The Ghost of a Model T and Other Stories Read Online Free

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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œIt was kind of you,” he mumbled.
    She looked at him sharply.
    â€œYou are sick,” she said.
    She stepped through the door, forcing him to step back, forcing her way in.
    â€œNot 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.
    â€œYou have a fever,” she declared. “You are burning up.”
    â€œThere’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?
    â€œYou come over here and sit right down,” she ordered him. “I don’t suppose you have a thermometer.”
    He shook his head, defeated.
    â€œNever 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.
    â€œThanks, 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