A movement made him look over his shoulder.
Somebody was standing at the top of the steps. "Hell's fire," whispered
Mooney. He'd forgotten all about that aboriginal law; and here above
him stood a man in a policeman's uniform, staring down with pale eyes.
No, not a policeman. The face was--Harse's.
Mooney swallowed and stood rooted.
"You!" Harse's savage voice came growling. "You are to stand. Still?"
Mooney didn't need the order; he couldn't move. No twentieth-century
cop was a match for Harse, that was clear; Harse had bested him, taken
his uniform away from him for camouflage--and here he was.
Unfortunately, so was Howard Mooney.
The figures below were looking up, pointing and talking; Harse from
above was coming down. Mooney could only stand, and wish--wish that he
were back in Sea Bright, living on cookies and stale tea, wish he had
planned things with more intelligence, more skill--perhaps even with
more honesty. But it was too late for wishing.
Harse came down the steps, paused a yard from Mooney, scowled a
withering scowl--and passed on.
He reached the bottom of the steps and joined the others waiting about
the egg. They all went inside.
The glowing silvery colors winked and went out. The egg flamed purple,
faded, turned transparent and disappeared.
Mooney stared and, yelling a demand for payment, ran stumbling down the
steps to where it had been. There was a round thawed spot, a trampled
patch--nothing else.
They were gone....
Almost gone. Because there was a sudden bright wash of flame from
overhead--cold silvery flame. He looked up, dazzled. Over him, the egg
was visible as thin smoke, hovering. A smoky, half-transparent hand
reached out of a port. A thin, reedy voice cried: "I promised you. Pay?"
And the silvery dispatch-case sort of thing, the survival kit, dropped
soundlessly to the snow beside Mooney.
When he looked up again, the egg was gone for good.
* * * * *
He was clear back to the hotel before he got a grip on himself--and
then he was drunk with delight. Honest Harse! Splendidly trustable
Harse! Why, all this time, Mooney had been so worried, had worked so
hard--and the whole survival kit was his, after all!
He had touched it gingerly before picking it up but it didn't shock
him; clearly the protective devices, whatever they were, were off.
He sweated over it for an hour and a half, looking for levers, buttons,
a slit that he might pry wider with the blade of a knife. At last he
kicked it and yelled, past endurance: "Open up, damn you!"
It opened wide on the floor before him.
"Oh, bless your heart!" cried Mooney, falling to his knees to drag out
the string of wampum, the little mechanical mice, the viewing-machine
sort of thing. Treasures like those were beyond price; each one might
fetch a fortune, if only in the wondrous new inventions he could patent
if he could discover just how they worked.
But where were they?
Gone! The wampum was gone. The goggles were gone. Everything was
gone--the little flat canisters, the map instruments, everything but
one thing.
There was, in a corner of the case, a squarish, sharp-edged thing that
Mooney stared at blindly for a long moment before he recognized it. It
was a part--only a part--of the jointed construction that Harse had
used to rid himself of undesirables by bathing them in blue light.
What a filthy trick! Mooney all but sobbed to himself.
He picked up the squarish thing bitterly. Probably it wouldn't even
work, he thought, the world a ruin around him. It wasn't even the whole
complete weapon.