Not three-dimensional, thought Hart, not too concise, nor too distinctive, not digging deep into the character and analyzing him – but good enough for the kind of tripe he’d have to write for Irving.
Take this joker and surround him with a few other ruffians chosen haphazardly from the file. Use one of the films from the Deep Dark Villain reel, throw in an ingenious treasure situation and a glob of violence, dream up some God-awful background, and he’d have it, that is, if the yarner worked…
Ten minutes gone. Just five more to go. In five more minutes he’d stop the camera, put it back into its case, slip the case into his pocket and get out of the place as fast as he could. Without causing undue notice, of course.
It had been simple, he thought – much simpler than he could possibly have imagined.
_They’re getting on to us_, Angela had said. _Even these crummy aliens._
Only three more minutes to go.
A hand came down from nowhere, and picked up the camera. Hart swiveled around. The proprietor stood directly behind him, with the camera under his arm.
_Good Lord_, thought Hart, _I was watching the Caphians so closely I forgot about this guy!_
The proprietor roared at him: “So! You sneak in here under false pretences to get your film! Are you trying to give my place a bad name?”
Swiftly Hart flung himself out of the booth, one frantic eye on the door. There was just a chance that he might make it. But the proprietor stuck out an expert foot and tripped him. Hart landed on his shoulders and somersaulted. He skidded across the floor, smashed into a table and rolled half under it.
The Caphians had come to their feet and were looking at him. He could see that they were hoping he’d get his head bashed in.
The proprietor hurled the camera with great violence to the floor. It came apart with an ugly, splintering sound. The film rolled free and snaked across the floor. The lens wobbled crazily. A spring came unloose from somewhere and went _zing_. It stood out at an angle, quivering.
Hart gathered his feet beneath him, and leaped out from the table. The Caphians started moving in on him – not rushing him, not threatening him in any way. They just kept walking toward him and spreading out so that he couldn’t make a dash for the door.
He backed away, step by careful step, and the Caphians still continued their steady advance.
Suddenly he leaped straight toward them in a direct assault on the center of the line. He yelled and lowered his head and caught Green Shirt squarely in the belly. He felt the Caphian stagger and lurch to one side, and for a split second he thought that he had broken free.
But a hairy, muscular hand reached out and grabbed him and flung him to the floor. Someone kicked him. Someone stepped on his fingers. Someone else picked him up and threw him – straight through the open door into the street outside.
He landed on his back and skidded, with the breath completely knocked out of him. He came to rest with a jolt against the curbing opposite the place from which he had been heaved.
The Caphians, the full dozen of them, were grouped around the doorway, aroar with booming laughter. They slapped their thighs, and pounded one another on the back. They doubled over, shrieking. They shouted pleasantries and insults at him. Half of the jests he did not understand, but the ones that registered were enough to make his blood run cold.
He got up cautiously, and tested himself, He was considerably bruised and battered and his clothes were torn. But seemingly he had escaped any broken bones. He tried a few steps, limping. He tried to run and was surprised to find that he could.
Behind him the Caphians were still laughing. But there was no telling at what moment they might cease to think that his predicament was funny and start after him in earnest – for blood.
He raced down the street and ducked into an alley that led to a tangled square. He crossed the square into another street without pausing for breath and went running on. Finally he became satisfied that he was safe and sat down on a doorstep in an alley to regain his breath and carefully review the situation.
The situation, he realized, was bad. He not only had failed to get the character he needed; he had lost the camera, suffered a severe humiliation and barely escaped with his life.
There wasn’t a thing that he could do about it. Actually, he told himself, he had been extremely lucky. For he didn’t have a legal leg to stand on. He’d been entirely in the wrong. To film a character without the permission of the character’s original was against the law.
It wasn’t that he was a lawbreaker, he thought. It wasn’t as if he’d deliberately set out to break the law. He’d been forced into it. Anyone who might have consented to serve as a character would have demanded money – more money than he was in a position to shell out.
But he did desperately need a character! He simply had to have one, or face utter defeat.
He saw that the sun had set, and that twilight was drifting in. The day, he thought, had been utterly wasted, and he had only himself to blame.
A passing police officer stopped and looked into the alley.
“You,” he said to Hart. “What are you sitting there for?”
“Resting,” Hart told him.
“All right. You’re rested. Now get a move on.”
Hart got a move on.
He was nearing home when he heard the crying in the areaway between an apartment house and a bindery. It was a funny sort of crying, a not-quite-human crying – perhaps not so much a crying as a sound of grief and loneliness.
He halted abruptly and stared around him. The crying had cut off, but soon it began again. It was a low and empty crying, a hopeless crying, a crying to one’s self.
For a moment he stood undecided, then started to go on. But he had not gone three paces before he turned back. He stepped into the areaway and at the second step his foot touched something lying on the ground.
He squatted and looked at the form that lay there, crying to itself. It was a bundle – that described it best – a huddled, limp, sad bundle that moaned heartbrokenly.
He put a hand beneath it and lifted it and was surprised at how little weight it had. Holding it firmly with one hand, he searched with the other for his lighter. He flicked the lighter and the flame was feeble, but he saw enough to make his stomach flop. It was an old blanket with a face that once had started out to be humanoid and then, for some reason, had been forced to change its mind. And that was all there was – a blanket and a face.
He thumbed the lighter down and crouched in the dark, his breath rasping in his throat. The creature was not only an alien. It was, even by alien standards, almost incredible. And how had an alien strayed so far from the spaceport? Aliens seldom wandered. They never had the time to wander, for the ships came in, freighted up with fiction, and almost immediately took off again. The crews stayed close to the rocket berths, seldom venturing farther than the dives along the riverfront.
He rose, holding the creature bundled across his chest as one would hold a child – it was not as heavy as a child – and feeling the infant-like warmth of it against his body and a strange companionship. He stood in the areaway while his mind went groping back in an effort to unmask the faint recognition he had felt. Somewhere, somehow, it seemed he once had heard or read of an alien such as this. But surely that was ridiculous, for aliens did not come, even the most fantastic of them, as a living blanket with the semblance of a face.
He stepped out into the street and looked down to examine the face again. But a portion of the creature’s blanket-body had draped itself across its features and he could see only a waving blur.
Within two blocks be reached the Bright Star bar, went around the corner to the side door and started up the stairs. Footsteps were descending and he squeezed himself against the railing to let the other person past.
“Kemp,” said Angela Maret. “Kemp, what have you there?”
“I found it in the street,” Hart told her.
He shifted his arm a little and the blanket-body slipped and she saw the face. She moved back against the railing, her hand going to her mouth to choke off a scream.