He hunted for his stamp tongs and failed to find them. He opened the desk drawer and rummaged through the tangled rat’s nest be 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 mouse-like 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?”
“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…”
“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.