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When the sunlight failed, Landers ran an extension cord into the attic and hooked up an old lamp in the rafters over the catwalk. Then he brought up a folding chair and a little smoking table to set a plate on. He would have liked something more comfortable, but there was no fitting an overstuffed chair up through the hatch. Near midnight he finished a story called "Rain Check" by Lewis Padgett, which featured a character named Tubby (apparently there had been a time when the world was happy with men named Tubby) and another character who drank highballs.... He laid the book down and sat for a moment, listening to the rustling of leaves against the side of the house. Highballs. What did people drink nowadays? Beer with all the color and flavor filtered out of it. Maybe that made a sad and frightening kind of sense. He looked at the back cover of the magazine, where, perhaps coincidentally, there was an ad for Calvert Whiskey: "Just be sure your highball is made with Calvert," the ad counseled. He wondered if there was any such thing anymore, whether anywhere within a twenty-mile radius someone was mixing up a highball out of Calvert Whiskey. Hell, a hundred miles... Rod's Liquor Store down on the Plaza was open late, and he was suddenly possessed with the idea of mixing himself a highball. He took the magazine with him when he climbed down out of the attic, and, before he left the house, he filled out the order blank for the Thirteen Phantasms, and slipped it into an envelope along with a dollar bill. It seemed right to him, like the highball, or like old Mrs. Cummings keeping the slide rule. He wrote out Squires's Glendale address, put one of the new interim "G" stamps on the envelope, and slid it into the mail slot for the postman to pick up tomorrow morning.
The canceled stamp depicted an American flag with the words "Old Glory" over the top. "A G stamp?" Latzarel said out loud. "What is that, exactly?" Squires shook his head. "Something new?" "Very damned new, I'd say. Look here." He pointed at the flag on the stamp. "I can't quite..." He looked over the top of his glasses, squinting hard. "I count too many stars on this flag. Take a look." He handed the envelope back to Squires, who peered at the stamp, then dug a magnifying glass out of the drawer of the little desk in front of the window. He peered at the stamp through the glass. "Fifty," he said. "It must be a fake." "Post office canceled it, too." Latzarel frowned and shook his head. "What kind of sense does that make? Counterfeiting stamps and getting the flag obviously wrong? A man wouldn't give himself away like that, unless he was playing some kind of game." "Here's something else," Squires said. "Look at the edge. There's no perforations. This is apparently cut out of a solid sheet." He slit the envelope open and unfolded the letter inside. It was an order for the Smith collection, from an address in the city of Orange. There was a dollar bill included with the order.
Landers flipped through the first volume of the Thirteen Phantasms, which had arrived postage-due from Glendale. There were four stories in each volume. Somehow he had expected thirteen altogether, and the first thing that came into his mind was that there was a phantasm missing. He nearly laughed out loud. But then he was sobered by the obvious impossibility of the arrival of any phantasms at all. They had come enclosed in a cardboard carton that was wrapped in brown paper and sealed with tape. He looked closely at the tape, half surprised that it wasn't yellowed with age, that the package hadn't been in transit through the ether for half a century. He sipped from his highball and reread a note that had come with the books, written out by a man named Russell Latzarel, president of a group calling itself the Newtonian Society--apparently Squires's crowd. In the note, Latzarel wondered if Landers was perpetrating a hoax. A hoax... The note was dated 1947. "Who are you really ?" it asked. "What is the meaning of the G stamp?" For a time he stared out of the window, watching the vines shift against the glass, listening to the wind under the eaves. The house settled, creaking in its joints. He looked at Latzarel's message again. "The dollar bill was a work of art," it read. On the back there was a hand-drawn map and an invitation to the next meeting of the Newtonians. He folded the map and tucked it into his coat pocket. Then he finished his highball and laughed out loud. Maybe it was the whiskey that made this seem monumentally funny. A hoax! He'd show them a hoax.
Almost at once he found something that would do. It was a plastic lapel pin the size of a fifty-cent piece, a hologram of an eyeball. It was only an eighth of an inch thick, but when he turned it in the light it seemed deep as a well. It was a good clear hologram, too, the eyeball hovering in the void, utterly three-dimensional. The pin on the back had been glued on sloppily and at a screwball angle, and excess glue had run down the back of the plastic and dried. It was a technological marvel of the late twentieth century, and it was an absolute, and evident, piece of junk. He addressed an envelope, dropped the hologram inside, and slid it into the mail slot.
The trip out to Glendale took over an hour because of a traffic jam at the 605 junction and bumper to bumper cars on the Golden State. There was nothing apparently wrong--no accident, no freeway construction, just a million toiling automobiles stretching all the way to heaven-knew-where, to the moon. He had forgotten Latzarel's map, and he fought off a feeling of superstitious dread as the cars in front of him inched along. At Los Feliz he pulled off the freeway, cutting down the off-ramp at the last possible moment. There was a hamburger joint called Tommy's Little Oasis on Los Feliz, just east of San Fernando Road, that he and Janet used to hit when they were on their way north. That had been a few years back; he had nearly forgotten, but the freeway sign at Los Feliz had jogged his memory. It was a tiny Airstream trailer in the parking lot of a motel shaded by big elm trees. You went there if you wanted a hamburger. That was it. There was no menu except a sign on the wall, and even the sign was nearly pointless, since the only question was did you want cheese or not. Landers wanted cheese. He slowed down as he passed San Fernando, looking for the motel, for the big overarching elms, recalling a rainy Saturday afternoon when they'd eaten their burgers in the car because it was raining too hard to sit under the steel umbrella at the picnic table out front. Now there was no picnic table, no Airstream trailer, no motel--nothing but a run-down industrial park. Somehow the industrial park had sprung up and fallen into disrepair in--what?--less than twenty years! He u-turned and headed the opposite direction up San Fernando, turning right on Western. It was better not to think about it, about the pace of things, about the cheeseburgers of days gone by.... He pulled into a convenience store parking lot in order to ask directions. There were bars on the windows of the place, and the yellow stucco had holes kicked into it. The newspaper racks outside were full of singles newspapers and giveaway auto ads, and except for a desolate-looking laundromat the rest of the stores in the center were empty, their windows broken or boarded up. Inside the store there was an old Asian woman, very small, standing behind the counter, which was caged with a wrought iron grill. He smiled broadly at her, but she looked at him unhappily, and so out of guilt he grabbed a Nestle's Crunch bar and put it on the counter. Nothing is free, he reminded himself. "I'm looking for Rexroth Street," he said slowly, then smiled at her again. "Dirty dick!" she said to him. He blinked at her, paralyzed with shock. "Dirty dick!" She slapped her hand on the counter and grimaced, and abruptly he gave up on the candy bar and on any idea of asking directions. His heart pounding, he turned around slowly and stepped toward the open door, one foot after another, willing himself not to run and waiting for her to shout something else at him, some unnecessary obscenity. He climbed into his car, fired up the engine, and backed out fast, then turned up Western again, heading into the hills. To hell with directions; he would take a chance on his memory. He was three blocks north and deep into a residential neighborhood before it dawned on him: thirty-six! The woman had merely wanted money for the candy bar! Thirty-six cents. He laughed out loud, but the sound of his own laughter was unnerving, and he stopped abruptly. Dirty dick! He was still shaking. The incident had cast a pall of uncertainty and darkness over the adventure, and he half wished he hadn't come at all. Why the hell had he forgotten the map? The houses along the street were run-down, probably rentals. There was trash in the street, broken bottles, newspapers soaked in gutter water. Suddenly he was a foreigner. He had wandered into a part of the country that was alien to him. And, unless his instincts had betrayed him, it was clearly alien to Squires Press and the Newtonian Society and men named Tubby. At one time the mix of Spanish-style and Tudor houses had been elegant. Now they needed paint and the lawns were up in weeds, and there was graffiti on fences and garage walls. Windows and doors were barred. He drove slowly, calculating addresses and thinking about turning around, getting back onto the freeway and heading south again, just fleeing home, ordering something else out of the maga zines--personally autographed books by long-dead authors, "jar-proof" watches that could take a licking and go on ticking. He pictured the quiet shelter of his attic--his magazines, the makings of another highball. If ever a man needed a highball... And just then he came upon the sign for Rexroth Street, so suddenly that he nearly drove righ through the intersection. He braked abruptly, swinging around toward the west, and a car behind him honked its horn hard. He heard the driver shout something as the car flew past. "Dirty dick," Landers said under his breath, and started searching out addresses. The general tenor of the neighborhood hadn't improved at all, and he considered locking his doors. But then the idea struck him as superfluous, since he was about to park the car and get out anyway. He spotted the address on the curb, the paint faded and nearly unreadable. The house had a turreted entry hall in front, with an arched window in the wall that faced the street. A couple of the window panes were broken and filled with aluminum foil, and what looked like an old bed sheet was strung across as a curtain. Weeds grew up through the cracked concrete of the front walk, and there was black iron debris, apparently car parts, scattered on the lawn. He drifted to the curb, reaching for the ignition key, but then saw, crouched next to a motorcycle up at the top of the driveway, an immense man, tattooed and bearded and dressed in black jeans and a greasy t-shirt, holding a wrench and looking down the driveway at him. Landers instantly stepped on the gas, angling away from the curb and gunning toward the corner. He knew what he needed to know. He could go home now. Whoever this man was, living in what must have been Squires's old house, he didn't have anything to do with the Thirteen Phantasms. He wasn't a Newtonian. There was no conceivable chance that Squires himself was somewhere inside, working the crank of his mechanical printing press, stamping out fantastic stories on Winnebago Eggshell paper. Squires was gone; that was the truth of it. The Newtonians were gone. The world they'd inhabited, with its twenty-five cent pulp magazines and egg-headed robots and Martian canals, its highballs and hand-set type and slide rules, was gone, too. Probably it was all at the bottom of the tar pits, turning into puzzling fossils.
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