Larry's touring company was performing in Worcester that night, so it took Scott some time to get out there for the performance.
    "We regret to inform you that the part of Claudius will be played this evening by William Francis and not by Sir Larry Oliver."
    Scott went looking for the stage manager after the show. The man looked a bit startled to see him.
    "Oh, hi Mr. Silver, how are you?"
    "All right, yourself?"
    "I'm quite good, I thought we had sent you the complimentary tickets for Thursday?"
    "You did."
    "Oh." He looked puzzled. "Okay. Well then, thank you for coming twice."
    "What happened to Mr. Oliver?"
    "He didn't show up." The man shrugged.
    "Oh. That's depressing."
    "Also very unlike him, you know what a professional he is. We tried calling his house, and his wife said things I couldn't quote, also asked that if we found him with some floozie to let her know. But there wasn't anything... I have no idea. So we waited and waited, and he didn't show up, so we put the understudy in."
    "Do you know where he's been staying?"
    "Yes, we've got the hotel. You know, we're traveling through the New England area. Why don't I bring you over there?"
    "Thank you."
    "Like I said, it's really unlike him... guys, I'm going to be taking Mr. Silver over to the hotel."
    "All right. Oh hi, Mr. Silver. Can I have your autograph?"
    He signed a few cheerfully.
    "I understand you guys are gettin' a TV show?"
    "Uh... I don't know."
    "If you hear anything...." The man grinned and winked.
    Scott and Mr. Fowler crossed the street to the hotel.
    "Larry's in this room, I'm afraid I don't have a key...."
    The amorphous robot stuck a pseudopod under the door and looked in. The place looked quite neat. One light was on, near the desk. Directly beneath it was an envelope. Scott stretched halfway across the room to it and paused, remember the room that had blown up, the Wuxia's deathtrap... nothing seemed out of place. Larry's makeup kit was out and appeared to have been recently used, and his sword cane was missing. The envelope was sealed, stamped (uncanceled), and unaddressed except for the local zip code. He held it up to the light, but nothing showed through. There was obviously a letter inside.
    "Excuse me, sir," he said to Mr. Fowler, and entered the room fully.
    One of the things about Scott that few people realized was that he had very little sense of personal property. He opened the letter.
    It was written in a precise, neat hand that was very clearly not Larry's, and said: Let this be a lesson to all who will stand in our way. The Postman.
    Better than the Philatelist, I guess, he thought, and searched the rest of the room. There were two Gideon's Bibles. One of them was hollow. It contained two other books, one small and black, the other slightly larger. He flipped through them curiously.
    The small one was, in fact, Larry Oliver's Little Black Book. The names in it dated back almost fifty years, many of them now or once famous in Hollywood. Names added after about 1960 no longer had little stars next to them (that was when he got married; since Scott hadn't even a glimmer of a sex drive, he had no idea what any of this meant). Sasha's number was in there, he noted curiously.
    The other book was his road journal, going back three or four years, mostly notes about performances. The last entry was for the current day.
    I find myself curiously fascinated by my failure in my last assignment. The fact that I could not trace those people any further back bothers me. No one should be able to be working so far backstage that I can't find them. Therefore, a second attempt is required. In addition, the number of henchmen that they've been recruiting would indicate that they've been working in a larger radius than I had suspected. We'll see what this town delivers.
    Then followed a list of four bars that he had evidently planned to visit, with space for notes to be filled in later.
    Scott put the two books back and went out to check the same bars, unobtrusively. He hit paydirt at the third, where he found several men cleaning up the residue of what had obviously been a large fight.
    "Strangest thing I ever saw," one was commenting to another.
    "What was?" Scott asked, snaking a pseudopod down into the room and nearly giving the guy a heart attack. Startled yells answered him until someone realized who he was. "So what happened here?" he asked when they had calmed down.
    "Well, there was a guy here, fairly old guy, kinda seedy-looking, was looking for... you know, came in, had a few drinks, I don't know, was he tryin' to get laid?" the first man asked the others.
    "He might have been looking for a prostitute," another agreed.
    "Yeah. You know. But perfectly calm, had a couple of drinks, and then the guy that he was talking to jumped up and took a couple of steps, and threw something at him."
    "Something?"
    "It was about yea big, and then it just got huge."
    "And turned into?"
    "A giant postage stamp." He said it like he expected to be disbelieved, but Scott only nodded. "So the old guy managed to get the table up between him and the postage stamp, you see how we've been scraping the stamp off this table?" It looked like an ordinary twenty-eight-cent stamp, albeit much larger than usual. "There's a brief fight, and then there was a crowd of guys.... You know what it's like when a bar fight breaks out, and all the sudden all the old grudges start coming up and people are swinging at one another for no good reason, and someone get thrown through the plate glass window, 'cept we had ours replaced with Lexan? You can see the bloody stain there, and the table and chair underneath got smashed...."
    "You might want to consider a breakout frame for that," Scott noted.
    "Not a bad idea, actually. So, during the course of the fight, all the sudden that guy got knocked over, the old guy. And the one who threw the stamp at him originally pulled out this wicked looking gun, and—this was the weird thing—tore off the shirt he was wearing, and he was suddenly dressed all in blue, with a little cap, and said he was taking this guy. We called the cops, but the cops said that it was a postal matter." He shrugged at Scott's obvious perplexity. "They did!"
    Scott called Reilly.
    "Hello."
    "How long ago did Postal Employee Man make bail?"
    "About four hours." Beat. "Why?"
    "That was a quick costume and name change."
    "Oh dear God no. Please tell me he's not the Philatelist."
    "No, he's the Postman."
    "That's not bad, actually, given where he could have gone with that...."
    "He just kidnapped Larry." Scott was not feeling particularly amused.
    "I can't have heard that right. Postal Employee Man got the drop on Larry?" Reilly sounded incredulous.
    "Well, there was a bar fight full of people involved, I'm not sure how much of it was a setup yet."
    "All right. What do you need?"
    "I'm out in Worcester. Give a call to the police department, let 'em know I'm heading in?"
    Reilly agreed. A few minutes later Scott got a call back. "We have a problem," Reilly told him.
    "What?"
    "The Worcester police department's awfully loopy."
    "Really." "Yeah."
    
    "Why?"
    "I don't know. Someone answered the phone and started asking me whether or not I could see the pretty colors, too."
    "Would you like to let the staties know there might be a problem?" Scott sighed.
    "Will do."
    He reached the station, looked inside. The desk sergeant was sitting there, smiling beatifically. "Silver!" he announced when he saw Scott.
    "What happened?" the robot asked.
    "Groovy. It talks. Peace." The man flashed him a peace sign and a huge grin.
    Scott decided to look around and see if he could find anyone who didn't look as if his or her brains had been sucked out by a Ronco In-Shell Egg Scrambler*, but the only ones fitting that description were the people in the cells.
    "Hey! You guys gonna let us out?" one was asking the nearest cop.
    "No way, man. You're locked up in there, it's for a reason." He pointed an emphatic finger, swaying slightly. "Everything in the universe happens for a reason.... Peace."
    The other man in the room noticed him. "Look, it's the talking silver blob guy. Hi, talking silver blob guy."
    "Hi. You see anything strange tonight?" This may have been a foolish question, he realized immediately.
    "Well, you see anything strange tonight?" one cop asked the other.
    "No, other than the monkeys."
    Scott turned to the nearest prisoner. "Did you guys see anything strange tonight? Other than the cops," he added.
    "The cops just started going wacko," the man shrugged.
    "Somebody drop off free food or something?"
    "No."
    "Somebody show up?"
    "Didn't see anything. Apparently one of the guys on the squad was having a birthday, they were all sending cards out."
    Scott figured it out. "He drugged the stamps. Contact hallucinogens on the stamps. Nice." He called Reilly again. "So it looks like he drugged the gum on the back of the stamps here."
    Pause. "We have got to arrest all of these people."
    "So everybody except for the people in the cells are stoned off their gourds. We could probably use a couple of ambulances."
    "Okay, the staties are on their way there."
    "They're all relatively happy, peaceful people...."
    "Hey, you're on the phone," one noticed. "Who you talkin' to? Hi mom! Look what I found! A tape of disco music, guys! Let's burn it!"
    "This is going downhill, Reilly," he reported. "They're starting to burn disco in effigy."
    "I'll tell the staties to hurry."
    At least they seemed incapable of hurting themselves, although one had a bad case of the munchies, eating donut after donut. After each one he cried, and said a brief prayer for the donut's soul, before devouring the next. Scott got on the radio and managed to find an unaffected car to call in and keep an eye on them until the state police could arrive. Then he dialed the base.

* Yes, those were Tom's actual words.

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