But I missed Lorraine terribly, and we had never had children, neither of us had any close living relations or much in the way of friends; I was unemployed and unemployable, confined forever-more within the contracting walls of my pension and our modest savings… all the joy and much of the simple structure of my life had been leeched away, and the future looked like more of the same, a protracted fumble toward the grave.

If anything postponed the act of suicide it wasn’t courage or principle but the daily trivia. I would kill myself (I decided more than once), but not until after the nightly news… not until I paid the electric bill… not until I had taken my walk.

Not until I solved the mystery I’d brought home from Finders.

I won’t describe the books in detail. They looked more or less like others of their kind. What was strange about them was that I didn’t recognize them, although this was a genre (paperback science fiction of the 1950s and ‘60s) I had once known in intimate detail.

The shock was not just unfamiliarity, since I might have missed any number of minor works by minor writers; but these were major novels by well-known names, not retitled works or variant editions. A single example: I sat down that night with a book called The Stone Pillow, by a writer whose identity any science fiction follower would instantly recognize. It was a Signet paperback circa 1957, with a cover by the artist Paul Lehr in the period style. According to the credit slug, the story had been serialized in Astounding in 1946. The pages were browned at the margins; the glued spine was brittle as bone china. I handled the book carefully, but I couldn’t resist reading it, and in so far as I was able to judge it was a plausible example of the late author’s well-known style and habits of thought. I enjoyed it a great deal and went to bed convinced of its authenticity. Either I had missed it, somehow—in the days when not missing such things meant a great deal to me—or it had slipped out of memory. No other explanation presented itself.