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

for his attention:
    Ten dead mice.
    Eight pairs of stamp tongs.
    The packet of covers with the strange yellow stamps.
    Two—not one—but two covers, one bearing a strip of four and the other a strip of five Polaris 17b.
    Packer sat down heavily in his chair and stared at the items on the desk.
    How in the world, he wondered—how had it come about? What was going on?
    He peeked around the desk edge at the bubbling basket and it seemed to chortle at him.
    It was, he told himself, it must be the basket—or, rather, the stuff within the basket. Nothing else had been changed, no other factor had been added. The only thing new and different in the apartment was the basket of yellow gook.
    He picked up the packet of covers with the yellow stamps affixed and opened the drawer to find a glass. The drawer was arranged with startling neatness and there were five glasses lying in a row. He chose the strongest one.
    Beneath the glass the surface of the stamps became a field made up of tiny ball-like particles, unlike the grains of sand which the weaker glass he had used before had shown.
    He bent above the desk, with his eye glued to the glass, and he knew that what he was looking at were spores.
    Encysted, lifeless, they still would carry life within them, and that had been what had happened here. He’d spilled the broth upon the stamp and the spores had come to life—a strange alien community of life that settled within the basket.
    He put the glass back in the drawer and rose. He gathered up the dead mice carefully by their tails. He carried them to the incinerator shaft and let them drop.
    He crossed the room to the bookcases and the books were arranged in order and in sequence and there, finally, were books that he’d lost years ago and hunted ever since. There were long rows of stamp catalogues, the set of handbooks on galactic cancellations, the massive list of postmarks, the galactic travel guides, the long row of weird language dictionaries, indispensable in alien stamp identification, and a number of technical works on philatelic subjects.
    From the bookcase he moved to the piled-up boxes. One of them he lifted down. It was filled with covers, with glassine envelopes of loose stamps, with sheets, with blocks and strips. He dug through the contents avidly, with wonder mounting in him.
    All the stamps, all the covers, were from the Thuban system.
    He closed the box and bent to lift it back. It didn’t wait for him. It lifted by itself and fitted itself in place.
    He looked at three more boxes. One contained, exclusively, material from Korephoros, and another material from Antares and the third from Dschubba. Not only had the litter been picked up and boxed and piled into some order, but the material itself had been roughly classified!
    He went back to the chair and sat down a little weakly. It was too much, he thought, for a man to take.
    The spores had fed upon the broth and had come to life, and within the basket was an alien life form or a community of life forms. And they possessed a passion for orderliness and a zest for work and an ability to channel that zest into useful channels.
    And what was more, the things within the basket did what a man wanted done.
    It had straightened up the apartment, it had classified the stamps and covers, it had killed the mice, it had located the Polaris covers and had found the missing tongs.
    And how had it known that he wanted these things done? Read his mind, perhaps?
    He shivered at the thought, but the fact remained that it had done absolutely nothing except bubble merrily away until he had returned. It had done nothing, perhaps, because it did not know what to do—until he had somehow told it what to do. For as soon as he had returned, it had found out what to do and did it.
    The door chimed and he got up to answer.
    It was Tony.
    â€œHi, Unk,” he said. “You forgot your pajamas and I brought them back. You left them on the bed and forgot to