I drank a lot of iced tea and tried to concentrate on the thesis I was writing, a doctoral bit on the implications of the Methuen Treaty upon the War of the Spanish Succession. It was a particularly interesting theme and I was having a lot of fun with the research, and when I was about three-fourths of the way through it, Roger Carmody called up and told me I might as well forget it because he had failed his oral examinations and had decided to say the hell with it and join the Army.

I had put a price of $1750 on the thesis, which was reasonable enough. And I had collected half the money in advance, mine to keep now that the job was washed out, but Roger Carmody was a pretty nice fellow and I felt bad about the whole deal, so I gave him all his money back and consequently felt even worse about the whole deal. Someday I would finish the thesis for somebody else and get my money out of it. In the meanwhile my bank balance was lower than I like to have it.

It was just one damned thing after another. A batch of things was hanging in the air in an annoying fashion. In Macedonia a girl named Annalya, the mother of my son Todor, was expecting a second child momentarily; I couldn’t find out a thing about her, and some friends of mine who were normally in close contact with Macedonia didn’t know anything. Other good friends had gone over to Africa to assist a secessionist movement in one of the new states and had quietly disappeared from the face of the earth. No one had any idea what had happened to them, and as they had been last seen in cannibal territory, it was quite probable that they had been eaten.

Then I got an eviction notice from my idiot landlord.

It turned out to be a mistake, of course. My landlord had hired a new secretary, and either she was particularly stupid or he had been singularly incompetent in drilling her in standard procedures, because she had sent eviction notices to every tenant in the half dozen buildings he owned.