The last was a small hand light powered by the energy of time. It was tiny enough to be enclosed in a fist, but its illumination could be adjusted from a trickle to a flood. On this night Roszt and Kaynor would need no more than a trickle—their eyes easily adjusted to darkness because of their sikes of scouting and living underground.
Each of them carried two of Egarn’s weapons for ultimate emergencies. He hoped they would never have to use them except perhaps at the climax of their adventure when they had identified the Honsun Len Johnson beyond any doubt.
Roszt traced the outline of the bank’s door with the anti-burglar alarm tool. They paused to listen for alarms before Kaynor applied the lock pick. He turned the tube, and the door opened. They slipped inside with Val at their heels. At a gesture from Kaynor, the dog obediently seated himself by the door. Roszt ranged about tracing the bank’s alarm system while Kaynor locked them in. Then they went directly to the safe and went to work.
Steve Sterovitz, one of the two Alomia police officers on night patrol, had been delayed by a complaint about prowlers. The prowlers of course had vanished by the time he reached the scene. Now he was performing his nightly check to make certain doors of business establishments were properly locked. He strolled along nonchalantly. In his opinion, nothing exciting had happened in Alomia, Ohio, since about about 1920 when the town experienced its last runaway horse, and his thoughts were not exclusively on his work.
At Frylon’s Clothing Store, he paused to look at the window display. A sign in screaming red letters proclaimed, “THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT—50% OFF ON ODD SIZES!” The odd sizes on display were outlandishly-patterned suits with equally silly, broad-brimmed hats. There was a luggage sale, too, and the two manikins wearing the suits were carrying suitcases, while other cases and bags had been left about their feet for them to stumble over. Sterovitz tried to imagine anyone actually wearing clothes like that and failed.
As he was trying the door, the old burglar alarm on the venerable bank building emitted a single “Ding!” Sterovitz abandoned the clothing store and dashed for the bank. Its front door was properly locked and the safe at the rear wasn’t visible from the door or from the high Main Street windows. Sterovitz ran at top speed to the corner, circled around to the alley, and arrived at the bank’s rear door. It was locked. He placed his ear against it, heard nothing. Running as fast as he could, he returned to Main Street and his parked patrol car, where he panted his message into the radio’s microphone.
Inside the bank, Roszt had carefully explored the vault’s door to fuse the alarm system. Then Kaynor applied the lock pick. As Egarn had predicted, it didn’t work. Kaynor set about melting the lock.
At the same moment, Sterovitz was arguing with his sergeant. “Look, I’m trying to tell you,” he panted. “The bank’s burglar alarm just went off.”
The fat desk sergeant, whose environment was cluttered with empty coffee cups, overflowing ashtrays, and crushed beer cans, liked to spend his duty hours studying confiscated pornography. He resented the interruption. He said sarcastically, “What d’ya mean, the burglar alarm went off? If it’d went off there, it’d a went off here, too, and it didn’t.”
“I was checking Frylon’s door, and I heard it. Clearly. It went ‘Ding.’”
The sergeant said incredulously, “It went ‘Ding?’”
“That’s what I said.”
The sergeant exploded. “You idiot! Burglar alarms don’t go ‘Ding!’ They go ‘Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding.’ Didn’t anyone ever tell you that?”
“I don’t remember ever hearing it mentioned.”
“I’m telling you now. Next time, you’ll have to think of a different excuse. Now you tell me. How do burglar alarms go?”
“Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding,” Sterovitz said with profound resignation.
“Right. Remember that. Now get a move on. You were due out at the hospital twenty minutes ago.”
Sterovitz, no longer sauntering, resumed his door check. As he passed the burglar alarm, he looked up at it and said disgustedly, “Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding.”
At the same moment, Roszt and Kaynor were carefully relocking the bank’s rear door behind them. When they moved off, each was carrying two large cloth bags bulging with money. At the clothing store, Roszt fused the burglar alarm and Kaynor deftly opened the locked door. Two dim figures moved about in the dim store while Val waited patiently. The window manikins were snatched from view and reappeared a short time later stripped of their clothing. Four large suitcases that had been displayed with them vanished permanently.
When Roszt and Kaynor left the store a short time later, they were dressed in the outlandishly styled suits and hats from the front window and wearing, with agonized discomfort, shoes hurriedly selected at the rear of the store. Each of them carried two of the suitcases. One of these contained the clothing they had worn from Midlow and also a selection of items from the shopping—or shop-lifting—list Egarn had prepared for them: undergarments, socks, shirts. The other three suitcases contained the money. The dog sensed their seriousness, and he followed silently at their heels as they quickly walked away. Egarn, watching them on the flickering len, was elated. The mission could not have begun better.
Twenty minutes later, Officer Sterovitz, cruising rapidly along Main Street on his way from the hospital to the country club, brought his patrol car to a sudden, screeching halt. He had caught a glimpse of Frylon’s front window as he passed. He leaped out and charged over to it.
The manikins that had displayed the outrageous suits now faced the world in their underwear. Some of the luggage had disappeared. Sterovitz stood there for several minutes, one hand on his hip, the other scratching his head. He knew damned well something extremely screwy was going on. He also knew he wasn’t going to make an ass of himself a second time. He could imagine the sergeant’s reaction if he radioed a report that manikins were appearing in a Main Street store window in their underwear. “What are you, some kind of sex freak? What does it matter what manikins wear?”
He shrugged and turned away, muttering, “Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding.”
Near the edge of town, under the last street light on a quiet residential street, a venerable Oldsmobile with no license plate was parked on the lawn of a large, shabby-looking house. In the window of the car was a sign: “FOR SALE—$400.”
Roszt and Kaynor came walking silently along the sidewalk with Val at their heels. When they reached the car, they set the suitcases down. Roszt remained there with the dog; Kaynor went up the walk to the house. He rang the bell for a long time before there was any response. Finally the porch light came on, and a boy of nineteen or twenty, wearing pajamas and a robe, opened the door. He stared with astonishment at the lanky Kaynor. In his flamboyant new apparel, the scout from Slorn was an arresting sight.
Kaynor said, “You have car for sale?”
It took a moment for the question to register. Then the boy exclaimed, “Yes, yes! It’s for sale. I’ve been asking four hundred, but—”
Kaynor’s gloved hand thrust money at him. The boy stared, stared at Kaynor again, and then snatched the money. He counted it disbelievingly. “I’ll get the keys and the title!” he said and dashed away excitedly, leaving Kaynor waiting at the door.
He was back a moment later. “I need your name and address.”
Kaynor handed him a slip of paper that carried a fictitious name and a nonexistent address in Cleveland, Ohio. The boy hurried away again.
Finally he returned to hand over the car keys and a package of papers.
“I signed the title for you, and here is a receipt. The title has got to be notarized. If you will stop by tomorrow evening, I’ll take you to see Ed Wheeler—he lives around the corner, he’s a realtor—and he’ll fix it for you. I hate to bother him this late. It’s a real good car, and it runs swell, and it’s got a hot motor. If it didn’t burn so much oil—I mean, you got yourself a real good buy, mister.”
Kaynor said carefully, “Thank you,” accenting the “you” despite Egarn’s patient drilling. He turned and walked out to the car. The boy stood in the door, watching. Roszt and Kaynor put their luggage in the back seat, along with the dog, and took their places in front with Kaynor at the steering wheel. He had trouble finding the ignition switch, trouble inserting the key, trouble getting the motor to start. The starter ground, and ground, until the boy was about to go out and help him. Finally it caught with a roar. Racing the motor and pumping the clutch, Kaynor drove off with a preposterous series of jerks. The car moved like a wounded jack rabbit. Half a block down the street he killed the motor and had to start it again.
Egarn, nervously watching the scene on the len, thought with resignation that he was doing about as well as
