“And he gave me a letter for you. Only now I won’t give it to you.”
“What sort of letter.”
“Can’t have it.”
I finally noticed the piece of paper she had clutched in her fist. Alice looked at me, I looked at her, and she handed over the piece of paper anyway.
On the paper were notes for the feeding of red Crooms. I had been missing the note for the last three days.
“Alice, where did you find my notes?”
“Turn it over. The apparition didn’t have any paper so I gave him some of yours.”
On the reverse side of the paper, written in English in an unknown hand, was:
“Honorable Professor!
“I have summoned my courage to appeal to you, for I have fallen into a most unpleasant situation from which I may not emerge without outside intervention. Alas, neither can I go further than one meter from the center of this apple tree. You may look upon me in my woeful condition only during darkness.
“Thanks to your daughter, so thoughtful and sympathetic a being, I am finally able to resetablish communication with the outside world. “I, the woeful Professor Kuraki, am the victim of an unsuccessful experiment. I have been conducting experiments in matter transmission. I was able to transmit two turkey hens from Tokyo to Paris. They were received without problems by my colleagues. However, on the day I decided to test the equipment myself, the fuses in my laboratory overheated precisely at the moment of transmission. And the energy for molecular re-integration was insufficient. I was dispersed in space, however, my most concentrated locus is located in the region of your honorable garden. In this vexatious condition I have found myself for two weeks, and no doubt I have been given up for dead. “I beg of you, immediately upon receipt of this letter communicate with my colleagues in Tokyo. Someone must fix the fuses in my laboratory. Only then will rematerialization be able to occur. “Thanks a million, Kuraki”