Mooney stared at his napping guest in a mood of wonder and fear and
delight.
Time traveler! But it was hard to doubt the pale-eyed man. He had said
he was from the future and he mentioned a date that made Mooney gasp.
He had said: "When you speak to me, you must know that my. Name? Is
Harse." And then he had curled up on the floor, surrounding his shiny
briefcase like a mother cat around a kitten, and begun dozing alertly.
But not before he showed Mooney just what it was he proposed to pay
him with.
Mooney sipped his cooling tea and forgot to shiver, though the drafts
were fiercer and more biting than ever, now just before dawn. He
was playing with what had looked at first like a string of steel
ball-bearings, a child's necklace, half-inch spheres linked together in
a strand a yard long.
Wampum! That was what Harse had called the spheres when he picked the
string out of his little kit, and that was what they were.
Each ball-bearing was hollow. Open them up and out come the treasures
of the crown. Pop, and one of the spheres splits neatly in half,
and out spills a star sapphire, as big as the ball of your finger,
glittering like the muted lights of hell. Pop, and another sphere drops
a ball of yellow gold into your palm. Pop for a narwhal's tooth, pop
for a cube of sugar; pop, pop, and there on the table before Harse
sparkled diamonds and lumps of coal, a packet of heroin, a sphere of
silver, pearls, beads of glass, machined pellets of tungsten, lumps of
saffron and lumps of salt.
"It is," said Harse, "for your. Pay? No, _no_!" And he headed off
Mooney's greedy fingers.
Click, click, click, and the little pellets of treasure and trash were
back in the steel balls.
"No, _no_!" said Harse again, grinning, snapping the balls together
like poppets in a string. "After you have guided me to Brooklyn and the
December twenty-sixth. But I must say to you. This? That some of the
balls contain plutonium and some radium. And I do not think that you
can get them. Open? But if you did, you perhaps would die. Oh. Ho?"
And, laughing, he began his taut nap.
* * * * *
Mooney swallowed the last of his icy tea. It was full daylight outside.
Very well, castaway, he said silently to the dozing pale-eyed man, I
will guide you. Oh, there never was a guide like Mooney--not when a
guide's fee can run so high. But when you are where you want to go,
then we'll discuss the price....
A hacksaw, he schemed, and a Geiger counter. He had worn his fingers
raw trying to find the little button or knob that Harse had used to
open them. All right, he was licked there. But there were more ways
than one to open a cat's eye.
A hacksaw. A Geiger counter. And, Mooney speculated drowsily, maybe a
gun, if the pale-eyed man got tough.
Mooney fell asleep in joy and anticipation for the first time in more
than a dozen years.
* * * * *
It was bright the next morning. Bright and very cold.
"Look alive!" Mooney said to the pale-eyed man, shivering. It had been
a long walk from Uncle Lester's house to the bridge, in that ripping,
shuddering wind that came in off the Atlantic.
Harse got up off his knees, from where he had been examining the
asphalt pavement under the snow. He stood erect beside Mooney, while
Mooney put on an egg-sucking smile and aimed his thumb down the road.
The station wagon he had spotted seemed to snarl and pick up speed as
it whirled past them onto the bridge.
"I hope you skid into a ditch!" Mooney bawled into the icy air. He was
in a fury. There was a bus line that went where they wanted to go.
A warm, comfortable bus that would stop for them if they signaled,
that would drop them just where they wanted to be, to convert one of
Harse's ball-bearings into money. The gold one, Mooney planned. Not the
diamond, not the pearl. Just a few dollars was all they wanted, in this
Jersey shore area where the towns were small and the gossip big. Just
the price of fare into New York, where they could make their way to
Tiffany's.
But the bus cost thirty-five cents apiece. Total, seventy cents. Which
they didn't have.
"Here comes another. Car?"
Mooney dragged back the corners of his lips into another smile and held
out his thumb.
It was a panel truck, light blue, with the sides lettered: _Chris's
Delicatessen. Free Deliveries._ The driver slowed up, looked them over
and stopped. He leaned toward the right-hand window.