The first warning he had was when there was a sudden commotion among the lodge brothers. Mooney turned, much too late. There was Harse; he had wandered over there, curious and interested and—Harse. He had stared them up and down, but he hadn’t been content to stare. He had opened the little silvery dispatch-case and taken out of it the thing that looked like a film viewer; and maybe it was a camera, too, because he was looking through it at the conventioneers. He was covering them as Dixie is covered by the dew, up and down, back and forth, heels to head.
And it was causing a certain amount of attention. Even one of the photographers thought maybe this funny-looking guy with the funny-looking opera glasses was curious enough to be worth a shot. After all, that was what the photographer was there for. He aimed and popped a flash gun.
There was an abrupt thin squeal from the box. Black fog sprayed out of it in a greasy jet. It billowed toward Harse. It collected around him, swirled high. Now all the flashguns were popping. …
It was a clear waste of a twenty-dollar bill, Mooney told himself aggrievedly out on the sidewalk. There had been no point in buttering up the bellhop as long as Harse was going to get them thrown out anyway.
On the other side of the East River, in a hotel that fell considerably below Mooney’s recent, brief standards of excellence, Mooney cautiously tipped a bellboy, ushered him out, locked the door behind him and, utterly exhausted, flopped on one of the twin beds.
Harse glanced at him briefly, then wandered over to the window and stared incuriously at the soiled snow outside.
“You were fine, Harse,” said Mooney without spirit. “You didn’t do anything wrong at all.”
“Ah,” said Harse without turning. “So?”
Mooney sat up, reached for the phone, demanded setups and a bottle from room service and hung up.
“Oh, well,” he said, beginning to revive, “at least we’re in Brooklyn now. Maybe it’s just as well.”
“As well. What?”
“I mean this is where you wanted to be. Now we just have to wait four days, until the twenty-sixth. We’ll have to raise some more money, of course,” he added experimentally.
Harse turned and looked at him with the pale eyes. “One thousand dollars you have. Is not enough?”
“Oh, no, Harse,” Mooney assured him. “Why, that won’t be nearly enough. The room rent in this hotel alone is likely to use that up. Besides all the extras, of course.”
“Ah.” Harse, looking bored, sat down in the chair near Mooney, opened his kit, took out the thing that looked like a film viewer and put it to his eyes.
“We’ll have to sell some more of those things. After all—” Mooney winked and dug at the pale-eyed man’s ribs with his elbow—“we’ll be needing some, well, entertainment.”
Harse took the viewer away from his eyes. He glanced thoughtfully at the elbow and then at Mooney. “So,” he said.
Mooney coughed and changed the subject. “One thing, though,” he begged. “Don’t get me in any more trouble like you did in that hotel lobby—or with that guy in the truck. Please? I mean, after all, you’re making it hard for me to carry out my job.”
Harse was thoughtfully silent.
“Promise?” Mooney urged.
Harse said, after some more consideration: “It is not altogether me. That is to say, it is a matter of defense. My picture should not be. Photographed? So the survival kit insures that it is not. You understand?”
Mooney leaned back. “You mean—” The bellboy with the drinks interrupted him; he took the bottle, signed the chit, tipped the boy and mixed himself a reasonably stiff but not quite stupefying highball, thinking hard.
“Did you say ‘survival kit’?” he asked at last.
Harse was deep in the viewer again, but he looked away from it irritably. “Naturally, survival kit. So that I can. Survive?” He went back to the viewer.
Mooney took a long, thoughtful slug of the drink.
Survival kit. Why, that made sense. When the Air Force boys went out and raided the islands in the Pacific during the war, sometimes they got shot down—and it was enemy territory, or what passed for it. Those islands were mostly held by Japanese, though their populations hardly knew it. All the aboriginals knew was that strange birds crossed the sky and sometimes men came from them. The politics of the situation didn’t interest the headhunters. What really interested them was heads.
But for a palatable second choice, they would settle for trade goods—cloth, mirrors, beads. And so the bomber pilots were equipped with survival kits—maps, trade goods, rations, weapons, instructions for proceeding to a point where, God willing, a friendly submarine might put ashore a rubber dinghy to take them off.
Mooney said persuasively: “Harse. I’m sorry to bother you, but we have to talk.” The man with the pale eyes took them away from the viewer again and stared at Mooney. “Harse, were you shot down like an airplane pilot?”
Harse frowned—not in anger, or at least not at Mooney. It was the effort to make himself understood. He said at last: “Yes. Call it that.”
“And—and this place you want to go to—is that where you will be rescued?”
“Yes.”
Aha, thought Mooney, and the glimmerings of a new idea began to kick and stretch its fetal limbs inside him. He put it aside, to bear and coddle in private. He said: “Tell me more. Is there any particular part of Brooklyn you have to go to?”
“Ah. The Nexus Point?” Harse put down the viewer and, snap-snap, opened the gleaming kit. He took out the little round thing he had consulted in the house by the cold Jersey sea. He tilted it this way and that, frowned, consulted a small square sparkly thing that came from another part of the case, tilted the round gadget again.
“Correcting for local time,” he said, “the Nexus Point is one hour and one minute after midnight at what is called. The
