At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high
counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men
whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to
listen.
"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or
lunate," the policeman said as he finished.
His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.
Jeff sighed. "I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in
something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I
do--more or less--but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong
in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm
so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten."
There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation.
The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and
got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.
The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. "Come out, what are you
advertising?" they kept asking. "Who got you up to this?"
The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his
wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a "Work License," which
Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave
doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.
In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night.
Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned
and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down
in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he
hesitated.
In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately
he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the
big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow
brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.