CodalSearch this book — or all of Codal…⌘K
nydus/Short Science FictionPublic

A collection of short science fiction stories by Noel Loomis.

Page 152 of 170
Table of Contents

Nine Men in Time

wanted to tell the original High-Pockets to gather them all up and put them back together, but I didn’t know how to find the original.

Well, they couldn’t get me down. I fooled them. I told them all to take the rest of the day off⁠—at full pay.

All nine of them washed up together and left together. It was the damnedest thing I ever saw offstage. Nine identical High-Pocketses⁠—all so tall they had to weave around the neon lights instead of ducking under them. It was enough to give a man nightmares, to watch that line of High-Pockets Joneses advancing across an open composing-room.

This kind of thing went on the next day, and the next. Every day there were nine High-Pockets Joneses in the composing-room. Everybody was falling over everybody else, when they weren’t standing around laughing up their sleeves.

152