So there was Mooney, driving a stolen panel truck, Mooney the bankrupt,
Mooney the ne'er-do-well, and now Mooney the accomplice murderer. Or so
he thought, though the pale-eyed man had laughed like a panther when
he'd asked.
He rehearsed little speeches all the day down U.S. One, Mooney did, and
they all began: "Your Honor, I didn't know--"
Well, he hadn't. How could a man like Mooney know that Harse was so
bereft of human compassion as to snuff out a life for the sake of
finishing his lunch in peace? And what could Mooney have done about it,
without drawing the diffident blue glow to himself? No, Your Honor,
really, Your Honor, he took me by surprise....
But by the time they ditched the stolen car, nearly dry of gas, at the
Hoboken ferry, Mooney had begun to get his nerve back. In fact, he was
beginning to perceive that in that glittering silvery dispatch case
that Harse hugged to him were treasures that might do wonders for a
smart man unjustly dogged by hard times. The wampum alone! But beyond
the wampum, the other good things that might in time be worth more than
any amount of mere money.
There was that weapon. Mooney cast a glance at Harse, blank-eyed and
relaxed, very much disinterested in the crowds of commuters on the
ferry.
Nobody in all that crowd would believe that Harse could pull out a
little jointed metal thing and push a button and make any one of them
cease to exist. Nobody would believe it--not even a jury. Corpus
delicti, body of evidence--why, there would _be_ no evidence! It was a
simple, workable, foolproof way of getting any desired number of people
out of the way without fuss, muss or bother--and couldn't a smart but
misfortunate man like Mooney do wonders by selectively removing those
persons who stood as obstacles in his path?
And there would be more, much, much more. The thing to do, Mooney
schemed, was to find out just what Harse had in that kit and how to
work it; and then--who could know, perhaps Harse would himself find the
diffident blue light reaching out for him before the intersection of
Brooklyn and December twenty-sixth?
Mooney probed.
"Ah," laughed Harse. "Ho! I perceive what you want. You think perhaps
there is something you can use in my survival kit."
"All right, Harse," Mooney said submissively, but he did have
reservations.
First, it was important to find out just what was in the kit. After
that--
Well, even a man from the future had to sleep.
* * * * *
Mooney was in a roaring rage. How dared the Government stick its
bureaucratic nose into a simple transaction of citizens! But it turned
out to be astonishingly hard to turn Harse's wampum into money. The
first jeweler asked crudely threatening questions about an emerald
the size of the ball of his thumb; the second quoted chapter and
verse on the laws governing possession of gold. Finally they found a
pawnbroker, who knowingly accepted a diamond that might have been worth
a fortune; and when they took his first offer of a thousand dollars,
the pawnbroker's suspicions were confirmed. Mooney dragged Harse away
from there fast.
But they did have a thousand dollars.
As the cab took them across town, Mooney simmered down; and by the
time they reached the other side, he was entirely content. What was a
fortune more or less to a man who very nearly owned some of the secrets
of the future?
He sat up, lit a cigarette, waved an arm and said expansively to Harse:
"Our new home."
The pale-eyed man took a glowing little affair with eyepieces away from
in front of his eyes.
"Ah," he said. "So."
It was quite an attractive hotel, Mooney thought judiciously. It did a
lot to take away the sting of those sordidly avaricious jewelers. The
lobby was an impressively close approximation of a cathedral and the
bellboys looked smart and able.
Harse made an asthmatic sound. "What is. That?" He was pointing at
a group of men standing in jovial amusement around the entrance to
the hotel's grand ballroom, just off the lobby. They wore purple
harem pants and floppy green hats, and every one of them carried a
silver-paper imitation of a scimitar.
Mooney chuckled in a superior way. "You aren't up on our local customs,
are you? That's a convention, Harse. They dress up that way because
they belong to a lodge. A lodge is a kind of fraternal organization. A
fraternal organization is--"