“I don’t mind.”
“Good,” said Knight approvingly as he moved away. “By the way, I won that case. Nice juicy fee, too. Thanks for asking.”
Tina also wanted to know if he objected to the new arrangements when she brought the mail. Again, he didn’t. Where had he been for over two days? He had been busy, very busy. Something entirely new. Something important.
She stared down at him as he separated offers of used cars guaranteed not to have been driven over a quarter of a million miles from caressing reminders that he still owed half the tuition for the last year of law school and when was he going to pay it?
Came a letter that was neither bill nor ad. Sam’s heart momentarily lost interest in the monotonous round of pumping that was its lot as he stared at a strange postmark: Glunt City, Ohio.
Dear Sir: There is no firm in Glunt City at the present time bearing any name similar to “Bild-A-Man Company” nor do we know of any such organization planning to join our little community. We also have no thoroughfare called “Diagonal”; our north-south streets are named after Indian tribes while our east-west avenues are listed numerically in multiples of five. Glunt City is a restricted residential township; we intend to keep it that. Only small retailing and service establishments are permitted here. If you are interested in building a home in Glunt City and can furnish proof of white, Christian, Anglo-Saxon ancestry on both sides of your family for fifteen generations, we would be glad to furnish further information. Thomas H. Plantagenet, Mayor.
P.S. An airfield for privately owned jet and propeller-driven aircraft is being built outside the city limits.
That was sort of that. He would get no refills on any of the vials and bottles even if he had a loose slunk or two with which to pay for the stuff. Better go easy on the material and conserve it as much as possible. But no disassembling!
Would the “Bild-A-Man Company” begin manufacturing at Glunt City some time in the future when it had developed into an industrial metropolis against the constricted wills of its restricted citizenry? Or had his package slid from some different track in the human time stream, some era to be born on an other-dimensional Earth? There would have to be a common origin to both, else why the English wordage? And could there be a purpose in his having received it, beneficial—or otherwise?
Tina had been asking a question. Sam detached his mind from shapeless speculation and considered her quite-the-opposite features.