“I suppose so. What do—” But the stranger was already walking into the kitchen. Mooney scowled and started to follow, and stopped, and scowled even more. The stranger was leaving footprints behind him, or anyway some kind of marks that showed black on the faded summer rug. True, he was speckled with snow, but—that much snow? The man was drenched. It looked as though he had just come out of the ocean.
The stranger stood by the stove and glanced at Mooney warily. Mooney stood six feet, but this man was bigger. The silvery sort of thing he had on covered his legs as far as the feet, and he wore no shoes. It covered his body and his arms, and he had silvery gloves on his hands. It stopped at the neck, in a collar of what looked like pure silver, but could not have been because it gave with every breath the man took and every tensed muscle or tendon in his neck. His head was bare and his hair was black, cut very short.
He was carrying something flat and shiny by a molded handle. If it had been made of pigskin, it would have resembled a junior executive’s briefcase.
The man said explosively: “You will help me.”
Mooney cleared his throat. “Listen, I don’t know what you want, but this is my house and—”
“You will help me,” the man said positively. “I will pay you. Very well?”
He had a peculiar way of parting his sentences in the middle, but Mooney didn’t care about that. He suddenly cared about one thing and that was the word “pay.”
“What do you want me to do?”
The angry-eyed man ran his gloved hands across his head and sluiced drops of water onto the scuffed linoleum and the bedding of the cot Mooney had dragged into the kitchen. He said irritably: “I am a wayfarer who needs a. Guide? I will pay you for your assistance.”
The question that rose to Mooney’s lips was “How much?” but he fought it back. Instead, he asked, “Where do you want to go?”
“One moment.” The stranger sat damply on the edge of Mooney’s cot and, click-snap, the shiny sort of briefcase opened itself in his hands. He took out a flat round thing like a mirror and looked into it, squeezing it by the edges, and holding it this way and that.
Finally he said: “I must go to Wednesday, the twenty-sixth of December, at—” He tilted the little round thing again. “Brooklyn?” he finished triumphantly.
Mooney said, after a second: “That’s a funny way to put it.”
“Question?”
“I mean,” said Mooney, “I know where Brooklyn is and I know when the twenty-sixth of December is—it’s next week—but you have to admit that that’s an odd way of putting it. I mean you don’t go anywhere in time.”
The wet man turned his pale eyes on Mooney. “Perhaps you are. Wrong?”
II
Mooney stared at his napping guest in a mood of wonder and fear and delight.
Time traveler! But it was hard to doubt the pale-eyed man. He had said he was from the future and he mentioned a date that made Mooney gasp. He had said: “When you speak to me, you must know that my. Name? Is Harse.” And then he had curled up on the floor, surrounding his shiny briefcase like a mother cat around a kitten, and begun dozing alertly.
But not before he showed Mooney just what it was he proposed to pay him with.
Mooney sipped his cooling tea and forgot to shiver, though the drafts were fiercer and more biting than ever, now just before dawn. He was playing with what had looked at first like a string of steel ball-bearings, a child’s necklace, half-inch spheres linked together in a strand a yard long.
Wampum! That was what Harse had called the spheres when he picked the string out of his little kit, and that was what they were.
Each ball-bearing was hollow. Open them up and out come the treasures of the crown. Pop, and one of the spheres splits neatly in half, and out spills a star sapphire, as big as the ball of your finger, glittering like the muted lights of hell. Pop, and another sphere drops a ball of yellow gold into your palm. Pop for a narwhal’s tooth, pop for a cube of sugar; pop, pop, and there on the table before Harse sparkled diamonds and lumps of coal, a packet of heroin, a sphere of silver, pearls, beads of glass, machined pellets of tungsten, lumps of saffron and lumps of salt.
“It is,” said Harse, “for your. Pay? No, no!” And he headed off Mooney’s greedy fingers.
Click, click, click, and the little pellets of treasure and trash were back in the steel balls.
“No, no!” said Harse again, grinning, snapping the balls together like poppets in a string. “After you have guided me to Brooklyn and the December twenty-sixth. But I must say to you. This? That some of the balls contain plutonium and some radium. And I do not think that you can get them. Open? But if you did, you perhaps would die. Oh. Ho?” And, laughing, he began his taut nap.
Mooney swallowed the last of his icy tea. It was full daylight outside.
Very well, castaway, he said silently to the dozing pale-eyed man, I will guide you. Oh, there never was a guide like Mooney—not when a guide’s fee can run so high. But when you are where you want to go, then we’ll discuss the price. …
A hacksaw, he schemed, and a Geiger counter. He had worn his fingers raw trying to find the little button or knob that Harse had used to open them. All right, he was licked there. But there were more ways than one to open a cat’s eye.
A hacksaw. A Geiger counter. And, Mooney speculated drowsily, maybe a gun, if the pale-eyed man got tough.
Mooney fell asleep in joy and anticipation for the first time in more than a dozen years.
It
