Five Days — That’s Not Too Many!

On Sunday, I asked for help in identifying a story I’d read many years ago. I pointed to the posting from Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

This morning, a friend from shul (who happens to be a Googler) answered my Google+ post, asking if this review might be of the story I was looking for. It was, and a quick search found the first few pages on Google Books.

I wanted to read the whole story, and I thought I’d probably be able to find Matheson’s book in a local library, but I was still curious where I’d originally read the story. I was pretty sure that I’d read it in an anthology, not a single-author collection, so I went to the Contento Index and looked for “The Creeping Terror”. I discovered two interesting things there:

• The story was also called “A Touch of Grapefruit”
• It had been anthologized under that name in Star Science Fiction 5

Both of those facts seemed awfully familiar. I got up from the computer, went to the bookshelves, and found my copy of Star Science Fiction 5. And “A Touch of Grapefruit” was right there on page 35.

Yes. I’d been searching for years for a story which was sitting on my own bookshelves.

At least I got to read the end of the story today!