Stairway to Forever by Robert Adams Read Free Book Online

you aright? Fitz, you want some water or somethin?"
    The cost of the crumbling rental house set Fitz back little more than the depressed value of the land on which it sat, moldering. During the next eight weeks, however, a top-flight general contractor and his horde of subcontractors and laborers converted the ramshackle cottage into a small luxury home, complete with every conceivable convenience. The ancient Ford clunker had been retired to a junkyard

    and the new garage housed a Mercedes 280, a Jeep Wagoneer and a powerful trail bike.
    The pantry and the big new deep-freeze now both were well-stocked and Fitz was beginning to gain back some of the weight he had lost in the course of the last few hellish years of suffering and privation. He had quit his job with the vacuum cleaner company; for one reason, he no longer needed the money, for since he had paid off the credit union of his former employer in full, he now was receiving his full pension, not to even mention the thousands of dollars that kept rolling in from the sales of gold coins. But the other reason he had quit was that the time necessary had been cutting deeply into the time he felt that he needed to spend in and further explore the world beyond that underground wall below his backyard. Besides, he was getting not a few odd looks from employers, fellow salesmen and customers alike, as he had gone about selling vacuum cleaners, door to door, while driving a brand-spanking-new Mercedes sedan and dressed in expensive, custom-tailored clothing, all his visible skin surfaces deeply and evenly tanned amid his winter-pale fellow humans.
    As for Gus Tolliver, he had to all intents and purposes closed down his shop to the general public, now receiving customers therein only by way of preset appointments. The bulk of his time and energy now was going toward representing Fitz as sole agent in the sales of exceedingly rare, early medieval coins to an ever-widening sphere of avid and generally well-heeled collectors.
    As Anno Domini 1974 became Anno Domini 1975, and the word spread, mail, wires and telephone calls from all over the world poured into the small shop— bids, want-lists and simple inquiries. The twenty-percent commission on all sales to which Fitz had

    agreed was making a wealthy man of Gus Tolliver, while merely the fact that he now was noted, world wide, as a factor in the sale of a collection of rare coins had guaranteed him a bright future in the field of numismatics.
    Because Fitz had been leaving his home less and less frequently, of late, Gus had begun driving out from the city on each Friday night to settle the past week's accounts, have a few drinks and just talk. He and his client had quickly become fast friends during the still-short course of their most-lucrative mutual enterprise. So close were they two now become that Gus and Fitz now held one each of the only three keys to the gate of the twelve-foot-high cyclone fence that now circumscribed the entire property.
    Fitz had had the barrier erected—complete with three strands of barbed wire at the top, rigged with tripwires and pressure points and electric eyes which activated bright lights and banshee-loud alarms—after the third time he had returned from the sand world to find that his home had been entered. On the first occasion, he had called the sheriff and it had been that dignitary who had first suggested a good fence and some sophisticated locks.
    "Look, Mistuh Fitzgilbert," Gomer Vaughan had said, "you got you a damn fine house in a damn crummy neighborhood. Most the folks 'round here don't even own the crackerboxes they lives in, they just rents, longs they can pay the rent, then my boys has to put them out, like as not. And the way the kind of scum 'round here thinks, they're just natcherly going to resent you and this house and all. They don't none of them have the kind of minds that might stop and think you might of worked your ass off to get whatall you got. Naw, they'll just be