One such item wouldn’t have worried me. But I had brought home four more volumes equally inexplicable.

Chalk it up to age, I thought. Or worse. Senility. Alzheimer’s. Either way, a bad omen.

Sleep was elusive.

The next logical step might have been to see a doctor. Instead, the next morning I thumbed through the yellow pages for a used-book dealer who specialized in period science fiction. After a couple of calls I reached a young man named Niemand who offered to evaluate the books if I brought them to him that afternoon.

I told him I’d be there by one.

If nothing else, it was an excuse to prolong my life one more interminable day.

Niemand—his store was an overheated second-story loft over a noisy downtown street—gave the books a long, thoughtful examination.

“Fake,” he said finally. “They’re fake.”

“Fake? You mean… counterfeit?”

“If you like, but that’s stretching a point. Nobody counterfeits books, even valuable books. The idea is ludicrous. I mean, what do you do, set up a press and go through all the work of producing a bound volume, duplicate the type, flaws and all, and then flog it on the collector’s market? You’d never recoup your expenses, not even if you came up with a convincing Gutenburg Bible. In the case of books like this, the idea’s doubly absurd. Maybe if they were one-off from an abandoned print run or something, but, hell, people would know about that. Nope. Sorry, but these are just… fake.”

“But—well, obviously, somebody did go to the trouble of faking them.”

He nodded. “Obviously. It’s flawless work, and it can’t have been cheap. And the books are genuinely old. Contemporary fakes, maybe… maybe some obsessive fan with a big disposable income, rigging up books he wanted to exist…”