"Because it would upset everything, that's why! You want to get to
your rendezvous, don't you? Well, if you do anything like that, we'll
_never_ get there!"
"Why not?"
"Please," Mooney said, "please take my word for it. You hear me? I'll
explain later!"
Harse looked by no means convinced, but he stopped opening the silvery
metal case. Mooney kept an eye on him while registering. Harse
continued to watch the conventioneers, but he went no further. Mooney
began to breathe again.
"Thank _you_, sir," said the desk clerk--not every guest, even in this
hotel, went for a corner suite with two baths. "Front!"
* * * * *
A smart-looking bellboy stepped forward, briskly took the key from the
clerk, briskly nodded at Mooney and Harse. With the automatic reflex
of any hotel bellhop, he reached for Harse's silvery case. Baggage was
baggage, however funny it looked.
But Harse was not just any old guest. The bellboy got the bag away
from him, all right, but his victory was purely transitory. He yelled,
dropped the bag, grabbed his fist with the other hand.
"Hey! It shocked me! What kind of tricks are you trying to do with
electric suitcases?"
Mooney moaned softly. The whole lobby was looking at them--even the
conventioneers at the entrance to the ballroom; even the men in mufti
mingling with the conventioneers, carrying cameras and flash guns; even
the very doorman, the whole lobby away. That was bad. What was worse
was that Harse was obviously getting angry.
"Wait, wait!" Mooney stepped between them in a hurry. "I can explain
everything. My friend is, uh, an inventor. There's some very important
material in that briefcase, believe me!"
He winked, patted the bellhop on the shoulder, took his hand with
friendly concern and left in it a folded bill.
"Now," he said confidentially, "we don't want any disturbance. I'm
sure you understand how it is, son. Don't you? My friend can't take
any chances with his, uh, confidential material, you see? Right. Well,
let's say no more about it. Now if you'll show us to our room--"
The bellhop, still stiff-backed, glanced down at the bill and the
stiffness disappeared as fast as any truck-driver bathed in Harse's
pale blue haze. He looked up again and grinned.
"Sorry, sir--" he began.
But he didn't finish. Mooney had let Harse get out of his sight a
moment too long.
The first warning he had was when there was a sudden commotion among
the lodge brothers. Mooney turned, much too late. There was Harse; he
had wandered over there, curious and interested and--Harse. He had
stared them up and down, but he hadn't been content to stare. He had
opened the little silvery dispatch-case and taken out of it the thing
that looked like a film viewer; and maybe it was a camera, too, because
he was looking through it at the conventioneers. He was covering them
as Dixie is covered by the dew, up and down, back and forth, heels to
head.
And it was causing a certain amount of attention. Even one of
the photographers thought maybe this funny-looking guy with the
funny-looking opera glasses was curious enough to be worth a shot.
After all, that was what the photographer was there for. He aimed and
popped a flash gun.
There was an abrupt thin squeal from the box. Black fog sprayed out of
it in a greasy jet. It billowed toward Harse. It collected around him,
swirled high. Now all the flashguns were popping....
It was a clear waste of a twenty-dollar bill, Mooney told himself
aggrievedly out on the sidewalk. There had been no point in buttering
up the bellhop as long as Harse was going to get them thrown out anyway.
* * * * *
On the other side of the East River, in a hotel that fell considerably
below Mooney's recent, brief standards of excellence, Mooney cautiously
tipped a bellboy, ushered him out, locked the door behind him and,
utterly exhausted, flopped on one of the twin beds.
Harse glanced at him briefly, then wandered over to the window and
stared incuriously at the soiled snow outside.
"You were fine, Harse," said Mooney without spirit. "You didn't do
anything wrong at all."
"Ah," said Harse without turning. "So?"
Mooney sat up, reached for the phone, demanded setups and a bottle from
room service and hung up.
"Oh, well," he said, beginning to revive, "at least we're in Brooklyn
now. Maybe it's just as well."
"As well. What?"
"I mean this is where you wanted to be. Now we just have to wait four
days, until the twenty-sixth. We'll have to raise some more money, of
course," he added experimentally.
Harse turned and looked at him with the pale eyes. "One thousand
dollars you have. Is not enough?"
"Oh, no, Harse," Mooney assured him. "Why, that won't be nearly enough.
The room rent in this hotel alone is likely to use that up. Besides all
the extras, of course."
"Ah." Harse, looking bored, sat down in the chair near Mooney, opened
his kit, took out the thing that looked like a film viewer and put it
to his eyes.
"We'll have to sell some more of those things. After all--" Mooney
winked and dug at the pale-eyed man's ribs with his elbow--"we'll be
needing some, well, entertainment."
Harse took the viewer away from his eyes. He glanced thoughtfully at
the elbow and then at Mooney. "So," he said.
Mooney coughed and changed the subject. "One thing, though," he begged.
"Don't get me in any more trouble like you did in that hotel lobby--or
with that guy in the truck. Please? I mean, after all, you're making it
hard for me to carry out my job."
Harse was thoughtfully silent.
"Promise?" Mooney urged.
Harse said, after some more consideration: "It is not altogether
me. That is to say, it is a matter of defense. My picture should not
be. Photographed? So the survival kit insures that it is not. You
understand?"
Mooney leaned back. "You mean--" The bellboy with the drinks
interrupted him; he took the bottle, signed the chit, tipped the boy
and mixed himself a reasonably stiff but not quite stupefying highball,
thinking hard.
"Did you say 'survival kit'?" he asked at last.
Harse was deep in the viewer again, but he looked away from it
irritably. "Naturally, survival kit. So that I can. Survive?" He went
back to the viewer.
Mooney took a long, thoughtful slug of the drink.
* * * * *
Survival kit. Why, that made sense. When the Air Force boys went out
and raided the islands in the Pacific during the war, sometimes they
got shot down--and it was enemy territory, or what passed for it. Those
islands were mostly held by Japanese, though their populations hardly
knew it. All the aboriginals knew was that strange birds crossed the
sky and sometimes men came from them. The politics of the situation
didn't interest the headhunters. What really interested them was heads.
But for a palatable second choice, they would settle for trade
goods--cloth, mirrors, beads. And so the bomber pilots were equipped
with survival kits--maps, trade goods, rations, weapons, instructions
for proceeding to a point where, God willing, a friendly submarine
might put ashore a rubber dinghy to take them off.
Mooney said persuasively: "Harse. I'm sorry to bother you, but we have
to talk." The man with the pale eyes took them away from the viewer
again and stared at Mooney. "Harse, were you shot down like an airplane
pilot?"
* * * * *
Harse frowned--not in anger, or at least not at Mooney. It was the
effort to make himself understood. He said at last: "Yes. Call it that."
"And--and this place you want to go to--is that where you will be
rescued?"
"Yes."
Aha, thought Mooney, and the glimmerings of a new idea began to kick
and stretch its fetal limbs inside him. He put it aside, to bear and
coddle in private. He said: "Tell me more. Is there any particular part
of Brooklyn you have to go to?"
"Ah. The Nexus Point?" Harse put down the viewer and, snap-snap, opened
the gleaming kit. He took out the little round thing he had consulted
in the house by the cold Jersey sea. He tilted it this way and that,
frowned, consulted a small square sparkly thing that came from another
part of the case, tilted the round gadget again.
"Correcting for local time," he said, "the Nexus Point is one hour and
one minute after midnight at what is called. The Vale of Cashmere?"
Mooney scratched his ear. "The Vale of Cashmere? Where the devil is
that--somewhere in Pakistan?"
"Brooklyn," said Harse with an imp's grimace. "You are the guide and
you do not know where you are guiding me to?"
Mooney said hastily: "All right, Harse, all right. I'll find it. But
tell me one thing, will you? Just suppose--suppose, I said--that for
some reason or other, we don't make it to the what-you-call, Nexus
Point. Then what happens?"
Harse for once neither laughed nor scowled. The pale eyes opened wide
and glanced around the room, at the machine-made candlewick spreads on
the beds, at the dusty red curtains that made a "suite" out of a long
room, at the dog-eared Bible that lay on the night table.
"Suh," he stammered, "suh--suh--seventeen years until there is another
Nexus Point!"