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 jeweller 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 eye-pieces 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 jewellers. 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--'
Harse said abruptly: 'I want'
Mooney began to feel alarm. 'What?'
'I want one for a. Specimen? Wait, I think I take the big one there.'
'Harse! Wait a minute!' Mooney clutched at him. 'Hold everything, man! You can't do that.'
Harse stared at him. 'Why?'
'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 truckdriver 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 towards 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 defence. 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--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!'
• • • •
Mooney dreamed miraculous dreams and not entirely because of the empty bottle that had been full that afternoon. There never was a time, never will be a time, like the future Mooney dreamed of--Mooney-owned, houri-inhabited, a fair domain for a live-wire Emperor of the Eons...
He woke up with a splitting head.
Even a man from the future had to sleep, so Mooney had thought, and it had been in his mind that, even this first night, it might pay to stay awake a little longer than Harse, just in case it might then seem like a good idea to--
well, to bash him over the head and grab the bag. But the whisky had played him dirty and he had passed out--drunk, blind drunk, or at least he hoped so. He hoped that he hadn't seen what he thought he had seen sober.
He woke up and wondered what was wrong. Little tinkling ice spiders were moving around him. He could hear their tiny crystal sounds and feel their chill legs, so lightly, on him. It was still a dream--wasn't it?
Or was he awake? The thing was, he couldn't tell. If he was awake, it was the middle of the night, because there was no light whatever; and besides, he didn't seem to be able to move.
Thought Mooney with anger and desperation: I'm dead. And: What a time to die!
But second thoughts changed his mind; there was no heaven and no hell, in all the theologies he had investigated, that included being walked over by tiny spiders of ice. He felt them. There was no doubt about it.
It was Harse, of course--had to be. Whatever he was up to, Mooney couldn't say, but as he lay there sweating cold sweat and feeling the crawling little feet, he knew that it was something Harse had made happen.
Little by little, he began to be able to see--not much, but enough to see that there really was something crawling. Whatever the things were, they had a faint, tenuous glow, like the face of a watch just before dawn. He couldn't make out shapes, but he could tell the size--not much bigger than a man's hand--and he could tell the number, and there were dozens of them.
He couldn't turn his head, but on the walls, on his chest, on his face, even on the ceiling, he could see faint moving patches of fox-firelight
• • • •
He took a deep breath. 'Harse!' he started to call; wake him up, make him stop this! But he couldn't. He got no further than the first huff of the aspirate when the scurrying cold feet were on his lips. Something cold and damp lay across them and it stuck. Like spider silk, but stronger--he couldn't speak, couldn't move his lips, though he almost tore the flesh.
Oh, he could make a noise, all right. He started to do so, to snort and hum through his nose. But Mooney was not slow of thought and he had a sudden clear picture of that same cold ribbon crossing his nostrils, and what would be the use of all of time's treasures then, when it was no longer possible to breathe at all?
It was quite apparent that he was not to make a noise.
He had patience--the kind of patience that grows with a diet of thrice-used tea bags and soggy crackers. He waited.
It wasn't the middle of the night after all, he perceived, though it was still utterly dark except for the moving blobs. He could hear sounds in the hotel corridor outside--faintly, though: the sound of a vacuum cleaner, and it might have been a city block away; the tiniest whisper of someone laughing.
He remembered one of his drunken fantasies of the night before--
little robot mice, or so they seemed, spinning a curtain across the window; and he shuddered, because that had been no fantasy. The window was curtained. And it was mid-morning, at the earliest, because the chambermaids were cleaning the halls.
Why couldn't he move? He flexed the muscles of his arms and legs, but nothing happened. He could feel the muscles straining, he could feel his toes and fingers twitch, but he was restrained by what seemed a web of Gulliver's cords ...
There was a tap at the door. A pause, the scratching of a key, and the room was flooded with light from the hall.
Out of the straining corner of his eye, Mooney saw a woman in a grey cotton uniform, carrying fresh sheets, standing in the doorway, and her mouth was hanging slack. No wonder, for in th
e light from the hall, Mooney could see the room festooned with silver, with darting silvery shapes moving about Mooney himself wore a cocoon of silver, and on the bed next to him, where Harse slept, there was a fantastic silver hood, like the basketwork of a baby's bassinet, surrounding his head.
It was a fairyland scene and it lasted only a second. For Harse cried out and leaped to his feet. Quick as an adder, he scooped up something from the table beside his bed and gestured with it at the door. It was, Mooney half perceived, the silvery, jointed thing he had used in the truck; and he used it again.
Pale blue light screamed out.
It faded and the chambermaid, popping eyes and all, was gone.
It didn't hurt as much the second time.
Mooney finally attracted Harse's attention, and Harse, with a Masonic pass over one of the little silvery things, set it to loosening and removing the silver bonds. The things were like toy tanks with jointed legs; as they spun the silver webs, they could also suck them in. In moments, the webs that held Mooney down were gone.
He got up, aching in his tired muscles and his head, but this time the panic that had filled him in the truck was gone. Well, one victim more or less
- what did it matter? And besides, he clung to the fact that Harse had not exactly said the victims were dead.
So it didn't hurt as much the second time.
Mooney planned. He shut the door and sat on the edge of the bed.
'Shut up--you put us in a lousy fix and I have to think a way out of it,' he rasped at Harse when Harse started to speak; and the man from the future looked at him with opaque pale eyes, and silently opened one of the flat canisters and began to eat.
'All right,' said Mooney at last, 'Harse, get rid of all this stuff.'
'This. Stuff?'
'The stuff on the walls. What your little spiders have been spinning, understand? Can't you get it off the walls?'
Harse leaned forward and touched the kit. The little spider-things that had been aimlessly roving now began to digest what they had created, as the ones that had held Mooney had already done. It was quick--Mooney hoped it would be quick enough. There were over a dozen of the things, more than Mooney would have believed the little kit could hold; and he had seen no sign of them before.
The Frederick Pohl Omnibus (1966) SSC Page 35