A greased eel couldn't have squeezed in.
The thousands of pilgrims outside the walls now jostled one another piously for positions close to the loudspeakers mounted at the corners of the walls.
From the speakers would come Rumfoord's voice.
The crowd was the largest yet and the most excited yet, for the day was the long-promised Great Day of the Space Wanderer.
Handicaps of the most imaginative and effective sort were displayed everywhere. The crowd was wonderfully drab and hampered.
Bee, who had been Unk's mate on Mars, was in Newport, too. So was Bee's and Unk's son, Chrono.
"Hey! - getcher genuwine, authorized, official Malachis here," said Bee hoarsely. "Hey! - getcher Malachis here. Gotta have a Malachi to wave at the Space Wanderer," said Bee. "Get a Malachi, so the Space Wanderer can bless it when he comes by."
She was in a booth facing the little iron door in the wall of the Rumfoord estate in Newport. Bee's booth was the first in the line of twenty booths that faced the door. The twenty booths were under one continuous shed roof, and were separated from one another by waist-high partitions.
The Malachis she was hawking were plastic dolls with movable joints and rhinestone eyes. Bee bought them from a religious supply house for twenty-seven cents apiece and sold them for three dollars. She was an excellent businesswoman.
And while Bee showed the world an efficient and flashy exterior, it was the grandeur within her that sold more merchandise than anything. The carnival flash of Bee caught the pilgrims' eyes. But what brought the pilgrims to her booth and made them buy was her aura. The aura said unmistakably that Bee was meant for a far nobler station in life, that she was being an awfully good sport about being stuck where she was.
"Hey! - getcher Malachi while there's still time," said Bee. "Can't get a Malachi while a materialization's going on!"
That was true. The rule was that the concessionaires had to close their shutters five minutes before Winston Niles Rumfoord and his dog materialized. And they had to keep their shutters closed until ten minutes after the last trace of Rumfoord and Kazak had disappeared.
Bee turned to her son, Chrono, who was opening a fresh case of Malachis. "How long before the whistle?" she said. The whistle was a great steam whistle inside the estate. It was blown five minutes in advance of materializations.
Materializations themselves were announced by the firing of a three-inch cannon.
Dematerializations were announced by the release of a thousand toy balloons.
"Eight minutes," said Chrono, looking at his watch. He was eleven Earthling years old now. He was dark and smoldering. He was an expert short-changer, and was clever with cards. He was foul-mouthed, and carried a switch-knife with a six-inch blade. Chrono would not socialize well with other children, and his reputation for dealing with life courageously and directly was so bad that only a few very foolish and very pretty little girls were attracted to him.
Chrono was classified by the Newport Police Department and by the Rhode Island State Police as a juvenile delinquent. He knew at least fifty law-enforcement officers by their first names, and was a veteran of fourteen lie-detector tests.
All that prevented Chrono's being placed in an institution was the finest legal staff on Earth, the legal staff of the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. Under the direction of Rumfoord, the staff defended Chrono against all charges.
The commonest charges brought against Chrono were larceny by sleight of hand, carrying concealed weapons, possessing unregistered pistols, discharging firearms within the city limits, selling obscene prints and articles, and being a wayward child.
The authorities complained bitterly that the boy's big trouble was his mother. His mother loved him just the way he was.
"Only eight more minutes to get your Malachi, folks," said Bee. "Hurry, hurry, hurry."
Bee's upper front teeth were gold, and her skin, like the skin of her son, was the color of golden oak.
Bee had lost her upper front teeth when the space ship in which she and Chrono had ridden from Mars crash-landed in the Gumbo region of the Amazon Rain Forest. She and Chrono had been the only survivors of the crash, and had wandered through the jungles for a year.
The color of Bee's and Chrono's skins was permanent, since it stemmed from a modification of their livers, Their livers had been modified by a three-month diet consisting of water and the roots of the salpa-salpa or Amazonian blue poplar. The diet had been a part of Bee's and Chrono's initiation into the Gumbo tribe.
During the initiation, mother and son had been staked at the ends of tethers in the middle of the village, with Chrono representing the Sun and Bee representing the Moon, as the Sun and the Moon were understood by the Gumbo people.
As a result of their experiences, Bee and Chrono were closer than most mothers and sons.
They had been rescued at last by a helicopter. Winston Niles Rumfoord had sent the helicopter to just the right place at just the right time.
Winston Niles Rumfoord had given Bee and Chrono the lucrative Malachi concession outside the Alice-in-Wonderland door. He had also paid Bee's dental bill, and had suggested that her false front teeth be gold.
The man who had the booth next to Bee's was Harry Brackman. He had been Unk's platoon sergeant back on Mars. Brackman was portly and balding now. He had a cork leg and a stainless steel right hand. He had lost the leg and hand in the Battle of Boca Raton, He was the only survivor of the battle - and, if he hadn't been so horribly wounded, he would certainly have been lynched along with the other survivors of his platoon.
Brackman sold plastic models of the fountain inside the wall. The models were a foot high. The models had spring-driven pumps in their bases. The pumps pumped water from the big bowl at the bottom to the tiny bowls at the top. Then the tiny bowls spilled into the slightly larger bowls below and . . .
Brackman had three of them going at once on the counter before him. "Just like the one inside, folks," he said. "And you can take one of these home with you. Put it in the picture window, so all your neighbors'll know you've been to Newport. Put it in the middle of the kitchen table for the kids' parties, and fill it with pink lemonade."
"How much?" said a rube.
"Seventeen dollars," said Brackman.
"Wow!" said the rube.
"It's a sacred shrine, cousin," said Brackman, looking at the rube levelly. "Isn't a toy." He reached under the counter, brought out a model of a Martian space ship. "You want a toy? Here's a toy. Forty-nine cents. I only make two cents on it."
The rube made a show of being a judicious shopper. He compared the toy with the real article it was supposed to represent. The real article was a Martian space ship on top of a column ninety-eight feet tall, The column and space ship were inside the walls of the Rumfoord estate - in the corner of the estate where the tennis courts had once been.
Rumfoord bad yet to explain the purpose of the space ship, whose supporting column had been built with the pennies of school children from all over the world. The ship was kept in constant readiness. What was reputedly the longest free-standing ladder in history leaned against the column, led giddily to the door of the ship.
In the fuel cartridge of the space ship was the very last trace of the Martian war effort's supply of the Universal Will to Become.
"Uh huh," said the rube. He put the model back on the counter. "If you don't mind, I'll shop around a little more." So far, the only thing he had bought was a Robin Hood hat with a picture of Rumfoord on one side and a picture of a sailboat on the other, and with his own name stitched on the feather. His name, according to the feather, was Delbert. "Thanks just the same," said Delbert. "I'll probably be back."
"Sure you will, Delbert," said Brackman.
"How did you know my name was Delbert?" said Delbert, pleased and suspicious.
"You think Winston Niles Rumfoord is the only man around here with supernatural powers?" said Brackman.
A jet of steam went up inside the walls.
An instant later, the voice of the great steam whistle rolled over the booths - mighty, mournful, and triumphant. It was the signal that Rumfoord and his dog would materialize in five minutes.
It was the signal for the concessionaires to stop their irreverent bawling of brummagem wares, to close their shutters.
The shutters were banged shut at once.
The effect of the closing inside the booths was to turn the line of concessions into a twilit tunnel.
The isolation of the concessionaires in the tunnel bad an extra dimension of spookiness, since the tunnel contained only survivors from Mars. Rumfoord had insisted on that - that Martians were to have first choice of the concessions at Newport. It was his way of saying, "Thanks."
There weren't many survivors - only fifty-eight in the United States, only three hundred and sixteen in the entire World; of the fifty-eight in the United States, twenty-one were concessionaires in Newport.
"Here we go again, kiddies," somebody said, far, far, far down the line. It was the voice of the blind man who sold the Robin Hood hats with a picture of Rumfoord on one side and a picture of a sailboat on the other.
Sergeant Brackman laid his folded arms on the half-partition between his booth and Bee's. He winked at young Chrono, who was lying on an unopened case of Malachis.
"Go to hell, eh, kid?" said Brackman to Chrono.
"Go to hell," Chrono agreed. He was cleaning his nails with the strangely bent, drilled and nicked piece of metal that had been his good-luck piece on Mars. It was still his good-luck piece on Earth.
The good-luck piece had probably saved Chrono's and Bee's lives in the jungle. The Gumbo tribesmen had recognized the piece of metal as an object of tremendous power. Their respect for it had led them to initiate rather than eat its owners.
Brackman laughed affectionately. "Yessir - there's a Martian for you," he said. "Won't even get off his case of Malachis for a look at the Space Wanderer."
Chrono was not alone in his apathy about the Space Wanderer. It was the proud and impudent custom of all the concessionaires to stay away from ceremonies - to stay in the twilit tunnel of their booths until Rumfoord and his dog had come and gone.
It wasn't that the concessionaires had real contempt for Rumfoord's religion. Actually, most of them thought the new religion was probably a pretty good thing. What they were dramatizing when they stayed in their shuttered booths was that they, as Martian veterans, had already done more than enough to put the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent on its feet.
They were dramatizing the fact of their having been all used up.
Rumfoord encouraged them in this pose - spoke of them fondly as his ". . . soldier saints outside the little door. Their apathy," Rumfoord once said, "is a great wound they suffered that we might be more lively, more sensitive, and more free."
The temptation of the Martian concessionaires to take a peek at the Space Wanderer was great. There were loudspeakers on the walls of the Rumfoord estate, and every word spoken by Rumfoord inside blatted in the ears of anyone within a quarter of a mile. The words had spoken again and again of the glorious moment of truth that would come when the Space Wanderer came.
It was a big moment true believers titillated themselves about - the big moment wherein true believers were going to find their beliefs amplified, clarified, and vivified by a factor of ten.
Now the moment had arrived.
The fire engine that had carried the Space Wanderer down from the Church of the Space Wanderer on Cape Cod was clanging and shrieking outside the booths.
The trolls in the twilight of the booths refused to peek.
The cannon roared within the walls.
Rumfoord and his dog, then, had materialized - and the Space Wanderer was passing in through the Alice-in-Wonderland door.
"Probably some broken-down actor he hired from New York," said Brackman.
This got no response from anyone, not even from Chrono, who fancied himself the chief cynic of the booths. Brackman didn't take his own suggestion seriously - that the Space Wanderer was a fraud. The concessionaires knew all too well about Rumfoord's penchant for realism. When Rumfoord staged a passion play, he used nothing but real people in real hells.
Let it be emphasized here that, passionately fond as Rumfoord was of great spectacles, he never gave in to the temptation to declare himself God or something a whole lot like God.
His worst enemies admit that. Dr. Maurice Rosenau, in his Pan-Galactic Humbug or Three Billion Dupes says:
Winston Niles Rumfoord, the interstellar Pharisee, Tartufe, and Cagliostro, has taken pains to declare that he is not God Almighty, that he is not a close relative of God Almighty, and that he has received no plain instructions from God Almighty. To these words of the Master of Newport we can say Amen! And may we add that Rumfoord is so far from being a relative or agent of God Almighty as to make all communication with God Almighty Himself impossible so long as Rumfoord is around!
Ordinarily, talk by the Martian veterans in the shuttered booths was sprightly - bristling with entertaining irreverence and tips on selling trashy religious artides to boobs.
Now, with Rumfoord and the Space Wanderer about to meet, the concessionaires found it very hard not to be interested.
Sergeant Brackman's good hand went up to the crown of his head. It was the characteristic gesture of a Martian veteran. He was touching the area over his antenna, over the antenna that had once done all his important thinking for him. He missed the signals.
"Bring the Space Wanderer here!" blatted Rumfoord's voice from the Gabriel horns on the walls.
"Maybe - maybe we should go," said Brackman to Bee.
"What?" murmured Bee. She was standing with her back to the closed shutters. Her eyes were shut. Her head was down. She looked cold.
She always shivered when a materialization was taking place.
Chrono was rubbing his good-luck piece slowly with the ball of his thumb, watching a halo of mist on the cold metal, a halo around the thumb.
"The hell with 'em - eh, Chrono?" said Brackman.
The man who sold twittering mechanical birds swung his wares overhead listlessly. A farm wife had stabbed him with a pitchfork in the Battle of Toddington, England, had left him for dead.
The International Committee for the Identification and Rehabilitation of Martians had, with the help of fingerprints, identified the bird man as Bernard K. Winslow, an itinerant chicken sexer, who had disappeared from the alcoholic ward of a London hospital.
"Thanks very much for the information," Winslow had told the committee. "Now I don't have that lost feeling any more."
Sergeant Brackman had been identified by the Committee as Private Francis J. Thompson, who had disappeared in the dead of night while walking a lonely guard post around a motor pooi in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, U.S.A.
The committee had been baffled by Bee. She had no fingerprints on record. The Committee believed her to be either Florence White, a plain and friendless girl who had disappeared from a steam laundry in Cohoes, New York, or Darlene Simpkins, a plain and friendless girl who had last been seen accepting a ride with a swarthy stranger in Brownsville, Texas.
And down the line of booths from Brackman and Chrono and Bee were Martian husks who had been identified as Myron S. Watson, an alcoholic, who had disappeared from his post as a wash room attendant at Newark Airport . . . as Charlene Heller, assistant dietitian of the cafeteria of Stivers High School in Dayton, Ohio . . . as Krishna Garu, a typesetter still wanted, technically, on charges of bigamy, pandering, and nonsupport in Calcutta, India . . . as Kurt Schneider, also an alcoholic, manager of a failing travel agency in Bremen, Germany.
"The mighty Rumfoord - " said Bee.
"Pardon me?" said Brackman.
"He snatched us out of our lives," said Bee. "He put us to sleep. He cleaned out our minds the way you dean the seeds out of a jack-o'-lantern. He wired us like robots, trained us, aimed us - burned us out in a good cause." She shrugged.
"Cou
ld we have done any better if he'd left us in charge of our own lives?" said Bee. "Would we have become any more - or any less? I guess I'm glad he used me. I guess he had a lot better ideas about what to do with me than Florence White or Darlene Simpkins or whoever I was.
"But I hate him all the same," said Bee.
"That's your privilege," said Brackman. "He said that was the privilege of every Martian."
"There's one consolation," said Bee. "We're all used up. We'll never be of any use to him again."
"Welcome, Space Wanderer," blatted Rumfoord's oleomargarine tenor from the Gabriel horns on the wall. "How meet it is that you should come to us on the bright red pumper of a volunteer fire department. I can think of no more stirring symbol of man's humanity to man than a fire engine. Tell me, Space Wanderer, do you see anything here - anything that makes you think you may have been here before?"
The Space Wanderer murmured something unintelligible.
"Louder, please," said Rumfoord.
"The fountain - I remember that fountain," said the Space Wanderer gropingly. "Only - only - "
"Only?" said Rumfoord.
"It was dry then - whenever that was. It's so wet now," said the Space Wanderer.
A microphone near the fountain was now tuned into the public address system, so that the actual babble, spatter and potch of the fountain could underline the Space Wanderer's words.
"Anything else familiar, oh, Space Wanderer?" said Rumfoord.
"Yes," said the Space Wanderer shyly. "You."
"I am familiar?" said Rumfoord archly. "You mean there's a possibility that I played some small part in your life before?"
"I remember you on Mars," said the Space Wanderer. "You were the man with the dog - just before we took off."
"What happened after you took off?" said Rumfoord.
"Something went wrong," said the Space Wanderer. He sounded apologetic, as though the series of misfortunes were somehow his own fault. "A lot of things went wrong."
The Sirens of Titan Page 18