“Yeah, maybe.”
“You got a better gig than the guys in the wax museum. You want to switch with one of them?”
“Okay, I’m happy here.”
“Good boy. See you later.”
Footsteps went off the bridge. A receding voice said, “Remember. You see him, you fire once.”
A voice right overhead said, “Right.”
Parker listened. The guy was standing up there. He was moving back and forth a little, Parker could see him vaguely through the cracks between the boards. He heard him light a cigarette, using a lighter, heard the snap of the lighter shutting again.
He couldn’t move. If he let the boat drift out from under the bridge, toward the Hawaiian submarine ride, the guy on the bridge would have to see him. If he killed the guy on the bridge, other people would see that. There was nothing to do but wait.
It was about ten minutes. From time to time he heard orders shouted back and forth, far away, but nobody came close to the bridge. The guy up there, restless, kept walking back and forth and chain-smoking. He’d work on a cigarette for only a minute or two, then flip it into the water. Then right away Parker would hear the lighter grind again, and snap shut, and then more pacing, and then another long butt snapped into the water. All on the same side, the Alcatraz side, which was good. It wouldn’t be good to have him comparing the look of the stream on both sides of the bridge, because on the Alcatraz side most of the skim ice on the surface had been broken up by the passage of the boat, while on the Hawaii side the ice was still intact. A thoughtful man, looking at the stream on both sides, might figure it out that there had to be a boat underneath the bridge. But the guy up there” stayed mostly on the Alcatraz side. Besides, he acted more bored and sullen than thoughtful.
Parker was just beginning to wonder if maybe he shouldn’t take some action after all — it might be possible to float out on the Hawaii side and shoot the lookout down, with no one else knowing exactly where the shot came from — when he heard the grinding of a small gasoline engine. It was the cart Lozini was riding around in, and it came roaring up and clattered onto the bridge and stopped. Parker heard Lozini shout over the engine sound, “What the hell are you doing over here?”
“March told me to stay here on account of — “
“March told you! What the hell does March know? I don’t want that son of a bitch goin through behind you when you’re lookin the other way. Get back down by the fountain and keep your eyes open.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Lozini.”
“How do we know he didn’t get through down this side already?”
“I been watching both ways, Mr. Lozini. I swear he didn’t get through.”
Lozini’s answer was softer, and Parker couldn’t make out the words, but he was apparently mollified. Then the cart roared away again, headed toward the wax museum, and Parker heard footsteps go off the bridge toward the fountain.
He waited another couple of minutes, to be sure everybody was far enough away, and then pushed off again. The boat drifted out into the Hawaii section, and now the stream ran straight at first and then curved to the left, and came to the submarine ride.
This one was easier to get through, the boat gliding past the submarines to another of those picket fences. But this time the fence wasn’t locked, and when Parker pulled on the rope hanging beside it, the fence lifted out of the way and he floated on through and lowered the fence again behind him.
Now the stream was barely wider than the boat, but it was a short distance to the moat running along just inside the fence. Parker turned the boat to the right when he reached the moat, but there was no movement to the water here and he had to pull the boat along, crouching on the bottom and reaching out to the right-hand bank and hauling it through the water.
He moved slowly, but finally he got to the other stream, the one crossing the front half of the park, and turned into it. The movement of the water was against him now, so he had to pull harder, dragging the boat along, its momentum ending quickly after each heave.
He was now in Pleasure island, and the stream opened into a large concrete-sided pool. Heavy mesh screens guarded both ends of the pool, but they were raised now. In the summer the pool was full of porpoises, but now it was empty.
It was easier going through the pool, the current against him was less strong there, but on the other side it got tough again. He pulled, and the stream angled to the left, and up ahead was another footbridge, this one showing the line between Pleasure Island and Island Earth.
Parker got past this bridge without any trouble, went on a few yards farther, and then in the shadow of the Voyage Through the Galaxy black-light-ride building he got out of the boat and pulled it up out of the water after him. He turned it over and left if facedown by the rear wall of the building, where it might not cause anybody to wonder how come it was there. If he’d just let it float away again it might have tipped Lozini and his people to what had happened.
There was a smaller footbridge here, not on a line of sight from the fountain. Parker took it, going over to the other main building in the Island Earth section, a round concrete structure with a huge dome. This was the Trip to the Moon, and when Parker went inside now he found it all lit up. He walked up the ramp that circled inside the building and went through one of the double doors into the theater.
He was now in a round room almost the same circumference as the building, with the inside of the domed roof for its ceiling. Theater seats ran all the way around, facing complicated projection machinery in the middle. The seats had half-reclining backs, because in the summer movies were shown on the domed ceiling, a trip to the moon, with the idea being that the people in the theater were all in a spaceship of the future heading up from earth to the moon.
Parker went across the theater to a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. He went through there and into a small office with two curving walls, one the theater wall and the other the outer wall of the building. There was a long window in the outer wall. Parker went over to it, and down to his right were the gates. There was no one in sight, but he knew they were well guarded. But maybe that didn’t matter.
