny crimson dot in the lower left-hand corner and its design a mass of lacy scrollwork.

  “Yes,” he said, opening his eyes, “I believe I may have one. I seem to remember, years ago …”

  Pickering leaned forward, hardly breathing.

  “You mean you actually …”

  “I’m sure it’s here somewhere,” said Packer, waving his hand vaguely at the room.

  “If you find it,” offered Pickering, “I’ll pay ten thousand for it.”

  “A strip of five,” said Packer, “as I remember it. Out of Polaris VII to Betelgeuse XIII by way of—I don’t seem to remember by way of where.”

  “A strip of five!”

  “As I remember it. I might be mistaken.”

  “Fifty thousand,” said Pickering, practically frothing at the mouth. “Fifty thousand, if you find it.”

  Packer yawned. “For only fifty thousand, Mr. Pickering, I wouldn’t even look.”

  “A hundred, then.”

  “I might think about it.”

  “You’ll start looking right away? You must have some idea.”

  “Mr. Pickering, it has taken me all of twenty years to pile up all the litter that you see and my memory’s not too good. I’d have not the slightest notion where to start.”

  “Set your price,” urged Pickering. “What do you want for it?”
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  “If I find it,” said Packer, “I might consider a quarter million. That is, if I find it …”

  “You’ll look?”

  “I’m not sure. Some day I might stumble on it. Some day I’ll have to clean up the place. I’ll keep an eye out for it.”

  Pickering stood up stiffly.

  “You jest with me,” he said.

  Packer waved a feeble hand, “I never jest,” he said.

  Pickering moved toward the door.

  Packer heaved himself from the chair.

  “I’ll let you out,” he said.

  “Never mind. And thank you very much.”

  Packer eased himself back into the chair and watched the man go out.

  He sat there, trying to remember where the Polaris cover might be buried. And finally gave up. It had been so long ago.

  He hunted some more for the tongs, but be didn’t find them.

  He’d have to go out first thing in the morning and buy another pair. Then he remembered that he wouldn’t be here in the morning. He’d be up on Hudson’s Bay, at Tony’s summer place.

  It did beat hell, he thought, how he could manage to lose so many tongs.

  He sat for a long time, letting himself sink into a sort of suspended state, not quite asleep, nor yet entirely awake, and he thought, quite vaguely and disjointedly, of many curious things.

  But mostly about adhesive postage stamps and how, of all the ideas exported by the Earth, the idea of the use of stamps had caught on most quickly and, in the last two thousand years, had spread to the far corners of the galaxy.

  It was getting hard, he told himself, to keep track of all the stamps, even of the planets that were issuing stamps. There were new ones popping up all the blessed time. A man must keep everlastingly on his toes to keep tab on all of them.

  There were some funny stamps, he thought. Like the ones from Menkalinen that used smells to spell out their values. Not five-cent stamps or five-dollar stamps or hundred-dollar stamps, but one stamp that smelled something like a pasture rose for the local mail and another stamp that had the odor of ripe old cheese for the system mail and yet another with a stink that could knock out a human at forty paces distance for the interstellar service.

  And the Algeiban issues that shifted into colors beyond the range of human vision—and worst of all, with the values based on that very shift of color. And that famous classic issue put out, quite illegally, of course, by the Leonidian pirates who had used, instead of paper, the well-tanned, thin-scraped hides of human victims who had fallen into their clutches.

  He sat nodding in the chair, listening to a clock hidden somewhere behind the litter of the room, ticking loudly in the silence.

  It made a good life, he told himself, a very satisfactory life. Twenty years ago when Myra had died and he had sold his interest in the export company, he’d been ready to curl up and end it all, ready to write off his life as one already lived. But today, he thought, he was more absorbed in stamps than he’d ever been in the export business and it was a blessing—that was what it was, a blessing.

  He sat there and thought kindly of his stamps, which had rescued him from the deep wells of loneliness, which had given back his life and almost made him young again.

  And then he fell asleep.

  The door chimes wakened him and he stumbled to the door, rubbing sleep out of his eyes.

  The Widow Foshay stood in the hall, with a small kettle in her hands. She held it out to him.

  “I thought, poor man, he will enjoy this,” she said. “It’s some of the beef broth that I made. And I always make so much. It’s so hard to cook for one.”

  Packer took the kettle.

  “It was kind of you,” he mumbled.

  She looked at him sharply.

  “You are sick,” she said.

  She stepped through the door, forcing him to step back, forcing her way in.

  “Not sick,” he protested limply. “I fell asleep, that’s all. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  She reached out a pudgy hand and held it on his forehead.

  “You have a fever,” she declared. “You are burning up.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” he bellowed. “I tell you, I just fell asleep, is all.”

  She turned and bustled out into the room, threading her way among the piled-up litter. Watching her, he thought: My God, she finally got into the place! How can I throw her out?

  “You come over here and sit right down,” she ordered him. “I don’t suppose you have a thermometer.”

  He shook his head, defeated.

  “Never had any need of one,” he said. “Been healthy all my life.”

  She screamed and jumped and whirled around and headed for the door at an awkward gallop. She stumbled across a pile of boxes and fell flat upon her face, then scrambled, screeching, to her feet and shot out of the door.

  Packer slammed the door behind her and stood looking, with some fascination, at the kettle in his hand. Despite all the ruckus, he’d spilled not a single drop.

  But what had caused the Widow …

  Then he saw it—a tiny mouse running on the floor.

  He hoisted the kettle in a grave salute.

  “Thanks, my friend,” he said.

  He made his way to the table in the dining room and found a place where he could put down the kettle.

  Mice, he thought. There had been times when he had suspected that he had them—nibbled cheese on the kitchen shelf, scurryings in the night—and he had worried some about them making nests in the material he had stacked all about the place.

  But mice had a good side to them, too, he thought.

  He looked at his watch and it was almost five o’clock and he had an hour or so before he had to catch a cab and he realized now that somehow he had managed to miss lunch. So he’d have some of the broth and while he was doing that he’d look over the material that was in the bag.

  He lifted some of the piled-up boxes off the table and set them on the floor so he had some room to empty the contents of the bag.

  He went to the kitchen and got a spoon and sampled the broth. It was more than passing good. It was still warm and he had no doubt that the kettle might do the finish of the table top no good, but that was something one need not worry over.

  He hauled the bag over to the table and puzzled out the strangeness of the return address. It was the new script they’d started using a few years back out in the Bootis system and it was from a rather shady gentle-being from one of the Cygnian stars who appreciated, every now and then, a case of the finest Scotch.

  Packer, hefting the bag, made a mental note to ship him two, at least.

  He opened up the bag and upended it and a mound of covers flowed out on the table.

  Packer tossed the bag into a corner and sat down contentedly. He sipped at the broth and began going slowly through the pile of covers. They were, by and large, magnificent. Someone had taken the trouble to try to segregate them according to systems of their origin and had arranged them in little packets, held in place by rubber bands.

  There was a packet from Rasalhague and another from Cheleb and from Nunki and Kaus Borealis and from many other places.

  And there was a packet of others he did not recognize at all. It was a fairly good-sized packet with twenty-five or thirty covers in it and all the envelopes, he saw, were franked with the same stamps—little yellow fellows that had no discernible markings on them—just squares of yellow paper, rather thick and rough. He ran his thumb across one and he got the sense of crumbling, as if the paper were soft and chalky and were abrading beneath the pressure of his thumb.

  Fascinated, he pulled one envelope from beneath the rubber band and tossed the rest of the packet to one side.

  He shambled to his desk and dug frantically in the drawer and came back with a gl
ass. He held it above the stamp and peered through it and he had been right—there were no markings on the stamp. It was a mere yellow square of paper that was rather thick and pebbly, as if it were made up of tiny grains of sand.

  He straightened up and spooned broth into his mouth and frantically flipped the pages of his mental catalogue, but he got no clue. So far as he could recall, he’d never seen or heard of that particular stamp before.

  He examined the postmarks with the glass and some of them he could recognize and there were others that he couldn’t, but that made no difference, for he could look them up, at a later time, in one of the postmark and cancellation handbooks. He got the distinct impression, however, that the planet, or planets, of origin must lie Libra-wards, for all the postmarks he could recognize trended in that direction.

  He laid the glass away and turned his full attention to the broth, being careful of his whiskers. Whiskers, he reminded himself, were no excuse for one to be a sloppy eater.

  The spoon turned in his hand at that very moment and some of the broth spilled down his beard and some spattered on the table, but the most of it landed on the cover with the yellow stamp.

  He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and tried to wipe the cover clean, but it wouldn’t wipe. The envelope was soggy and the stamp was ruined with the grease and he said a few choice cusswords, directed at his clumsiness.

  Then he took the dripping cover by one corner and hunted until he found the wastebasket and dropped the cover in it.

  CHAPTER II

  He was glad to get back from the weekend at Hudson’s Bay.

  Tony was a fool, he thought, to sink so much money in such a fancy place. He had no more prospects than a rabbit and his high-pressure deals always seemed to peter out, but he still went on talking big and hung onto that expensive summer place. Maybe, Packer thought, that was the way to do it these days; maybe if you could fool someone into thinking you were big, you might have a better chance of getting into something big. Maybe that was the way it worked, but he didn’t know.