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“Shammmmmm!!!” the elder Crumptonian shouted, suffusing the immediate area with a fine greenish mist. “I am returned.”

“Obviously,” Sam said to himself, as he stood to greet his boss. “You’ve come back rather early, Mardnnn. Is there something amiss?”

“Vladish screw-up,” Mardnnn replied and proceeded to slobber and froth a tale of maltreatment and ill-use. After much muddled translation Sam managed to piece together the tale of Mardnnn’s peregrinations.

Apparently the Poshinova ship had decided to bypass Erandi because of a local jurisdictional dispute that had attracted the attention of the Hegemony’s court clerk and therefore made proximity to Erandi a thing to be avoided at all costs. As a result, Mardnnn had been stranded at an intermediate port of call. Discovering that the port where he had been so unceremoniously deposited had an excellent and fully equipped phloomb-based ansible facility, Mardnnn had decided to use that means to transact his Erandi business. This brilliant stroke had saved him both time and money, so that here he was—he finished in an azure froth of self-congratulation—a week later, back and ready to pick up the reins once again.

A stab of fear went through Sam as the porters began to hustle Mardnnn’s platform toward the doors. What if Mardnnn checked the accounts before Brill’s buyer arrived? How was he going to explain the missing funds?

In a flash he was back at Mardnnn’s side. “Surely you must be tired from all of your travels,” he suggested as ingratiatingly as he could muster. “Why don’t you take a few days off? I can handle everything for you. Yes, you do look a bit peaked, even your color is a little off, if I must say so. Yes, I am certain, a tinge of green, I’d say, quite unbecoming. Must have been that travel does not agree with you. Are you absolutely certain that you feel up to returning to work?”

Mardnnn fumbled around, pinching a bit of his flesh and examining it with his eyestalk. He passed a tentacle across his middle region, rubbing it and pressing the tip to his mouth. “Perhaps you are right,” he bubbled. “A day’s rest will do me good.”

“Yes, a day’s rest, maybe even two days, will do you a world of good. Don’t worry,” Sam promised, hoping the Crumptonian wouldn’t notice the sweat pouring out of his forehead. “I’ve got the Kittchikoostran arrangements in hand. Everything is going wonderfully well. Nothing to worry about. Everything’s fine, really! Wonderful. In fact, they couldn’t be better.” Was he babbling too much? Had he aroused Mardnnn’s suspicions?

His heart didn’t stop racing until he saw Mardnnn safely onto a truck. He ensured that the destination given to the driver was Mardnnn’s residence and not the office. He slipped the driver a hundred note to make certain. “No detours,” he instructed her sternly.

Then he canceled his tickets and speeded for the office. He had to find Brill and set things to right.

Sam wasn’t prepared for the scene in the office when he returned. Boxes were piled ceiling deep. There was just barely enough room for him to squeeze through. The musty smell of fading newsprint and aging ink permeated the atmosphere. Sam flipped open the cover of one box and examined the garishly colored magazine that was on top. A young lady, obviously nubile and mammalian, was draped loosely over the limb of a purple spider, who wore a crystal bubble over its head and sported several rather nasty-looking fangs that drooled bloody slime. The imaginary creature was brandishing a futuristic ray gun in another appendage while it stood astride a pile of smashed vehicles and ruined machinery. There were several burning buildings in the background and many humans running away, obviously in fright. In many ways the scene reminded him of the Lyconate tourists he’d escorted to Atlantic City a few weeks before, except for the ray gun, of course.

“Aren’t they wonderful!” Brill exclaimed from her perch atop the pile. “These will sell like squirm bottles on the galactic market. And the best news is that there aren’t any more of these in existence. This collection is all there is—the last remnant of a half-vast genre of the last century! We own the market, friend Sam. The Galaxy is our vladin!”

“Why are they here?” Sam asked and wondered what a vladin might be. “I thought the buyer was going to pick these up from the collector.”

Brill blushed azure. “Well, there were a few complications, friend Sam.”

“Complications?” Sam repeated, with a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach. “What sort of complications?”

“The man I bought these from said that he had some pressing family business to attend. Said we had to take delivery of them immediately as he was leaving the country. Bad bit of news, but I was sympathetic, so I agreed. I figured that, with Pops on Erandi and you in Orlando, I might as well use the office to store the goods until the buyer arrives and takes them off our hands,” Brill replied. “Don’t worry. They’ll only be here for a few days.”

“We can’t wait a couple of days,” Sam shouted. “You have to get these out of here right away—now, in fact.”

“Why are you so upset, friend Sam?” Brill responded, dismissing Sam’s obvious agitation with a wave of her tentacle. “Surely a few more days won’t inconvenience anybody.”

“Pops, I mean, Mardnnn, is back from Erandi,” Sam breathed heavily as he lifted one of the boxes. “He cut his trip short. He’ll be coming here tomorrow morning.”

“Gack!” Brill said cleverly as she inched toward the door. “I think you have a problem, friend Sam,” she shouted as she bounded down the stair and out of the building.

Sam watched the Crumptonian disappear with a sinking heart. He had not expected Brill to desert him in this situation. Now he was in deep trouble, really deep trouble. He set the box down, sat upon it, and contemplated the hideous future that surely awaited him as he frantically looked through the classified pages. How had things managed to get so screwed up, Sam wondered as he found what he was looking for and dialed a moving and storage company.

He hoped that they could handle rush jobs.

The moving company had promised that the porters would be at the office as soon as possible and that the boxes would be safely stored in the recesses of their warehouse before the day was out. Sam would have preferred that the office be vacated of boxes immediately, if not sooner, but a few hours could be endured.

A few hours later the porters had still not arrived and Sam was on the verge of calling the moving company rep for the tenth time. At the moment that he resolved to do so Brill raced into the room and caromed off three walls before settling down on top of the desk.

“Friend Sam,” Brill announced breathlessly. “I’ve found how to get rid of the boxes. I’ve found a buyer!” She waved a limb at the stacks of boxes. “This Ligonian will give us fifty thousand for the lot! That will get them out of here and solve your problem.”

Sam couldn’t believe his ears. Had Brill really been stupid enough to sell the entire collection for a mere fifty thousand dollars? “Oh great,” he moaned and lowered his head into his hands. “Now we only have to repay Mardnnn the balance, which should only take us a few centuries or so depending on what the prisons pay their tenants.” He wondered how he would look in a Dayglo orange prison suit. Or maybe the galactics used some more fashionable color for their miscreants. Somehow he didn’t relish finding out.

“Not to fear,” Brill announced gleefully. “I used the money we didn’t spend on the collection to buy an even better set of magazines that my ’zine collector had. It’s a collection of Improved Domicile and Habitat, no, that wasn’t it. Oh yes, it was Better Homes and Gardens. I just know that these are even more marketable than the other ones. By the way, he said I could send the balance that we owed to him to this bank account number in Swizzleand.”