The boy is five and is holding the envelope correctly, which is to say at one corner, the way his mother has reminded him to hold envelopes that are not his.
Barrett is at the kitchen counter making coffee that the machine has refused to make hot for three weeks. His wife is at the table, on the second of the morning’s three things she does before the school day starts. The boy walks in from the front-door alcove holding the envelope, which the post has slid under the door in the night. There is no return address. There is a real stamp. The postmark is Olympus Mons, which is the postmark these envelopes always have, and which Barrett, the first time he saw it at age nine, had thought was funny because Olympus Mons was where the biggest dragon in the western dungeon of his game lived; and which he had stopped thinking was funny at age twenty-six.
His wife does not look up from the page she is on. She says: another one.
Barrett says: another one.
The boy puts the envelope on the table. He goes back to whatever he is doing in the next room, which sounds like he has decided to teach the dog to sit and the dog has decided to be taught.
Barrett opens the envelope.
Inside is a thin board-bound book with a printed dust jacket, the kind a small Earth-side press makes for a small Earth-side market. The title is Practical Algorithms for Patient Children, with a Forward by an Author Who Has Asked to Remain Anonymous. The book has not been published, by any catalog Barrett can find later, by any press anywhere on Earth or Mars. The dust jacket has, on the inside flap, an inscription handwritten in the same hand that no post office has ever produced:
for the next sub_basement.
His wife reaches across the table without looking up and puts her hand on his hand, which is a thing she has done at exactly this moment four times across their marriage, and which she does not explain. The hand stays for the count of three. Then she goes back to her page.
Barrett does not say anything to her. He has not said anything to her, in all the years they have been married, about any of these envelopes. He has not said anything to anyone. He has known, in the way a man knows a thing in his chest before he has said it to his own face, since he was twenty-six. He has applied, since twenty-six, the principle his father taught him at the dinner table when he was eight, which was that the federal government and the NGOs are not to be trusted, and the smaller the unit of trust the better, and any entity that pays rent to your line for forty years without asking for anything back is, by elimination, neither one. The principle holds. The envelope is allowed.
He takes the book to the boy in the next room.
The boy stops trying to teach the dog. The boy looks at the book. The boy says, because the boy is five, can I read it?
Barrett says yes.
The boy reads it, slowly, with his finger on the line and his mother’s face appearing at the doorframe to make sure her husband has held onto the morning the way he was supposed to.
Barrett kisses the top of his son’s head.
He goes to teach his afternoon class.