“It’s noon now,” Bill reflected. “Sure, I guess tomorrow morning’s paper’ll do.”
“OK. What’s the date today?”
“August 21.”
“Fine. I’ll bring you a paper for August 22. Only I’m warning you: It won’t do any good. But here goes nothing. Goodbye now. Hello again. Here you are.” There was a string in Snulbug’s horny hand, and on the end of the string was a newspaper.
“But hey!” Bill protested. “You haven’t been gone.”
“People,” said Snulbug feelingly, “are dopes. Why should it take any time out of the present to go into the future? I leave this point, I come back to this point. I spent two hours hunting for this damned paper, but that doesn’t mean two hours of your time here. People—” he snorted.
Bill scratched his head. “I guess it’s all right. Let’s see the paper. And I know: You’re warning me.” He turned quickly to the obituaries to check. No Hitchens. “And I wasn’t dead in the time you were in?”
“No,” Snulbug admitted. “Not dead,” he added, with the most pessimistic implications possible.
“What was I, then? Was I—”
“I had salamander blood,” Snulbug complained. “They thought I was an undine like my mother and they put me in the cold-water incubator when any dope knows salamandry is a dominant. So I’m a runt and good for nothing but to run errands, and now I should make prophecies! You read your paper and see how much good it does you.”
Bill laid down his pipe and folded the paper back from the obituaries to the front page. He had not expected to find anything useful there—what advantage could he gain from knowing who won the next naval engagement or which cities were bombed?—but he was scientifically methodical. And this time method was rewarded. There it was, streaming across the front page in vast black blocks:
MAYOR ASSASSINATED
FIFTH COLUMN KILLS CRUSADER
Bill snapped his fingers. This was it. This was his chance. He jammed his pipe in his mouth, hastily pulled a coat on his shoulders, crammed the priceless paper into a pocket, and started out of the attic. Then he paused and looked around. He’d forgotten Snulbug. Shouldn’t there be some sort of formal discharge?
The dismal demon was nowhere in sight. Not in the pentacle or out of it. Not a sign or a trace of him. Bill frowned. This was definitely not methodical. He struck a match and held it over the bowl of his pipe.
A warm sigh of pleasure came from inside the corncob.
Bill took the pipe from his mouth and stared at it. “So that’s where you are!” he said musingly.
“I told you salamandry was a dominant,” said Snulbug, peering out of the bowl. “I want to go along. I want to see just what kind of a fool you make of yourself.” He withdrew his head into the glowing tobacco, muttering about newspapers, spells, and, with a wealth of unhappy scorn, people.
The crusading mayor of Granton was a national figure of splendid proportions. Without hysteria, red baiting, or strike-breaking, he had launched a quietly purposeful and well-directed program against subversive elements which had rapidly converted Granton into the safest and most American city in the country. He was also a persistent advocate of national, state, and municipal subsidy of the arts and sciences—the ideal man to wangle an endowment for the Hitchens Laboratory, if he were not so surrounded by overly skeptical assistants that Bill had never been able to lay the program before him.
This would do it. Rescue him from assassination in the very nick of time—in itself an act worth calling up demons to perform—and then when he asks, “And how, Mr. Hitchens, can I possibly repay you?” come forth with the whole great plan of research. It couldn’t miss.
No sound came from the pipe bowl, but Bill clearly heard the words, “Couldn’t it just?” ringing in his mind.
He braked his car to a fast stop in the red zone before the city hall, jumped out without even slamming the door, and dashed up the marble steps so rapidly, so purposefully, that pure momentum carried him up three flights and through four suites of offices before anybody had the courage to stop him and say, “What goes?”
The man with the courage was a huge bull-necked plain-clothes man, whose bulk made Bill feel relatively about the size of Snulbug. “All right, there,” this hulk rumbled. “All right. Where’s the fire?”
“In an assassin’s gun,” said Bill. “And it had better stay there.”
Bullneck had not expected a literal answer. He hesitated long enough for Bill to push him to the door marked MAYOR—PRIVATE. But though the husky’s brain might move slowly, his muscles made up for the lag. Just as Bill started to shove the door open, a five-pronged mound of flesh lit on his neck and jerked.
Bill crawled from under a desk, ducked Bullneck’s left, reached the door, executed a second backward flip, climbed down from the table, ducked a right, reached the door, sailed back in reverse and lowered himself nimbly from the chandelier.
Bullneck took up a stand in front of the door, spread his legs in ready balance, and drew a service automatic from its holster. “You ain’t going in there,” he said, to make the situation perfectly clear.
Bill spat out a tooth, wiped the blood from his eyes, picked up the shattered remains of his pipe, and said, “Look. It’s now 12:30. At 12:32 a redheaded hunchback is going to come out on that balcony across the street and aim through the open window into the mayor’s office. At 12:33 His Honor is going to be slumped over his desk, dead. Unless you help me get him out of range.”
“Yeah?” said Bullneck. “And who says so?”
“It says so here. Look. In the paper.”
Bullneck guffawed. “How can a paper say what ain’t even happened yet? You’re nuts, brother, if you ain’t something worse. Now go on. Scram. Go peddle your paper.” Bill’s glance darted out the window. There
