The Ghost of a Model T and Other Stories (4 page)

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 he 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.

He went back to the desk and the top of it was clear except for several items laid out, as if for his attention:

Ten dead mice.

Eight pairs of stamp tongs.

The packet of covers with the strange yellow stamps.

Two—not one—but two covers, one bearing a strip of four and the other a strip of five Polaris 17b.

Packer sat down heavily in his chair and stared at the items on the desk.

How in the world, he wondered—how had it come about? What was going on?

He peeked around the desk edge at the bubbling basket and it seemed to chortle at him.

It was, he told himself, it
must
be the basket—or, rather, the stuff within the basket. Nothing else had been changed, no other factor had been added. The only thing new and different in the apartment was the basket of yellow gook.

He picked up the packet of covers with the yellow stamps affixed and opened the drawer to find a glass. The drawer was arranged with startling neatness and there were five glasses lying in a row. He chose the strongest one.

Beneath the glass the surface of the stamps became a field made up of tiny ball-like particles, unlike the grains of sand which the weaker glass he had used before had shown.

He bent above the desk, with his eye glued to the glass, and he knew that what he was looking at were spores.

Encysted, lifeless, they still would carry life within them, and that had been what had happened here. He'd spilled the broth upon the stamp and the spores had come to life—a strange alien community of life that settled within the basket.

He put the glass back in the drawer and rose. He gathered up the dead mice carefully by their tails. He carried them to the incinerator shaft and let them drop.

He crossed the room to the bookcases and the books were arranged in order and in sequence and there, finally, were books that he'd lost years ago and hunted ever since. There were long rows of stamp catalogues, the set of handbooks on galactic cancellations, the massive list of postmarks, the galactic travel guides, the long row of weird language dictionaries, indispensable in alien stamp identification, and a number of technical works on philatelic subjects.

From the bookcase he moved to the piled-up boxes. One of them he lifted down. It was filled with covers, with glassine envelopes of loose stamps, with sheets, with blocks and strips. He dug through the contents avidly, with wonder mounting in him.

All the stamps, all the covers, were from the Thuban system.

He closed the box and bent to lift it back. It didn't wait for him. It lifted by itself and fitted itself in place.

He looked at three more boxes. One contained, exclusively, material from Korephoros, and another material from Antares and the third from Dschubba. Not only had the litter been picked up and boxed and piled into some order, but the material itself had been roughly classified!

He went back to the chair and sat down a little weakly. It was too much, he thought, for a man to take.

The spores had fed upon the broth and had come to life, and within the basket was an alien life form or a community of life forms. And they possessed a passion for orderliness and a zest for work and an ability to channel that zest into useful channels.

And what was more, the things within the basket did what a man wanted done.

It had straightened up the apartment, it had classified the stamps and covers, it had killed the mice, it had located the Polaris covers and had found the missing tongs.

And how had it known that he wanted these things done? Read his mind, perhaps?

He shivered at the thought, but the fact remained that it had done absolutely nothing except bubble merrily away until he had returned. It had done nothing, perhaps, because it did not know what to do—until he had somehow told it what to do. For as soon as he had returned, it had found out what to do and did it.

The door chimed and he got up to answer.

It was Tony.

“Hi, Unk,” he said. “You forgot your pajamas and I brought them back. You left them on the bed and forgot to pack them.”

He held out a package and it wasn't until then that he saw the room.

“Unk!” he yelled. “What happened? You got the place cleaned up!”

Packer shook his head in bewilderment. “Something funny, Tony.”

Tony walked in and stared around in admiration and astonishment.

“You sure did a job,” he said.

“I didn't do it, Tony.”

“Oh, I see. You hired someone to do it while you were up at our place.”

“No, not that. It was done this morning. It was done by that!”

He pointed at the basket.

“You're crazy, Unk,” said Tony, firmly. “You have flipped your thatch.”

“Maybe so,” said Packer. “But the basket did the work.”

Tony walked around the basket warily. He reached down and punched the yellow stuff with a stuck-out finger.

“It feels like dough,” he announced.

He straightened up and looked at Packer.

“You aren't kidding me?” he asked.

“I don't know what it is,” said Packer. “I don't know why or how it did it, but I'm telling you the truth.”

“Unk,” said Tony, “we may have something here!”

“There is no doubt of that.”

“No, that's not what I mean. This may be the biggest thing that ever happened. This junk, you say, will really work for you?”

“Somehow or other,” said Packer. “I don't know how it does it. It has a sense of order and it does the work you want. It seems to understand you—it anticipates whatever you want done. Maybe it's a brain with enormous psi powers. I was looking at a cover the other night and I saw this yellow stamp …”

Packer told him swiftly what had happened.

Tony listened thoughtfully, pulling at his chin.

“Well, all right, Unk,” he said, “we've got it. We don't know what it is or how it works, but let's put our thinking into gear. Just imagine a bucket of this stuff standing in an office—a great big, busy office. It would make for efficiency such as you never saw before. It would file all the papers and keep the records straight and keep the entire business strictly up to date. There'd never be anything ever lost again. Everything would be right where it was supposed to be and could be located in a second. When the boss or someone else should want a certain file—bingo! It would be upon his desk. Why, an office with one of these little buckets could get rid of all its file clerks. A public library could be run efficiently without any personnel at all. But it would be in big business offices—in insurance firms and industrial concerns and transportation companies—where it would be worth the most.”

Packer shook his head, a bit confused. “It might be all right, Tony. It might work the way you say. But who would believe you? Who would pay attention? It's just too fantastic. They would laugh at you.”

“You leave all that to me,” said Tony. “That's my end of the business. That's where I come in.”

“Oh,” said Packer, “so we're in business now.”

“I have a friend,” said Tony, who always had a friend, “who'd let me try it out. We could put a bucket of this stuff in his office and see how it works out.”

He looked around, suddenly all business.

“You got a bucket, Unk?”

“Out in the kitchen. You'd find something there.”

“And beef broth. It was beef broth, wasn't it?”

Packer nodded. “I think I have a can of it.”

Tony stood and scratched his head. “Now let's get this figured out, Unk. What we want is a sure source of supply.”

“I have those other covers. They all have stamps on them. We could start a new batch with one of them.”

Tony gestured impatiently. “No, that wouldn't do. They are our reserves. We lock them tight away against emergency. I have a hunch that we can grow bucket after bucket of the stuff from what we have right here. Pull off a handful of it and feed it a shot of broth –”

“But how do you know –”

“Unk,” said Tony, “doesn't it strike you a little funny that you had the exact number of spores in that one stamp, the correct amount of broth, to grow just one basket full?”

“Well, sure, but …”

“Look, this stuff is intelligent. It knows what it is doing. It lays down rules for itself to live by. It's got a sense of order and it lives by order. So you give it a wastebasket to live in and it lives within the limits of that basket. It gets just level with the top; it lets a little run down the sides to cement the basket tight to the floor. And that is all. It doesn't run over. It doesn't fill the room. It has some discipline.”

“Well, maybe you are right, but that still doesn't answer the question –”

“Just a second, Unk. Watch here.”

Tony plunged his hand into the basket and came out with a chunk of the spore-growth ripped loose from the parent body.

“Now, watch the basket, Unk,” he said.

They watched. Swiftly, the spores surged and heaved to fill the space where the ripped-out chunk had been. Once again the basket was very neatly filled.

“You see what I mean?” said Tony. “Given more living room, it will grow. All we have to do is feed it so it can. And we'll give it living room. We'll give it a lot of buckets, so it can grow to its heart's content and –”

“Damn it, Tony, will you listen to me? I been trying to ask you what we're going to do to keep it from cementing itself to the floor. If we start another batch of it, it will cement its bucket or its basket or whatever it is in to the floor just like this first one did.”

“I'm glad you brought that up,” said Tony. “I know just what to do. We will hang it up. We'll hang up the bucket and there won't be any floor.”

“Well,” said Packer, “I guess that covers it. I'll go heat up that broth.”

They heated the broth and found a bucket and hung it on a broomstick suspended between two chairs.

They dropped the chunk of spore-growth in and watched it and it stayed just as it was.

“My hunch was right,” said Tony. “It needs some of that broth to get it started.”

He poured in some broth and the spores melted before their very eyes into a black and ropy scum.

“There's something wrong,” said Tony, worriedly.

“I guess there is,” said Packer.

“I got an idea, Unk. You might have used a different brand of broth. There might be some difference in the ingredients. It may not be the broth itself, but some ingredient in it that gives this stuff the shot in the arm it needs. We might be using the wrong broth.”

Packer shuffled uncomfortably.

“I don't remember, Tony.”

“You have to!” Tony yelled at him. “Think, Unk! You got to—you have to remember what brand it was you used.”

Packer whuffled out his whiskers unhappily.

“Well, to tell you the truth, Tony, it wasn't boughten broth. Mrs. Foshay made it.”

“Now, we're getting somewhere! Who is Mrs. Foshay?”

“She's a nosy old dame who lives across the hall.”

“Well, that's just fine. All you have to do is ask her to make some more for you.”

“I can't do it, Tony.”

“All we'd need is one batch, Unk. We could have it analyzed and find out what is in it. Then we'd be all set.”

“She'd want to know why I wanted it. And she'd tell all over how I asked for it. She might even figure out there was something funny going on.”

“We can't have that,” exclaimed Tony in alarm. “This is our secret, Unk. We can't cut in anyone.”

He sat and thought.

“Anyhow, she's probably sore at me,” said Packer. “She sneaked in the other day and got the hell scared out of her when a mouse ran across the floor. She tore down to the management about it and tried to make me trouble.”

Tony snapped his fingers.

“I got it!” he cried. “I know just how we'll work it. You go on and get in bed –”

“I will not!” snarled Packer.

“Now listen, Unk, you have to play along. You have to do your part.”

“I don't like it,” protested Packer. “I don't like any part of it.”

“You get in bed,” insisted Tony, “and look the worst you can. Pretend you're suffering. I'll go over to this Mrs. Foshay and I'll tell her how upset you were over that mouse scaring her. I'll say you worked all day to get the place cleaned up just because of that. I'll say you worked so –”

“You'll do no such thing,” yelped Packer. “She'll come tearing in here. I won't have that woman –”

“You want to make a couple billion, don't you?” asked Tony angrily.

“I don't care particularly,” Packer told him. “I can't somehow get my heart in it.”

“I'll tell this woman that you are all tuckered out and that your heart is not so good and the only thing you want is another bowl of broth.”