Free Time and Again by Clifford D. Simak

with clippings that had not been pasted up. An album half filled with a cheap stamp collection.
    He squatted back on his heels and turned the pages of the album lovingly, childhood coming back again. Cheap stamps because he had had no money to buy the better ones. Gaudy ones because they had appealed to him. Most of them in poor condition, but there had been a time when they had seemed wonderful.
    The stamp craze, he remembered, had lasted two years…three years at the most. He had pored over catalogues, had traded, had bought cheap packets, picked up the strange lingo of the hobby…perforate, imperforate, shades, watermarks, intaglio.
    He smiled softly at the happiness of memory. There had been stamps he'd wanted but could never have, and he had studied the illustrations of them until he knew each of them by heart. He lifted his head and stared at the wall and tried to remember what some of them were like, but there was no recollection. The once all-important thing had been buried by more than fifty years of other all-important matters.
    He laid the album to one side, went at the trunk again.
    More notebooks and letters. Loose clippings. A curious-looking wrench. A well-chewed bone that at one time probably had been the property and the solace of some well-loved but now forgotten family dog.
    Junk, said Sutton. Buster could have saved a lot of time by simply burning it.
    A couple of old newspapers. A moth-eaten pennant. A bulky letter that never had been opened.
    Sutton tossed it on top of the rest of the litter he had taken from the trunk, then hesitated, put out his hand and picked it up again.
    That stamp looked queer. The color, for one thing.
    Memory ticked within his brain and he saw the stamp again, saw it as he had seen it when a lad…not the stamp, itself, of course, but the illustration of it in a catalogue.
    He bent above the letter and caught a sudden, gasping breath.
    The stamp was old, incredibly old…incredibly old and worth…good Lord, how much was it worth?
    He tried to make out the postmark, but it was so faint with time that it blurred before his eyes.
    He got up slowly and carried the letter to the table, bent above it, puzzling out the town name.
    BRIDGEP—, WIS.
    Bridgeport, probably. And WIS.? Some old state, perhaps. Some political division lost in the mist of time.
    July—198 .
    July, 1980-some thing!
    Six thousand years ago!
    Sutton's hand shook.
    An unopened letter, mailed sixty centuries ago. Tossed in with this heap of junk. Lying cheek by jowl with a tooth-scarred bone and a funny wrench.
    An unopened letter…and with a stamp that was worth a fortune.
    Sutton read the postmark again. Bridgeport, Wis. July, it looked like 11…July 11, 198-. The missing numeral in the year was too faint to make out. Maybe with a good glass it could be done.
    The address, faded but still legible, said:
    Mr. John H. Sutton,
    Bridgeport,
    Wisconsin.
    So that was what WIS. was. Wisconsin.
    And the name was Sutton.
    Of course, it would be Sutton.
    What had Buster's android lawyer said? A trunkful of family papers.
    I'll have to look into historic geography, Sutton thought. I'll have to find out just where Wisconsin was.
    But John Sutton? John H. Sutton. That was another matter. Just another Sutton. One who had been dust these many years. A man who sometimes forgot to open up his mail.
    Sutton turned the letter and examined the flap. There was no sign of tampering. The adhesive was flaking with age and when he ran a fingernail along one corner the mucilage came loose in a tiny shower of powder. The paper, he saw, was brittle and would require careful handling.
    A trunkful of family papers, the android Wellington had said when he came into the room and balanced himself very primly on the edge of a chair and laid his hat precisely on the tabletop.
    And it was a trunkful of junk instead. Bones and wrenches and paper clips and clippings. Old notebooks and letters and a letter that had been mailed six thousand years