One Door From Heaven

parlor at the hub of the labyrinth barely measured large enough to accommodate him and the Toad at once. An armchair, flanked by a floorlamp and a small table, faced a television. To the side stood an ancient brocade-upholstered sofa with a tassel-fringed skirt.
        The Toad sat in the armchair.
        Preston squeezed past him and settled on the end of the sofa farthest from his host. Had he sat any closer, they would have been brought together in an intolerably intimate tete-a-tete.
        They were surrounded by maze walls constructed of magazines, newspapers, books, old 78-rpm phonograph records stored in plastic milk crates, stacks of used coffee cans that might contain anything from nuts and bolts 10 several human fingers, boxy floor-model radios from the 1930s balanced atop one another, and an array of other items too numerous to catalog, all interlocked, held together by weight and mold and inertia, braced by strategically placed planks and wedges.
        The Toad, like his loon-mad ma and pa before him, was a world-class obsessive. Packrat royalty.
        Ensconced in his armchair, the Toad said, "So what's your deal?"
        "As I explained on the phone earlier, I've come to hear about your close encounter."
        "Here's the thing, Mr. Banks. After all these many years, the government went and cut off my disability checks."
        "I'm sorry to hear that."
        "Said I'd been fakin' twenty years, which I flatly did not."
        "I'm sure you didn't."
        "Maybe the doctor who certified me made a true racket of it, like they say, and maybe I was the only for real sufferin' soul ever crossed his doorstep, but I have been a genuine half-cripple, damn if I
        weren't."
        "And this relates to your close encounter-how?" Preston asked.
        A small glistening pink animal poked its head out of the Toad's great tangled beard.
        Preston leaned forward, fascinated until he realized that the pink animal was the man's tongue. It slid back and forth between lips no doubt best left unrevealed, perhaps to lubricate them in order to facilitate the passage of his lies.
        "I'm grateful," said the Toad, "that some three-eyed starmen come along and healed me. They were a weird crew, no two ways about it, and plenty scary enough to please the big audience you need, but in spite of their bein' so scary, I acknowledge they committed a good deed on me. The problem is, now I'm not the pitiful half-cripple that I always used to be, so there's no way to get back on disability."
        "A dilemma," Preston said.
        "I made a promise to the starmen-and a solemn promise, it was-not to reveal them to the world for what they done here. I feel most bad about breakin' that promise, but the hard fact is I've got to eat and pay bills."
        Preston nodded at the bibbed and bearded moron. "I'm sure the starmen will understand."
        "Don't mean to say I'm not for-sure grateful about havin' the cripple takin' right out of me with that blue-light thing of theirs. But all-powerful like they were, it seems queer they wouldn't also thought to give me some skill or talent I could put to use makin' a livin'. Like mind readin' or seein' the future."
        "Or the ability to turn lead into gold," Preston suggested.
        "There would be a good one!" the Toad declared, slapping his armchair with one hand. "And I wouldn't abuse the privilege, neither. I'd make me just as little gold as I needed to get by."
        "You strike me as responsible in that respect," said Preston.
        "Thank you, Mr. Banks. I do appreciate the sentiment. But this is all just jabber, 'cause the spacemen didn't think to bless me in that regard. So… though it shames me to break my solemn promise, I can't see any damn way out of this dilemma, as you called it, except to sell my story of bein' de-crippled by aliens."
        Although the Toad gave even deeper meaning to the word fraud than had any politician of recent memory, and though Preston had no intention of reaching for his wallet and fishing out a twenty-dollar bill, curiosity compelled him to ask, "How much do you want?"
        What might have been a shrewd expression furrowed the Toad's blotchy red brow, pinched the corners of his eyes, and further puckered his boiled-dumpling nose. Or it might have been a mini seizure.
        "Now, sir, we're both smart businessmen here, and I have a world of respect for you, just as I'm sure