“Probably some broken-down actor he hired from New York,” said Brackman.
This got no response from anyone, not even from Chrono, who fancied himself the chief cynic of the booths. Brackman didn’t take his own suggestion seriously — that the Space Wanderer was a fraud. The concessionaires knew all too well about Rumfoord’s penchant for realism. When Rumfoord staged a passion play, he used nothing but real people in real hells.
Let it be emphasized here that, passionately fond as Rumfoord was of great spectacles, he never gave in to the temptation to declare himself God or something a whole lot like God.
His worst enemies admit that. Dr. Maurice Rosenau, in his Pan-Galactic Humbug or Three Billion Dupes says:
Winston Niles Rumfoord, the interstellar Pharisee, Tartufe, and Cagliostro, has taken pains to declare that he is not God Almighty, that he is not a close relative of God Almighty, and that he has received no plain instructions from God Almighty. To these words of the Master of Newport we can say Amen! And may we add that Rumfoord is so far from being a relative or agent of God Almighty as to make all communication with God Almighty Himself impossible so long as Rumfoord is around!
Ordinarily, talk by the Martian veterans in the shuttered booths was sprightly — bristling with entertaining irreverence and tips on selling trashy religious artides to boobs.
Now, with Rumfoord and the Space Wanderer about to meet, the concessionaires found it very hard not to be interested.
Sergeant Brackman’s good hand went up to the crown of his head. It was the characteristic gesture of a Martian veteran. He was touching the area over his antenna, over the antenna that had once done all his important thinking for him. He missed the signals.
“Bring the Space Wanderer here!” blatted Rumfoord’s voice from the Gabriel horns on the walls.
“Maybe — maybe we should go,” said Brackman to Bee.
“What?” murmured Bee. She was standing with her back to the closed shutters. Her eyes were shut. Her head was down. She looked cold.
She always shivered when a materialization was taking place.
Chrono was rubbing his good-luck piece slowly with the ball of his thumb, watching a halo of mist on the cold metal, a halo around the thumb.
“The hell with ’em — eh, Chrono?” said Brackman.
The man who sold twittering mechanical birds swung his wares overhead listlessly. A farm wife had stabbed him with a pitchfork in the Battle of Toddington, England, had left him for dead.
The International Committee for the Identification and Rehabilitation of Martians had, with the help of fingerprints, identified the bird man as Bernard K. Winslow, an itinerant chicken sexer, who had disappeared from the alcoholic ward of a London hospital.
“Thanks very much for the information,” Winslow had told the committee. “Now I don’t have that lost feeling any more.”
Sergeant Brackman had been identified by the Committee as Private Francis J. Thompson, who had disappeared in the dead of night while walking a lonely guard post around a motor pooi in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, U.S.A.
The committee had been baffled by Bee. She had no fingerprints on record. The Committee believed her to be either Florence White, a plain and friendless girl who had disappeared from a steam laundry in Cohoes, New York, or Darlene Simpkins, a plain and friendless girl who had last been seen accepting a ride with a swarthy stranger in Brownsville, Texas.
And down the line of booths from Brackman and Chrono and Bee were Martian husks who had been identified as Myron S. Watson, an alcoholic, who had disappeared from his post as a wash room attendant at Newark Airport . . . as Charlene Heller, assistant dietitian of the cafeteria of Stivers High School in Dayton, Ohio . . . as Krishna Garu, a typesetter still wanted, technically, on charges of bigamy, pandering, and nonsupport in Calcutta, India . . . as Kurt Schneider, also an alcoholic, manager of a failing travel agency in Bremen, Germany.
“The mighty Rumfoord — ” said Bee.
“Pardon me?” said Brackman.
“He snatched us out of our lives,” said Bee. “He put us to sleep. He cleaned out our minds the way you dean the seeds out of a jack-o’-lantern. He wired us like robots, trained us, aimed us — burned us out in a good cause.” She shrugged.