like an Okie on a good day, one which had included a bath and a shave.
He was wearing blue jeans pants, for one thing, and a pair of sneakers on his feet . .
. except they didn’t look like any
sneakers I’d ever seen before. They were great big clumpy things. What they really looked like were the shoes Boris
Karloff wears as part of his Frankenstein get-up, and if they were made of canvas, I’d eat my favorite Fedora. The
word written up the sides in red script looked like the name of a dish on a Chinese carry-out menu: REEBOK.
I looked down at the blotter which had once been covered with a tangle of telephone numbers, and suddenly realized
that I could no longer remember Mavis Weld’s, although I must have called it a billion times only this past winter. That
feeling of dread intensified.
“Mister,” I said, `Ì wish you’d state your business and get out of here. Come to think of it, why don’t you skip the
talking and just go right to the getting-out part?’
He smiled . . . tiredly, I thought. That was the other thing. The face above the plain open-collared white shirt looked
terribly tired. Terribly sad, as well. It said the man who owned it had been through
things I couldn’t even dream of. I
felt some sympathy for my visitor, but what I mostly felt was fear. And anger. Because it was my face, too, and the
bastard had apparently gone a long way toward wearing it out.
“Sorry, Clyde,” he said. “No can do.”
He put his hand on that tiny, cunning zipper, and all at once Landry opening that case was the last thing in the world I
wanted. To stop him I said, “Do you always go visiting your tenants dressed like a guy who makes his living following
the cabbage crop? What are you, one of those eccentric millionaires?’
`Ì’m eccentric, all right,” he said. `Ànd it won’t do you any good to draw this
business out, Clyde.”
“What gave you that ide–”
Then he said the thing I’d been dreading, and put out the last tiny flicker of hope at the same time. `Ì know all your
ideas, Clyde. After all, I’m you.”
I licked my lips and forced myself to speak; anything to keep him from yanking that zipper. Anything at all. My voice
came out husky, but at least it did come out.
“Yeah, I noticed the resemblance. I’m not familiar with the cologne, though. I’m an Old Spice man, myself.”
His thumb and finger remained pinched on the zipper, but he didn’t pull it. At least not yet.
“But you like this,” he said with perfect assurance, `ànd you’d use it if you could get it down at the Rexall on the
corner, wouldn’t you? Unfortunately, you can’t. It’s Aramis, and it won’t be invented for another forty years or so.” He
glanced down at his weird, ugly basketball shoes. “Like my sneakers.”
“The devil you say.”
“Well, yes, I suppose the devil might come into it somewhere,” Landry said, and he didn’t smile.
“Where are you from?’
`Ì thought you knew.” Landry pulled the zipper, revealing a rectangular gadget made of some smooth plastic. It was
the same color the seventh-floor hall was going to be by the time the sun went down.
I’d never seen anything like it.
There was no brand name on it, just something that must have been a serial number: T-1000. Landry lifted it out of its
carrying case, thumbed the catches on the sides, and lifted the hinged top to reveal something that looked like the
telescreen in a Buck Rogers movie. `Ì come from the future,” Landry said. “Just like in a pulp magazine story.”
“You come from Sunnyland Sanitarium, more like it,” I croaked.
“But not exactly like a pulp science-fiction story,” he went on, ignoring what I’d said. “No, not exactly.” He pushed a
button on the side of the plastic case. There was a faint whirring sound from inside
the gadget, followed by a brief,
whistling beep. The thing sitting on his lap looked like some strange stenographer’s machine . . . and I had an idea that