"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…"
"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, be 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 Bootes 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 glass. 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-ward, for all the postmarks he could recognize trended in that direction.
He laid the glass away and t
urned 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.
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 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 better chance of getting into something big. Maybe that was the way it worked, but he didn't know.
He stopped in the lobby to pick up his mail, hoping there might be a package from PugAlNash. In the excitement of leaving for the weekend, he'd forgotten to take along the box of leaf and three days without it had impressed upon him how much he had come to rely upon it. Remembering how low his supply was getting he became a little jittery to think that more might not be forthcoming.
There was a batch of letters, but no box from Pug.
And he might have known, he told himself, that there wouldn't be, for the box never came until he was entirely out. At first, he recalled, he wondered by what prophetic insight Pug might have known when the leaf was gone, how he could have gauged the shipping time to have it arrive exactly when there was need of it. By now he no longer thought about it, for it was one of those unbelievable things it does no good to think about.
"Glad to have you back," the clerk told him cheerfully. "You had a good weekend, Mr. Packer?"
"Tolerable," growled Packer, grumpily, heading for the elevator.
Before he reached it, he was apprehended by Elmer Lang, the manager of the building.
"Mr. Packer," he whinnied, "I'd like to talk to you."
"Well, go ahead and talk."
"It's about the mice, Mr. Packer."
"What mice?"
"Mrs. Foshay tells me there are mice in your apartment."
Packer drew himself up to the fullness of his rather dumpy height.
"They are your mice, Lang," he said. "You get rid of them."
Lang wrung his hands. "But how can I, Mr. Packer? It's the way you keep your place. All that litter in there. You've got to clean it up."
"That litter, I'll have you know, sir, is probably one of the most unique stamp collections in the entire galaxy. I've gotten behind a little in keeping it together, true, but I will not have you call it litter."
"I could have Miles, the caretaker, help you get it straightened out."
"I tell you, sir," said Packer, "the only one who could help me is one trained in philately. Does your caretaker happen to be —»
"But, Mr. Packer," Lang pleaded, "all that paper and all those boxes are nesting places for them. I can do nothing about the mice unless I can get in there and get some of it cleared away."
"Cleared away!" exploded Packer. "Do you realize, sir, what you are talking of? Somewhere hidden in that vast stock of material, is a certain cover — to you, sir, an envelope with stamps and postmarks on it — for which I have been offered a quarter million dollars if I ever turn it up. And that is one small piece of all the material I have there. I ask you, Lang, is that the sort of stuff that you clear away?"
"But, Mr. Packer, I cannot allow it to go on. I must insist —»
The elevator arrived and Packer stalked into it haughtily, leaving the manager standing in the lobby, twisting at his hands.
Packer whuffled his moustache at the operator.
"Busybody," he said, "What was that, sir?"
"Mrs. Foshay, my man. She's a busybody."
"I do believe," said the operator" judiciously, "that you may be entirely right."
Packer hoped the corridor would be empty and it was. He unlocked his door and stepped inside.
A bubbling noise stopped him in his tracks.
He stood listening, unbelieving, just a little frightened.
The bubbling noise went on and on.
He stepped cautiously out into the room and as he did he saw it.
The wastebasket beside the desk was full of a bubbling yellow stuff that in several places had run down the sides and formed puddles on the floor.
Packer stalked the basket, half prepared to turn and run.
But nothing happened. The yellowness in the basket simply kept on bubbling.
It was a rather thick and gooey mess, not frothy, and the bubbling was no more than a noise that it was making, for in the strict sense of the word, he saw, it was not bubbling.
Packer sidled closer and thrust out a hand toward the basket. It did not snap at him. It paid no attention to him.
He poked a finger at it and the stuff was fairly solid and slightly warm and he got the distinct impression that it was alive.
And immediately he thought of the broth-soaked cover be had thrown in the basket. It was not so unusual that he should think of it, for the yellow of the brew within the basket was the exact color of the stamp upon the cover,
He walked around the desk and dropped the mail he'd picked up in the lobby. He sat down ponderously in the massive office chair.
So a stamp had come to life, he thought, and that certainly was a queer one. But no more queer, perhaps, than the properties of many other stamps, for while Earth had exported the idea of their use, a number of peculiar adaptations of the idea had evolved.
• And now-, he thought a little limply, — you have to get this mess in the basket out of here before Lang comes busting in.-
He worried a bit about what Lang had said about cleaning up the place and he got slightly sore about it, for he paid good money for these diggings and he paid promptly in advance and he was never any bother. And besides, he'd been here for twenty years, and Lang should consider that.
He finally got up from the chair and lumbered around the desk. He bent and grasped the wastebasket, being careful to miss the places where the yellow goo had run down the sides, He tried to lift it and the basket did not move. He tugged as hard as he could pull and the basket stayed exactly where it was. He squared off and aimed a kick at it and the basket didn't budge.
He stood off a ways and glared at it, with his whiskers bristling. As if he didn't have all the trouble that he needed, without this basket deal! Somehow or other, he was going to have to get the apartment straightened out and get rid of the mice, He should be looking for the Polaris cover. And he'd lost or mislaid his tongs and would have to waste his time going out to get another pair.
But first of all, he'd have to get this basket out of here. Somehow it had become stuck to the floor — maybe some of the yellow goo had run underneath the edge of it and dried. Maybe if he had a pinch bar or some sort of lever that he could jab beneath it, he could pry it loose.
From the basket the yellow stuff made merry bubbling noises at him.
He clapped his bat back on his head and went out and slammed and locked the door behind him.
It was a fine summer day and he walked around a little, trying to run his many problems through his mind, but no matter what he thought of, he always came back to the basket brimming with the yellow mess and he knew he'd never be able to get started on any of the other tasks until he got rid of it.
So he hunted up a hardware store and bought a good-sized pinch bar and headed back for the apartment house. The bar, he knew, might mark up the floor somewhat, but if he could get under the edge of the basket with a bar that size he was sure that he could
pry it loose,
In the lobby, Lang descended on him.
"Mr. Packer," he said sternly, "where are you going with that bar?"
"I went out and bought it to exterminate the mice."
"But, Mr. Packer —»
"You want to get rid of those mice, don't you?"
"Why, certainly I do."
"It's a desperate situation," Packer told him gravely, "and one that may require very desperate measures."
"But that bar!"
"Ill exercise my best discretion," Packer promised him. "I shall hit them easy."
He went up the elevator with the bar. The sight of Lang's discomfiture made him feel a little better and he managed to whistle a snatch of tune as he went down the hall.
As he fumbled with the key, he heard the sound of rustling coming from beyond the door and he felt a chill go through him, for the rustlings were of a furtive sort and they sounded ominous,
• Good Lord-, he thought, — there can't be that many mice in there!-
He grasped the bar more firmly and unlocked the door and pushed it open.
The inside of the place was a storm of paper.
He stepped in quickly and slammed the door behind him to keep the blowing paper from swooping out into the hall.
• Must have left a window open-, he thought. But he knew he had not, and even if he had, it was quiet outside. There was not a breath of breeze.
And what was happening inside the apartment was more than just a breeze.
He stood with his back against the door and watched what was going on and shifted his grip on the bar so that it made a better club.
The apartment was filled with a sleet of flying paper and a barrage of packets and a snowstorm of dancing stamps. There were open boxes standing on the floor and the paper and the stamps and packets were drifting down and chunking into these, and along the wall were other boxes, very neatly piled — and that was entirely wrong, for there had been nothing neat about the place when he had left it less than two hours before.
But even as he watched, the activity slacked off. There was less stuff flying through the air and some of the boxes were closed by unseen hands and then flew off, all by themselves, to stack themselves with the other boxes.
All Flesh Is Grass and Other Stories Page 91
