When the old man told these stories, he did not always know the details of them until he heard them from his own lips. Like many good talkers and taletellers, he relied on inspiration. His tongue was like a pump hooked up to some deep well of secrets, and when he got it primed the tales he spewed up were as astonishing to him as to any man in the room. He sometimes wondered at the source of them.

Now, on this November night in the basement, Ralph gave some thought to his second son for whom no Galbralian name had ever been invented. Clinton was good company, not talkative himself, but a perfect listener, and though he was not wild he had a lot to him in a quiet way.

Ralph’s head was inclined over the puzzle. He stole a glance at this tame son and felt a sudden flush of guilt that he had never given him a nickname. He drank his liquor and busied himself with the puzzle. A moment later, he mumbled, “It’s a tribe of Galbralians.” Clinton laughed in a quiet, agreeable way, and Ralph said: “Don’t you snicker. You’re just as bad as that other one. You’re both Galbralians. You want a drink of liquor?” Clinton said, “Yes, please,” and took a small swallow from the bottle. The two of them laughed together over nothing in particular, and pretty soon the old man felt better about the whole matter.

Clinton did not place the letter in the first mailbox he passed. He went first to a White Tower hamburger place and ordered a cup of coffee. He often stopped at this place during his late evening walks. You could not always count on interesting talk here, but on occasions it had been lively enough. There was a public telephone on the wall, not encased by a booth, and you could often get half of a conversation.

The counter man was a thin person of indeterminate age and faded eyes. He spoke with a machine-gun hillbilly speed and, though usually laconic, Clinton found his little scraps of talk worth listening to: for instance, when he spoke his name, Melvin, you could not hear the “I”; and he talked of Tennessee as if it were Paradise. Clinton always thought of him as Mevvin from Heaven. He also admired Mevvin’s efficiency behind the counter. The man could take care of eight stools, work the grill, serve, and ring up cash without ever getting confused or flustered. Clinton had long ago entered all of these facts, along with samples of Mevvin’s talk, in his notebook.

Now Clinton sat at the counter and removed various articles of equipment from his pocket and placed them before him: his notebook, a ball-point pen with his name on it in gold (received through the mail from a crippled war veteran along with a letter inviting him to become a ball-point pen salesman in his neighborhood; he gave it some thought, but never followed through on it), a package of king-sized cigarettes in a plastic container, book matches, a roll of transparent tape, a key ring with a metal tag on it that read: I HAVE BEEN TELEVISED AT THE NEW YORK WORLD’S FAIR; from this key ring depended a large number of useless keys and a single-bladed knife given him by a Red Cross Shoes salesman.