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 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.
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.