Hey, weirdos. Just wanted to let you know that on the Weird Darkness YouTube channel recently, we've been having fun doing a live chat each weeknight at 10.30 p.m. Central Time. I set up the YouTube channel to premiere a video at that time, usually the podcast episode for the day, and then during the premiere, we all hang out in the YouTube live chat. Even if you've already heard that day's episode here in the podcast, you're

still welcome to join us for the YouTube chat. It's every weeknight at 10.30 p.m. Central Time. And

sometimes I do it over the weekends, too, because I have no social life whatsoever. You can find my

channel at weirddarkness.com slash YouTube. That's weirddarkness.com slash YouTube.

Time enough at last, by Lynn Venable, from If Worlds of Science Fiction, January,

1953.

For a long time, Henry Bemis had had an ambition, to read a book.

Not just the title or the preface or a page somewhere in the middle. He wanted to read the whole thing all the way through from beginning

to end. A simple ambition, perhaps, but in the cluttered life of Henry Bemis, an impossibility.

Henry had no time of his own. There was his wife, Agnes, who owned that part of it that

his employer, Mr. Carsville, did not buy. Henry was allowed enough to get to and from work,

that in itself being quite a concession on Agnes' part.

Also, nature had conspired against Henry by handing him a pair of hopelessly myopic eyes.

Poor Henry literally couldn't see his hand in front of his face. For a while, when he was very young, his parents

had thought him an idiot. When they realized it was his eyes, they got glasses for him. He was

never quite able to catch up. There was never enough time. It looked as though Henry's

ambition would never be realized. Then something

happened, which changed all that. Henry was down in the vault of the Eastside Bank and

trust when it happened. He had stolen a few moments from the duties of his tellers' cage to

try to read a few pages of the magazine he had bought that morning.

He'd made an excuse to Mr. Carsville about needing bills in large denominations for a certain customer, and then, safe inside the dim recesses of the vault, he had pulled from inside his coat,

the pocket-size magazine. He had just started a picture article,

...