I opened one at random. The comic was a broadsheet. The much-thumbed paper was thin, delicate, and all but rubbed away along its spine. But the full-color strips within were as bright as they had been in 1965. I found myself in issue 19, in which the Kaplan, the leader of the Astrans—aliens oddly like huge jelly beans—is assassinated, JFK-style, and Colonel Steve Zodiac, commander of the mighty spacecraft Fireball XL5, is assigned to find the killers and avert a space war.

“Mike Noble.” It was Peter; he had stuck his head through the hatch.

“Sorry, I was lost again.”

He handed me a mug of tea. “My mug, my tea, my milk. I guessed you don’t take sugar.”

“Right. Mike who?”

“Noble. The artist who drew Fireball for TV-Twenty-one—and later Zero X, and Captain Scarlet. Always our favorite.”

Our? . . . But, yes, I remembered that a shared interest in the Anderson shows, and later all things science-fictional and space-related, had been an early hook-up between me and Peter, links that had overcome my reluctance to be associated with the school weirdo. “I thought my parents burned this lot.”

Peter shrugged. “If they’d told you they were up here they’d never have gotten you out of the attic. Anyhow, maybe they meant to give them back to you someday, and just forgot.”

That sounded like Dad, I thought sourly.

“Do you have a complete run in there?”

“I think so,” I said dubiously. “I think I kept buying it right until the end.”

“Which end?”

“Huh?”

He clambered a little higher—I saw he had brought a stepladder—and perched on the rim of the open hatch, legs dangling. “TV Twenty-one went through a few changes as sales began to fall. In nineteen sixty-eight—issue one ninety-two—it merged with another title called TV Tornado, and began to run more non-Anderson material. Then, after issue two forty-two, it merged with a Joe Ninety comic and began a second series from number one . . .”

“The last issue I remember buying had George Best on the cover. How do you know all this?”

“I researched it.” He shrugged. “You can reclaim the past, you know. Colonize it. There’s always more you can find out. Structure your memories.” He sighed. “But for TV Twenty-one it has gotten harder with time. There was a surge of interest in the eighties—”

“When our generation reached our thirties.”

Peter grinned. “Old enough to be nostalgic, young enough to form irrational enthusiasms, rich enough to do something about it. But now we’re passing through our forties, and . . .”

“And we’re becoming decayed old fucks and nobody cares anymore.” And, I thought, we are being picked off one by one by the demographics, as if by a relentless sniper. I flicked through the comics, looking at the brightly colored panels, the futuristic vehicles and shining uniforms. “The twenty-first century isn’t turning out the way I expected, that’s for sure.”