"I'm afraid so, Sir." There not being any room on the desk, she put the box of telegrams on a visitor's chair. "The switch board called up with the first of today's hourly running totals. There have been 297 complaints since nine o'clock this morning which brings the total up to 92,784 since the disaster four days ago."
"Where is he? He was supposed to be here by now." The Post Master General waved one arm toward the desk and chair. "Look at that. I run the biggest message service in the country and how do people choose to contact me - telephones and telegrams. Nobody has any faith in the United States Postal Service any more, and it's all his fault."
"Yes, Sir. Excuse me, Sir. I'll go and check with security to find out if anyone has sighted him."
As the shapely secretary left the room, the Post Master General sat behind his desk with a groan. He closed his eyes and laid his head against the well polished alligator leather of the chair.
A deep rumbling throat clearing startled him upright. Turning to look through the open window to his left he saw a large toothless head, atop a stretched out neck, sheepishly grinning at him. Two thick horn-like eye stalks tipped with scarlet knobs waved at him. "I hear you want to see me, Boss."
The Post Master General leaped to his feet. "You'd better bloody believe that I do. Whatever possessed you to do such a thing?"
"Ah, Boss I couldn't help it. I'm a growing snail. I need my nourishment. You don't know what it's like. How would you like to haul around several tons of sweetly aromatic yummies without being allowed to even have one little nibble, and put on a starvation diet while you're doing it."
"You can't tell me you haven't nibbled. There's been plenty of mail lost. We even had to invent the fiction of a lost letter department in order to cover your nibbling. Even then, magazines and letters would arrive with whole bites taken out of them. But, this - this is absolutely the worst! If you had to eat something why is it you never eat any of the junk mail? Nobody would miss them."
"I've tried that once, boss. But junk food gives me gas, and it doesn't really have any nutritional value. Now a good literary magazine, or an intelligently written letter has a lot of healthy food value. I haven't been greedy. A nibble here, a bite from another - very small bites, Boss."
The Post Master General ran a hand down his face in exasperation. The snail stretched his head into the window as far as he could. His eye stalks excitedly oscillated. "Ah humph, Boss. Is that a lot of unwanted mail I smell on your desk?"
The Post Master General glared at the company monster. The snail retracted its head with a guilty look all over it's spongy face. "I was only asking. It's been a long time since I've eaten anything, and I thought that you might offer a fellow a bit of nourishment. Something to keep body and soul together."
The Post Master General sighed. "Oh hell, why not. They're only telegrams. Feeding them to a horned monster is one way of getting rid of them." He went over to the chair and picked up the file box. Carrying it to the waiting snail he poured the contents of the box down the monster's open maw.
The creature masticated the paper with a considering look on his face. "Interesting flavor," he said, having swallowed the lot. "Tart, almost acid in tone, yet full bodied with emotional substance. May I have more?"
The Post Master General carried arm full after arm full of dispatches to the oversized gastropoda. As the last of the telegrams met their gastronomical fate, the Post Master General dropped into his chair. "This still doesn't solve the present problem."
"What's that, Boss?" asked the snail. He turned his head to burp. "Sorry about that, Boss, some of that stuff was a bit acerbic."
"I should think so. Just tell me one thing. You had a large selection of material you were carrying when you had your feeding frenzy. Newsweek, Time, the Washington Monthly, all those packages of books from a dozen mail order houses and at least as many book clubs. Why did you leave them untouched and gobble up every single scrap of Playboy?"
The snail looked uncomfortable. "Well, Boss it's like this," he said wiggling his red tipped eye stalks. "I'm a Horny Snail."