THE AIR OF CASTOR OIL BY JIM HARMON Illustrated by WALKER [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine August 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Let the dead past bury its dead? Not while I am alive, it won't! It surely was all right for me to let myself do it now. I couldn't have been more safe. In the window of the radio store a color television set was enjoying a quiz by itself and creased in my pocket was the newspaper account of the failure of a monumental human adventure in the blooming extinction of a huge rocket. The boys on the corner seemed hardly human, scowling anthropoids in walrus-skin coats. It was my own time. Anybody could see I was safe, and I could risk doing what I ached to do. I turned the corner. The breaks were against me from the start. It didn't come as any surprise. I could never get away with it. I knew that all along. There was a Packard parked just beyond the fire plug. The metal and glass fronts of the buildings didn't show back here, only seasoned brick glued with powdering chalk. The line of the block seemed to stretch back, ever further away from the glossy fronts into the crumbling stone. A man brushed past me, wearing an Ivy League suit and snap-brim hat, carrying a briefcase. And, reassuringly, he was in a hurry. I decided to chance it. I certainly wanted to do it in the worst way. My footsteps carried me on down the block. A little car spurted on past me. One of those foreign jobs, I decided. Only it wasn't. I fixed the silhouette in my mind's eye and identified it. A Henry J. Still, I wasn't worried. It was actually too early in the day. It wasn't as if it were evening or anything like that. The little store was right where I left it, rotting quietly to itself. The Back Number Store, the faded circus poster proclaimed in red and gold, or now, pink and lemon. In the window, in cellophane envelopes, were the first issue of _Life_, a recent issue of _Modern Man_ with a modern woman fronting it, a Big Big Book of _Buck Rogers and the Silver Cities of Venus_, and a brand-new, sun-bleached copy of _Doctor Zhivago_. There was a little car at the curb. This time I recognized that it wasn't an import, just a Crosley. I went in, the brass handle making me conscious of the sweat on my palm. * * * * * The old man sat behind a fortress of magazines and books, treacherously reading the funnies in a newspaper. His bald head swiveled on the hunched shoulders of his sweater which was azuring toward white. He grinned, toothless. "Came back for more of the stuff, did you?" He laid down the newspaper. (That subheadline couldn't really be making so nasty a suggestion to a noted general, could it?) "Yes," I laughed, not very true.