“Sure you will, Delbert,” said Brackman.
“How did you know my name was Delbert?” said Delbert, pleased and suspicious.
“You think Winston Niles Rumfoord is the only man around here with supernatural powers?” said Brackman.
A jet of steam went up inside the walls. An instant later, the voice of the great steam whistle rolled over the booths — mighty, mournful, and triumphant. It was the signal that Rumfoord and his dog would materialize in five minutes.
It was the signal for the concessionaires to stop their irreverent bawling of brummagem wares, to close their shutters.
The shutters were banged shut at once.
The effect of the closing inside the booths was to turn the line of concessions into a twilit tunnel.
The isolation of the concessionaires in the tunnel bad an extra dimension of spookiness, since the tunnel contained only survivors from Mars. Rumfoord had insisted on that — that Martians were to have first choice of the concessions at Newport. It was his way of saying, “Thanks.”
There weren’t many survivors — only fifty-eight in the United States, only three hundred and sixteen in the entire World; of the fifty-eight in the United States, twenty-one were concessionaires in Newport.
“Here we go again, kiddies,” somebody said, far, far, far down the line. It was the voice of the blind man who sold the Robin Hood hats with a picture of Rumfoord on one side and a picture of a sailboat on the other.
Sergeant Brackman laid his folded arms on the half-partition between his booth and Bee’s. He winked at young Chrono, who was lying on an unopened case of Malachis.
“Go to hell, eh, kid?” said Brackman to Chrono.
“Go to hell,” Chrono agreed. He was cleaning his nails with the strangely bent, drilled and nicked piece of metal that had been his good-luck piece on Mars. It was still his good-luck piece on Earth.
The good-luck piece had probably saved Chrono’s and Bee’s lives in the jungle. The Gumbo tribesmen had recognized the piece of metal as an object of tremendous power. Their respect for it had led them to initiate rather than eat its owners.
Brackman laughed affectionately. “Yessir — there’s a Martian for you,” he said. “Won’t even get off his case of Malachis for a look at the Space Wanderer.”
Chrono was not alone in his apathy about the Space Wanderer. It was the proud and impudent custom of all the concessionaires to stay away from ceremonies — to stay in the twilit tunnel of their booths until Rumfoord and his dog had come and gone.
It wasn’t that the concessionaires had real contempt for Rumfoord’s religion. Actually, most of them thought the new religion was probably a pretty good thing. What they were dramatizing when they stayed in their shuttered booths was that they, as Martian veterans, had already done more than enough to put the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent on its feet.
They were dramatizing the fact of their having been all used up.
Rumfoord encouraged them in this pose — spoke of them fondly as his “. . . soldier saints outside the little door. Their apathy,” Rumfoord once said, “is a great wound they suffered that we might be more lively, more sensitive, and more free.”
The temptation of the Martian concessionaires to take a peek at the Space Wanderer was great. There were loudspeakers on the walls of the Rumfoord estate, and every word spoken by Rumfoord inside blatted in the ears of anyone within a quarter of a mile. The words had spoken again and again of the glorious moment of truth that would come when the Space Wanderer came.
It was a big moment true believers titillated themselves about — the big moment wherein true believers were going to find their beliefs amplified, clarified, and vivified by a factor of ten.
Now the moment had arrived.
The fire engine that had carried the Space Wanderer down from the Church of the Space Wanderer on Cape Cod was clanging and shrieking outside the booths.
The trolls in the twilight of the booths refused to peek.
The cannon roared within the walls.
Rumfoord and his dog, then, had materialized — and the Space Wanderer was passing in through the Alice-in-Wonderland door.