could be expected for one to whom the automobile and the gasoline motor were the ultimate mysteries of the universe. The boy, still watching from his front door, belatedly remembered something. He shouted after the car, “Hey—you’re not supposed to drive without a—”
The car turned the corner. “…license plate,” the boy finished weakly. Suddenly he turned in alarm and held his money up to the porch light. There seemed to be nothing wrong with that, so he shrugged, pocketed it, went back into the house, and turned off the light.
Before they left town, Roszt and Kaynor found a parked car that looked as though it hadn’t been used recently and stole its license plate. They drove south and then east. Kaynor quickly learned to control the car’s speed—he meticulously kept it under the speed limit—and point it where he wanted to go, but they had trouble with highway signs, trouble working the pump at a self-service gas station, trouble adding oil, trouble ordering food at a drive-in restaurant, and finally, in West Virginia, trouble finding a motel that looked sufficiently shoddy so the owners wouldn’t fuss about their lack of identification.
They quickly noticed that their clothing attracted attention. Attention was the one thing they did not want. They abandoned their hats and suit coats almost at once. The next day they stopped at a shopping mall, where they bought sweaters and jackets and shoes that fit them and work trousers that almost fit.
That night they bought another used car from its owner and abandoned their first car in the parking lot of a large motel where it might go unnoticed for daes. Traveling through Maryland and Pennsylvania, they repeated this procedure twice before they reached the state of New York. They had much less trouble the second night. After that, they had none at all.
In Buffalo they found themselves a shabby rooming house in an area that even they could sense was a high-crime district. Because they didn’t want the nuisance of having to rob another bank, one of them guarded their money while the other exercised the dog and attempted to accustom himself to twentieth century civilization.
Then they had a stroke of luck. Their next-door neighbor noticed their awkward behavior and stiffly incorrect English and deduced that they were aliens—though of course he had no idea where they were aliens from. Aliens were his livlihood, and he cultivated their acquaintance diligently.
He was a forger. He offered them complete sets of documents, guaranteed to appear authentic to anyone but a expert with scientific instruments. Their birth certificates, for example, would list birthplaces in a southern community whose records had been destroyed in a fire. To Roszt and Kaynor this was an incredible stroke of luck, but they managed to handle it with nonchalance. They remembered Egarn’s stricture that they must never act as though they had money, so they haggled about the price—but only a little.
Their new friend was willing to perform as many services for them as they were willing to pay for. He disposed of their Pennsylvania car at a junk yard. He wouldn’t attempt to forge drivers’ licenses, but with their other documents for identification, they were able to obtain them legally. He helped them study for the test. He found them a used car of more recent vintage and showed them how to get it insured. He also showed them how to apply for social security numbers. He even licensed Val for them. An illegal alien, he told them soberly, couldn’t afford to slip up in anything.
While he was doing that, he helped them with their English, found them a dictionary that was easy to use, and patiently explained the more perplexing aspects of life in Buffalo, New York at the end of the twentieth century.
With a properly licensed and insured car, with complete sets of documents, with inconspicuous clothing their friend helped them select, their confidence grew daily. They would have remained there for monts, learning from their friend, but they remembered that Egarn and his team would be watching anxiously and perhaps eating the last of their food while the Lantiff prowled overhead, so they bade their friend farewell and drove to Rochester.
They stopped first at the Howard Johnson Motel in Henrietta, a Rochester suburb, where the desk clerk thought their carefully worded query about Mr. Johnson was a scream. They stayed there for a tenite, driving about and trying to become familiar with the city. They already had a sketchy knowledge of Buffalo, and they were disconcerted to find so many differences.
They drove slowly along the Genesee River that wound its way through the city, passing parks and the University of Rochester. They explored neighborhoods that caught their fancy, pondering the striking contrasts. They fell in love with Mount Hope Cemetary and the Victorian splendor of its monuments and mausoleums, visiting it by day or—after they found a hole in the fence that someone was using as a shortcut—by night. The cemetery contained magnificent hiding places, and in one of them, an old boarded-up chapel and crematorium, they cached a bundle of supplies for an emergency.
They hadn’t visited central Buffalo, and Rochester’s tall downtown buildings fascinated them. It took all of their courage to enter a self-service elevator for a claustrophobic ascent—after which the arrangement of buttons so confused them that they had to walk down. They stood staring up at the “Wings of Progress” atop the Times Square Building until they made the embarrassing discovery that they were obstructing pedestrian traffic. They never succeeded in figuring out the function of the strangly shaped “wings.”
They wanted a more central location to work from, so they moved to the Sharber Motel off East Avenue close to downtown Rochester. It was an older motel striving to remain respectable. Its restaurant was much patronized at lunch time by people working in the downtown area. The rooms were neat and well looked after; the atmosphere, despite the hectic traffic of the inner city, peaceful; and they were permitted to keep Val with them.
Their Buffalo friend had considered motels much safer than apartment buildings or rooming houses. In these latter establishments, he said, the same neighbors would see them day after day. Any oddities or irregularities in their conduct would arouse curiosity and cause talk, and the things an alien absolutely had to avoid were curiosity and talk. In a motel, they had new neighbors daily or every few days, and travelers were much too preoccupied with their own affairs to worry about two men who left the motel early and returned late, lived quietly, and bothered no one.
They settled at the Sharber Motel for an extended stay. Their room seemed reasonably secure, and Val was there to guard their possessions, but they bought a small safe anyway, fastened it securely to the floor under their bed—where the bed frame, which extended to the floor, concealed it—and hid a reserve of money in it.
Their search for the Honsun Len Johnson began with the telephone directory in their motel room, where the name “Johnson” occupied more than ten columns and filled two and a half pages. “Johnston” and “Johnstone” added two columns more. The task of narrowing that list to the one person who had invented—or was about to invent—the Honsun Len staggered them. Doggedly they visited an office supply store, invested in index cards and a filing box, and went to work.
Then they discovered the telephone directory’s yellow pages, which alphabetized names within classifications, and this necesitated a prolonged and tedious search for people doing business under the name of Johnson. Obviously it was an honorable name. Most of the entries told them nothing at all, but a few seemed intriguing. Johnson Cameras, for example; and Johnson Exterminators, which—until they discovered what a professional exterminator did—suggested that someone had already found a use for the Honsun Len.
Except for the few Johnsons who could be linked with specific businesses, their research gave them a long list of people about whom they knew nothing at all. Egarn had briefed them carefully as to their next step. They went to the main Rochester Public Library on South Avenue.
The place seemed infinitely confusing—people coming and going, people reading at tables, books everywhere; but the helpful librarians were accustomed to confused patrons. Roszt and Kaynor were directed to the long, narrow reference room, where they quickly located something they were familiar with—telephone directories from near and far. Some were arranged in carousels, which they spun delightedly until they noticed the puzzled glances they were receiving. Their next discovery was a set of suburban Rochester telephone directories, and these added nine more columns of Johnsons to their collection.
The most essential reference work—the one Egarn had attached the most importance to—was a city directory, which they were unable to find until a reference librarian referred them to the Local History Room on the second floor. There they struck a bonanza: City Directories dating all the way back to 1870 and suburban directories from 1930.
It was the long, uninterrupted run of directories that proved invaluable. In current volumes, few of the entries mentioned a resident’s place of employment. Citizens had been less obsessed with privacy and security a
