The President Arrives Too Late
Richard possessed many qualities that made him an excellent president of the Paradox Club—his intelligence, his ability to remain calm in a crisis, his talent at building consensus, even his occasional wit had all served as assets to the club at one time or another.
But the talent he used most often in the halls of the club was his uncanny ability to remember names and faces, even after a single brief meeting.
Some members believed he must have worked for hours every week with flash cards bearing names and pictures, but Richard could simply register a face and its accompanying name as easily as taking a photograph.
Had he ever had political aspirations outside the walls of the Paradox Club, the talent would have served him well.
As he swung his rental car onto Vilas Avenue the memories of his years in Madison flooded over him.
He had never been admitted into the inner circle of Harry, Marie, and Vivian, but they had allowed him to orbit their trio.
How many times had they had dinner together or taken walks out to Picnic Point?
Harry had been his best friend. True, they had sparred over university politics and even over policies of the Paradox Club, but Harry had always been there for Richard, especially in those years when being a gay professor on a college campus had been dangerous.
What he wouldn’t give to sit down with Harry and discuss the current situation over a beer. But Richard had no time for nostalgia.
He watched in his rearview mirror as the car continued down Vilas Avenue, then Richard turned left at the end of the block and left again, speeding two blocks down Drake and cutting back over to Vilas in time to see the black sedan a block ahead.
An excerpt from
An Insider’s History of the Paradox Club
(unpublished), by Prefect 16
The location of the Paradox Club on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (club rules prohibit writing down the exact address) was not a random choice.
Ten years after the club’s founding in 1933, two untethered foreign objects appeared almost simultaneously in a brownstone in that neighborhood.
In the days before the club’s scientists invented methods for detecting UFOs, many such objects likely escaped the club’s notice.
A pair of scissors or a fountain pen or a linen napkin from another universe was unlikely to draw much attention.
This is why so many of the earliest discovered UFOs were printed items. A volume of Dickens with previously unknown paragraphs was much easier to recognize as foreign than an ordinary piece of cutlery or an empty beer bottle.
On June 14, 1943, Mrs. Elizabeth X (her name is redacted to prevent the discovery of the club address) found on her kitchen table a newspaper that she at first presumed to be some sort of practical joke, containing as it did references to events she knew had never occurred.
The following day, in her guest lavatory, she found a bar of soap inscribed with the name of a company entirely unknown to her.
She questioned her housekeeper, who knew nothing of either object.
A few days later, walking down East Sixtieth Street, she passed what she knew to be the home of the Grolier Club—a book-collecting society—and, on a whim, entered its doors to discover several members in conversation.
She asked if they knew anything about parody newspapers and they laughed her off, but as she continued down the street, one member came after her.
That man, a member of the Paradox Club known as Ransom (and later as Ransom 1), accompanied Mrs. X back to her home and recognized the two objects as UFOs.
The club was, at the time, in search of a permanent headquarters, and Ransom 1 suggested that a home in which two UFOs had appeared might be an appropriate spot.
In 1944, the club negotiated the purchase of both the building and the foreign objects from Mrs. X, who accepted an invitation to join the club and became known to members as Elaine 1.
In the ensuing decades the club renovated the building into the space we know today, with its many subterranean levels.
The front of the club has never shown any indication of its true nature and has always been maintained in the style of a residential brownstone.
In the early 2000s, when club member Harry Maxwell (who never adopted a club alias) put forth his theory of “thin places”—certain spots that were particularly apt to become portals to other universes, allowing UFOs to pass through—a club member named Pilgrim 3 asked him if he thought the clubhouse itself was such a place.
Maxwell replied that it likely was, noting how prescient the club members who acquired the building had been.
When pressed by Pilgrim 3 on the question of whether the club might again serve as a portal at some time in the future, Maxwell replied cryptically that he knew of sites where UFOs had appeared on more than one occasion, and he saw no reason that the clubhouse should be any different.