A bubbling noise stopped him in his tracks.
He stood listening, unbelieving, just a little frightened.
The bubbling noise went on and on.
He stepped cautiously out into the room and as he did he saw it.
The wastebasket beside the desk was full of a bubbling yellow stuff that in several places had run down the sides and formed puddles on the floor.
Packer stalked the basket, half prepared to turn and run.
But nothing happened. The yellowness in the basket simply kept on bubbling.
It was a rather thick and gooey mess, not frothy, and the bubbling was no more than a noise that it was making, for in the strict sense of the word, he saw, it was not bubbling.
Packer sidled closer and thrust out a hand toward the basket. It did not snap at him. It paid no attention to him.
He poked a finger at it and the stuff was fairly solid and slightly warm and he got the distinct impression that it was alive.
And immediately he thought of the broth-soaked cover be had thrown in the basket. It was not so unusual that he should think of it, for the yellow of the brew within the basket was the exact color of the stamp upon the cover,
He walked around the desk and dropped the mail he’d picked up in the lobby. He sat down ponderously in the massive office chair.
So a stamp had come to life, he thought, and that certainly was a queer one. But no more queer, perhaps, than the properties of many other stamps, for while Earth had exported the idea of their use, a number of peculiar adaptations of the idea had evolved.
_And now_, he thought a little limply, _you have to get this mess in the basket out of here before Lang comes busting in._
He worried a bit about what Lang had said about cleaning up the place and he got slightly sore about it, for he paid good money for these diggings and he paid promptly in advance and he was never any bother. And besides, he’d been here for twenty years, and Lang should consider that.
He finally got up from the chair and lumbered around the desk. He bent and grasped the wastebasket, being careful to miss the places where the yellow goo had run down the sides, He tried to lift it and the basket did not move. He tugged as hard as he could pull and the basket stayed exactly where it was. He squared off and aimed a kick at it and the basket didn’t budge.
He stood off a ways and glared at it, with his whiskers bristling. As if he didn’t have all the trouble that he needed, without this basket deal! Somehow or other, he was going to have to get the apartment straightened out and get rid of the mice, He should be looking for the Polaris cover. And he’d lost or mislaid his tongs and would have to waste his time going out to get another pair.
But first of all, he’d have to get this basket out of here. Somehow it had become stuck to the floor – maybe some of the yellow goo had run underneath the edge of it and dried. Maybe if he had a pinch bar or some sort of lever that he could jab beneath it, he could pry it loose.
From the basket the yellow stuff made merry bubbling noises at him.
He clapped his bat back on his head and went out and slammed and locked the door behind him.
It was a fine summer day and he walked around a little, trying to run his many problems through his mind, but no matter what he thought of, he always came back to the basket brimming with the yellow mess and he knew he’d never be able to get started on any of the other tasks until he got rid of it.
So he hunted up a hardware store and bought a good-sized pinch bar and headed back for the apartment house. The bar, he knew, might mark up the floor somewhat, but if he could get under the edge of the basket with a bar that size he was sure that he could pry it loose,
In the lobby, Lang descended on him.
“Mr. Packer,” he said sternly, “where are you going with that bar?”
“I went out and bought it to exterminate the mice.”
“But, Mr. Packer -”
“You want to get rid of those mice, don’t you?”
“Why, certainly I do.”
“It’s a desperate situation,” Packer told him gravely, “and one that may require very desperate measures.”
“But that bar!”
“Ill exercise my best discretion,” Packer promised him. “I shall hit them easy.”
He went up the elevator with the bar. The sight of Lang’s discomfiture made him feel a little better and he managed to whistle a snatch of tune as he went down the hall.
As he fumbled with the key, he heard the sound of rustling coming from beyond the door and he felt a chill go through him, for the rustlings were of a furtive sort and they sounded ominous,
_Good Lord_, he thought, _there can’t be that many mice in there!_
He grasped the bar more firmly and unlocked the door and pushed it open.
The inside of the place was a storm of paper.
He stepped in quickly and slammed the door behind him to keep the blowing paper from swooping out into the hall.
_Must have left a window open_, he thought. But he knew he had not, and even if he had, it was quiet outside. There was not a breath of breeze.
And what was happening inside the apartment was more than just a breeze.
He stood with his back against the door and watched what was going on and shifted his grip on the bar so that it made a better club.
The apartment was filled with a sleet of flying paper and a barrage of packets and a snowstorm of dancing stamps. There were open boxes standing on the floor and the paper and the stamps and packets were drifting down and chunking into these, and along the wall were other boxes, very neatly piled – and that was entirely wrong, for there had been nothing neat about the place when he had left it less than two hours before.
But even as he watched, the activity slacked off. There was less stuff flying through the air and some of the boxes were closed by unseen hands and then flew off, all by themselves, to stack themselves with the other boxes.
_Poltergeists!_ he thought in terror, his mind scrambling back frantically over all that he had ever thought or read or heard to grasp some explanation.
Then it was done and over.
There was nothing flying through the air. All the boxes had been stacked. Everything was still.
Packer stepped out into the room and stared in slackjawed amazement.
The desk and the tables shone. The drapes hung straight and clean. The carpeting looked as if it might be new. Chairs and small tables and lamps and other things, long forgotten, buried all these years beneath the accumulation of his collection, stood revealed and shining – dusted, cleaned and polished.
And in the middle of all this righteous order stood the wastebasket, bubbling happily.
Packer dropped the bar and headed for the desk.
In front of him a window flapped open and he heard a swish and the bar went past him, flying for the window. It went out the window and slashed through the foliage of a tree, then the window closed and he lost sight of it.
Packer took off his hat and tossed it on the desk.
Immediately his hat lifted from the desk and sailed for a closet door. The closet door swung open and the hat ducked in. The door closed gently on it.
Packer whuffled through his whiskers, He got out his handkerchief and mopped a glistening brow.
“Funny goings-on,” he said to himself.
Slowly, cautiously, he checked the place. All the boxes were stacked along one wall, three deep and piled from floor to ceiling. Three filing cabinets stood along another wall and be rubbed his eyes at that, for he had forgotten that there were three of them – for years he’d thought that he had only two. And all the rest of the place was neat and clean and it fairly gleamed.
He walked from room to room and everywhere it was the same.
In the kitchen the pots and pans were all in place and the dishes stacked primly in the cupboard. The stove and refrigerator had been wiped clean and there were no dirty dishes and that was a bit surprising for he was sure there had been. Mrs. Foshay’s kettle, with the broth emptied out of it and scrubbed until it shone, stood on the kitchen table.