The man looked around, saw him.
The man was old, his face was expressionless. His eyes were all right,
were dark and usual, but his nose was alien.
There was no doubt about that. To any other human it would look merely
odd, but to Web it was alien. Knifelike and alien.
They stood facing each other across the few feet of store. Web reached
again for the gun he did not have. Quickly--but with a gliding
smoothness, in no hurry at all--the alien turned away. He sat down on a
stool at the fountain.
Web stood for several seconds in the booth, watching.
He tried to think, but there was no time. Others would be gathering
outside. He fought the impulse to run. After a long moment he opened
the door of the booth and walked out into the store. The alien did not
turn. The huge glass window of the store was unblocked. Web could see
dozens of shoppers pass by in the night. In the crowd there would be
old men. To go out now was foolish.
He walked over to the fountain and sat down two seats away from the
alien. There was a fat, soda-eating woman between them. He ordered
coffee.
No way out. They were not likely to come in, but there was no way out.
Through the back door would be useless. Darker, less people. He looked
down toward the alien. The little man was sitting quietly, the glass
untouched before him. The nose was sharp in profile.
Web made up his mind quickly, in the only way possible. His strength,
his size was his only asset. He would have to use it.
He paid for his coffee, picked up his change, then stood up and looked
for the light switch. There were four long fluorescent tubes above him,
no chance to break them all. He saw the light switch against the back
wall, then took a deep breath.
He walked up quickly behind the alien.
The little man did not move.
"You," Web said.
The alien face swung toward him.
"Get up," Web said.
The dry face whitened, but the expression did not change and the old
man did not say anything.
"I asked you to get up," Web said gently. His right hand hung low, Web
clamped down on the alien's frail shoulder and jerked him to his feet.
When the alien opened his mouth, Web hit him low. The man doubled.
Web picked him up and heaved him the full length of the store, in the
direction of the light switch. He leaped after the hurtling body, threw
the switch.
In the sudden blessed blackness he found the alien's head on the floor,
crashed it down twice with a great, nerveless strength. Frantically,
savagely, while the fat lady screamed and the few other people bellowed
toward the door, he searched the alien's pockets. There was nothing
resembling a gun. What he found he jammed quickly into his own pocket,
then whirled and waited, crouching.
Outside were shouts, and a crowd was forming. When there were enough
people outside he stood up and ran for the door.
He weighed two hundred and forty pounds. He came through the door like
a freight express, ripped into the crowd with all the power of his
enormous body. He went through and over, came out the other side, let
out his speed and began to run.
A light orange flame touched a brick wall near him, glowed briefly on
a car, on a post, on a sign above him. He swerved. There was an alley,
dark and open.
He ran into it, over the fence at the other end, and through a back
yard. The flame followed in soft bursting balls. He was in another
alley with open light in front of him, when the flame caught up with
him.
It took him just under the right shoulder blade, burned a hole clean
through him in the space of a second. He died on his feet, still
running.
* * * * *
The recording was made in the drugstore, from an alley a few feet away.
It was made just in time for the Galactics to turn their talents to
other things. Altogether they had observed seven Faktors in the crowd
that gathered in front of the store. Kunklin had already obliterated
the four who lay in wait in the darkness at the rear, and the three at
the hotel.
It was not difficult. There is no single being in the entire galaxy
with the massed, polarized power of a Galactic repairman.
They found Web's body in the alley. It was of no use anymore, to
anybody, and was inconvenient. So they dissolved it.
* * * * *
When Web awoke there was a light gentle clicking in his mind that
he did not follow at all. He lay listening to it for a long while,
gathering himself, creeping out of a thick numbness.
And then he sat bolt upright.
He was on a train.
The clicking was the sound of wheels against rails. He stared at the
room around him, at the open window and the flat green fields rolling
by beyond it. For a moment he was extremely dizzy. He lowered his head
and waited.
After a while his head cleared and he could stand up. He walked
unsteadily to the window and looked out, saw nothing but fields and
quick-swishing poles. He turned back to the bunk on which he had been
lying. He was alone in the compartment.
A train?
How in God's name did he get on a train?
The last thing he remembered was a numbing crouch, a heart-bursting
need for action. Slowly at first, then with great clarity, he
remembered being on the floor of the drugstore, waiting for the crowd
to gather so he could make a dash for the door.
But he could not remember moving. He could not remember anything but
crouching. And then--nothing. His memory ended like a burned-out match.
And there were no bruises or lumps on his head. He felt it carefully
to make sure. The only pain he felt anywhere in his body was a dull,
left-over aching in his side--that had come from the landing in the pod.
Well somehow, obviously, he had been knocked out.
But--the train.
Dammit, hadn't they been trying to kill him?
It made no sense. Never in his life had his mind just up and gone
blank. But he had not been hit. He had been paralyzed somehow, and
taken out of the drugstore and--
He put his hand in his pocket. For the first time it occurred to him
that he was wearing different clothes.
He sat down abruptly, looked down at himself with increasing amazement.
The army clothes were gone. In their place was a stiff white shirt and
brown tweed pants, and a loosely knotted red plaid tie. His eyes leaped
to the door of the compartment. A matching tweed coat, obviously new,
hung from a wire coat hanger.
Am I me? he asked himself. He was utterly lost.
Across from the bunk there was a small wash room and a mirror. He went
over and looked at himself. He had not seen himself in a white shirt
for a long time and for a moment it was odd, but then, it was his own
face. There was no change. And he needed a shave.
He went back and sat down on the bed.
The minutes ticked by and when he had sat long enough without thinking
of anything at all he caught a firm grip on himself and tried to go
back over the whole thing. It was none of it real, and he immediately
rejected it. He had not gone up in a satellite at all, or driven a
halftrack out of a desert, and there was no naked man--
Yes he had. He damn well had.
He was Lieutenant Augustus Webster Hilton, and all of this had
happened. He focused again on where he was.
A train. Alone.
Bound for where?
He moved suddenly, with a baffled, growing anger. One thing at least he
could find out. He stood up and put on the jacket. He was on his way
out to find a porter when he felt the bulge in his pocket.
Instantly, he remembered the things he had taken from the dead alien.
They had been transferred to the pocket of his new clothes. The
courtesy of it struck him as incredible. He spread the things out on
the bed.
There was a set of keys, ordinary keys. There was a metallic disc about
the size of a quarter, engraved with meaningless figures. A coin? A
lucky piece? Probably a coin. There was a handkerchief, soiled, and a
small box of pasty white tablets. He put them down immediately. The
important thing was a card. A calling card, on the face of which,
simply printed, were the words:
Albert Bosco, M.D.
213 Wingate Rd.
Chicago, Ill.
The card was white paper, nothing unusual, but he stared at it with
mixed amazement and disbelief. It occurred to him for a rather horrible
second that the man he had killed might conceivably not have been an
alien.
But no. He recalled the nose clearly. The nose was alien, the man was
alien. And where he had gotten the card, and what use he had for it,
had probably died with him.
And then, of course, there was no reason why an alien named Albert
Bosco could not be a doctor.
But that was all he had gotten from the alien's pockets. It was a
curiously ordinary and unexciting mess of nothing, there was no
trace here of anything not human. But it did give him one thing: his
destination.
And whoever had put him on the train knew that too.
The first porter he found let slip, luckily, that his name had been
given as Mr. Pringle. Where they got that one, or how they got him on
the train, Web was never to know. And yessir, why sutinly, sir, said
the porter, looking at him oddly, as he had every right to look, this
here now train sho' does stop at Chicago.
When he left the train at Chicago it was after midnight.
Dammit, he said to himself bitterly, I got to do everything at night.
He had planned to dodge around the station a bit before leaving, but
there was no crowd. The place was wide and bare, stony, with a few
night travelers dozing on benches. None of them he could see had sharp
noses.