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"Postpaid to Paradise" is a 5,000-word short story by Robert Arthur about some magical stamps which send packages to the mythical country of El Dorado. It was first published in the June 15, 1940, issue of Argosy Weekly.

Plot

Murchison Morks inherited a stamp collection from his father. It included five stamps from a country called El Dorado. A dealer told him those stamps were fakes, but later he put one of the stamps on a letter to a friend, Harry Norris. That letter then disappeared, and arrived at Harry Norris’s house, on the other side of the country, in just three minutes, with the stamp cancelled.

Harry Norris comes to visit, and the two decide to try mailing a box with their pet cat in it. They make up an address, put the stamp on the box, and the box flies out the window. Then the box comes back, with the cat, and a stamp that says no such address exists.

Harry then decides he wants to go to El Dorado (the pictures on the stamps are enticing). He puts a tag on his arm, addressed to the postmaster general of El Dorado, and then applies the stamp. He disappears. Murchison was supposed to follow him, but he chickens out, and instead simply mails Harry’s belongings to the same address.

Additional Notes

This story has been reprinted in, among other things, an issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1950, and in Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 2 (1940).

This was the first in a series of stories featuring the character Murchison Morks.