The Phantom Milkman Jack Vance One thing is sure—if you order milk from the milkman, you are going to get a bill for that milk when it’s been delivered——and you’d better be ready to pay for it! I’VE had all I can stand. I’ve got to get out, away from the walls, the glass, the white stone, the black asphalt. All of a sudden I see the city for the terrible place that it is. Lights burn my eyes, voices crawl on my skin like sticky insects, and I notice that the people look like insects too. Burly brown beetles, wispy mosquito-men in tight black trousers, sour sow-bug women, mantids and scorpions, fat little dung-beetles, wasp-girls gliding with poisonous nicety, children like loathesome little flies . . . This isn’t a pleasant thought; I must not think of people so; the picture could linger to bother me. I think I’m a hundred times more sensitive than anyone else in the world, and I’m given to very strange fancies. I could list some that would startle you, and its just as well that I don’t. But I do have this frantic urge to flee the city; it’s settled. I’m going.
I consult my maps—there’s the Andes, the Atlas, the Altai; Mt. Godwin-Austin, Mt. Kilimanjaro: Stromboli and Etna. I compare Siberia above Baikal Nor with the Pacific between Antofagasta and Easter Island. Arabia is hot; Greenland is cold. Tristan da Cunha is very remote; Bouvet even more so. There’s Timbuktu, Zanzibar, Bali, the Great Australian Bight.
I am definitely leaving the city. I have found a cabin in Maple Valley, four miles west of Sunbury. It stands a hundred feet back from Maple Valley Road, under two tall trees. It has three rooms and a porch, a fireplace, a good roof, a good well and windmill.
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