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

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 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-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