Before leaving the office Parker gave the desk a quick shakedown, looking for anything that might prove useful, and came up first with a flashlight from the middle drawer. He didn’t know if the electricity would have been left on in the rest of the park or not, so he stuffed the flashlight into his other jacket pocket, opposite his gun.
In the bottom desk drawer he found a stack of colorful maps of the park. He opened one out on the desk and took a look at it. This was his battleground, it would be good to know what the terrain was like.
Fun Island was a large square, divided into eight approximately similar pie-slices, each of the eight representing another kind of island. To the left of the entrance gates, in the area containing this little office building and a couple of other small unidentified administrative buildings, the emphasis was on Desert Island. There was a Desert Island black-light ride — “on rubber life rafts!” — a Desert Island snack bar and a Desert Island fun house.
The next section was Voodoo Island, with another black-light ride, plus an outdoor jungle ride on wooden rafts, a snake house, a band shell — “name performers every weekend all summer long!” — and something called Theater of Jungle Dances.
Beyond that was New York Island, a miniature town full of Kill and camera shops, a steakhouse restaurant, a nickelodeon and so on, plus a Coney Island amusement area and a kiddie unto ride.
Treasure Island was next, with another black-light ride, a Ferris wheel and an outdoor pirate ship ride.
Fifth was Alcatraz Island, which contained a roller coaster, shooting galleries, wax museum, mess-hall restaurant and an outdoor gunboat ride.
After Alcatraz came the Island of Hawaii, with a volcano bobsled ride, an underwater submarine ride and a Polynesian restaurant. Connecting the Hawaii section with the Voodoo Island section directly opposite was the Island in the Sky ride.
Seventh was Pleasure Island, as in Pinocchio. There was a pony ride, plus a carousel and a porpoise display in an outdoor pool and a snack bar.
Last, all the way around to the gates again, between Pleasure Island and Desert Island, was a section called Island Earth, which was mostly science-fiction, with an interstellar space black-light ride, a Trip to the Moon and some ordinary amusement-area rides.
So it was an amusement park, like any other, with all the standard attractions. Parks of this kind built since the Second World War have all been thematic, whether islands or something else, but whatever the theme, they’ve always managed to get the ordinary mixture in. The Ferris wheel, the carousel, the roller coaster, the rides, the black-light rides, the snack bars and gift shops and wax museum and shooting galleries, all the same ingredients, but in each park under a slightly different name and with a slightly different paint job.
The two structures nearest to where Parker was sitting right now were the Desert Island snack bar and the Desert Island black-light ride, called Marooned! With any luck, there might be someplace to stash the money in the Marooned! building until he could get out of the park.
He folded up the map and tucked it into his hip pocket, pulling the elastic bottom of his jacket down over the protruding top of it, then picked up the satchel and carefully let himself back out into the cold air.
There was still no activity down by the gate. He turned the other way, and ahead of him saw a long oval building, windowless and doorless and painted gray. He walked over that way and around to the front of the building, where shivery letters screamed MAROONED! over the entrance.
The worst thing was the tracks he was leaving, but there just wasn’t anything to be done about that. There was about an inch of loose snow on the ground, and no way on earth to keep from leaving tracks when you walked through it. All he could hope to do was leave so many tracks that by the time the hoods came in they wouldn’t be able to tell for sure where he’d been or where he was or what he was up to.
Marooned! was closed up solid, but a secondary entrance behind the ticket booth looked flimsy, and when Parker kicked the door twice with his heel next to the knob it popped open and hung there ajar, revealing black darkness within.
Parker stepped inside, flicked on his flashlight, and pushed the door shut again. It closed, but not all the way.
He was in a small black-painted room with an electric control panel mounted on one wall. He went over and studied it and saw that a master switch was standing open, so he shut it, and at once the lights came on.
Lights and music, and voices. Laughing, talking, chortling, all of it full of echoes and seeming somehow to be both very close and far away at the same time.
There was a door in the opposite wall. Parker opened it, and found himself at the edge of a narrow black stream that ran through the building, probably an offshoot of the stream bordering the park. To his right a bunch of rubber life rafts were tied up and bobbing. He went over and untied the nearest one, and it wasn’t rubber at all but some kind of plastic, hard to the touch. He got into the raft with the satchel, and it began to float along the stream. That is, it was pulled along an underwater track by hooks built into the bottom of the raft.
Black-light rides are all similar in style. The customer is transported along a determined route in darkness, while various paintings or tableaux light up on either side of him and various fluorescent objects flutter around him. At the same time, recordings play music or screeches or laughter or explanations or whatever is desired.
This ride was an endless series of desert-island gags. On both sides the little boxes would light up, their mechanism triggered by something in the bottom of the raft as it went by, and in the boxes were representations of desert islands. Some of them contained one male doll alone, some contained two males, but most had one male and one female. Recorded voices gave out the tired old gag-lines, and the lit-up mannequins would make small mechanical movements, lifting their arms or slapping one another’s face. In the meantime, fluorescent mock-ups of various kinds of ships swooped down from the ceiling one after the other, as though to collide with the raft, but always swung hack up out of sight at the last moment.
Parker watched, but for a long time there didn’t seem to be any place in here to stash the money. Then, just before the end of the ride, there was a bigger tableau than any that had come before it. This one, almost life-size, showed a large desert island with a hill in the middle. What one first saw on coming around I lie corner was a mannequin in tattered rags bobbing his head in delight over a chest of gold he’d just accidentally dug up. After l lie raft went by him, though, one could see that on the other side of the island, hidden from the castaway by the hill, was a longboat full of pirates that had just landed.
Parker studied that last island, and then directly ahead was a pair of low wide doors closed above the water, with a huge mi cams hip painted on them in fluorescent colors as though a collision were imminent.
