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 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 decade or two earlier. Those Johnsons who were long-time residents of the area had their employment given in earlier directories even though the more recent ones omitted it.
They worked for two long days compiling a list of most likely subjects—Eastman Kodak Company employees and former employees; employees and
former employees of optical companies; and those Johnsons directly connected with a technical product or service that suggested they might have the competence to invent a new form of len. Not until they attempted to make use of their list did they become fully aware of how hopeless their mission was.
On the basis of a few casual questions, they had to decide whether a total stranger had invented, or was about to invent, the most evil device in all of human history. Even if they had the good fortune to locate him, would he be likely to let them know he was the right Johnson? Why should he willingly confide information about his invention to strangers? And what could they do if he lied and professed to know nothing about lens?
It seemed like an impossible task, but of course they had to try.
They began with those Johnsons who had a likely business connection, and one Randell Johnson, listed as the owner of Johnson’s Cameras, stood high on their list. They called on him at his place of business and had a polite conversation with him. He was a gaunt, elderly man who would have been almost as tall as Roszt and Kaynor if he hadn’t been so stooped. He listened with a half smile to Roszt’s short presentation of the material Egarn had taught them for situations like this: They were searching for the descendants of Ebeneser Johnson, who had resided in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, at the time of the American Revolution. There was an inheritance involved—not a huge one but one sufficiently large to justify a diligent search for heirs.
By the time Roszt finished, Randall Johnson was smiling broadly. “What’s the catch?” he demanded.
Fortunately this had been a favorite expression of their friend in Buffalo. “There is no catch,” Kaynor said carefully. “We only want to learn whether you are a descendant of Ebeneser Johnson.”
“If I’m not, you’ll go quietly?”
The Chronocide Mission Page 21
