Thirteen Phantasms Read Free

wasn’t sure why she kept it, but she had kept a couple of old smoking pipes too, and a ring-shaped cut-crystal decanter with some whiskey still in it. Mrs. Cummings didn’t have any use for the pipes or the decanter any more than she had a use for the slide rule, but Landers, who had himself kept almost nothing to remind him of his own past, understood that there was something about these souvenirs, sitting alongside a couple of old photographs on a small table, that recalled better days, easier living.
    •
    The arched window of the house on Rexroth Street in Glendale looked out onto a sloping front lawn with an overgrown carob tree at the curb, shading a dusty Land Rover with what looked like prospecting tools strapped to the rear bumper. There was a Hudson Wasp in the driveway, parked behind an Austin Healey. Across the street a man in shirtsleeves rubbed paste polish onto the fender of a Studebaker, and a woman in a sundress dug in a flower bed with a trowel, setting out pansies. A little boy rode a sort of sled on wheels up and down the sidewalk, and the sound of the solid-rubber wheels humping over cracks sounded oddly loud in the still afternoon.
    Russell Latzarel turned away from the window and took a cold bottle of beer from Roycroft Squires. In a few minutes the Newtonian Society would come to order, more or less, for the second time that day. Not that it made a lot of difference. For Latzarel’s money they could recess until midnight if they wanted to, and the world would spin along through space for better or worse. He and Squires were both bachelors, and so unlike married men they had until hell froze over to come to order.
    “India Pale Ale,” Latzarel said approvingly, looking at the label on the, squat green bottle. He gulped down an inch of beer. “Elixir of the gods, eh?” He set the bottle on a coaster. Then he filled his pipe with Balkan Sobranie tobacco and tamped it down, settling into an armchair in front of the chessboard, where there was a game laid out, half played. “Who’s listed as guest of honor at West Coast Con? Edward tells me they’re going to get Clifford Simak and van Vogt both.”
    “That’s not what it says here in the newsletter,” Squires told him, scrutinizing a printed pamphlet. “According to this it’s TBA.”
    “To be announced,” Latzarel said, then lit his pipe and puffed hard on it for a moment, his lips making little popping sounds. “Same son of a bitch as they advertised last time.” He laughed out loud and then bent over to scan the titles of the chess books in the bookcase. He wasn’t sure whether Squires read the damned things or whether he kept them there to gain some sort of psychological advantage, which he generally didn’t need.
    It was warm for November, and the casement windows along the west wall were wide open, the muslin curtains blowing inward on the breeze. Dust motes moved in the sunshine. The Newtonian Society had been meeting here every Saturday night since the war ended, and in that couple of years it had seldom broken up before two or three in the morning. Sometimes when there was a full house, all twelve of them would talk straight through until dawn and then go out after eggs and bacon, the thirty-nine-cent breakfast special down at Velma’s Copper Pot on Western, although it wasn’t often that the married men could get away with that kind of nonsense. Tonight they had scheduled a critical discussion of E. E. Smith’s
Children of the Lens
, but it turned out that none of them liked the story much except Hastings, whose opinion was unreliable anyway, and so the meeting had lost all its substance after the first hour, and members had drifted away, into the kitchen and the library and out to the printing shed in the backyard, leaving Latzarel and Squires alone in the living room. Later on tonight, if the weather held up, they would be driving out to the observatory in Griffith Park.
    There was a shuffling on the front walk, and