“What happened to you?” the people all yelled to him, and they laughed.
For the purposes of mass communications, Unk shortened the answer that had pleased the little crowd so much at the Church of the Space Wanderer. “Accidents!” he yelled.
He laughed. Oh boy.
What the hell. He laughed.
In Newport, the Rumfoord estate had been packed to the walls for eight hours. Guards turned thousands away from the little door in the wall. The guards were hardly necessary, since the crowd inside was monolithic.
A greased eel couldn’t have squeezed in.
The thousands of pilgrims outside the walls now jostled one another piously for positions close to the loudspeakers mounted at the corners of the walls.
From the speakers would come Rumfoord’s voice.
The crowd was the largest yet and the most excited yet, for the day was the long-promised Great Day of the Space Wanderer.
Handicaps of the most imaginative and effective sort were displayed everywhere. The crowd was wonderfully drab and hampered.
Bee, who had been Unk’s mate on Mars, was in Newport, too. So was Bee’s and Unk’s son, Chrono.
“Hey! – getcher genuwine, authorized, official Malachis here,” said Bee hoarsely. “Hey! – getcher Malachis here. Gotta have a Malachi to wave at the Space Wanderer,” said Bee. “Get a Malachi, so the Space Wanderer can bless it when he comes by.”
She was in a booth facing the little iron door in the wall of the Rumfoord estate in Newport. Bee’s booth was the first in the line of twenty booths that faced the door. The twenty booths were under one continuous shed roof, and were separated from one another by waist-high partitions.
The Malachis she was hawking were plastic dolls with movable joints and rhinestone eyes. Bee bought them from a religious supply house for twenty-seven cents apiece and sold them for three dollars. She was an excellent businesswoman.
And while Bee showed the world an efficient and flashy exterior, it was the grandeur within her that sold more merchandise than anything. The carnival flash of Bee caught the pilgrims’ eyes. But what brought the pilgrims to her booth and made them buy was her aura. The aura said unmistakably that Bee was meant for a far nobler station in life, that she was being an awfully good sport about being stuck where she was.
“Hey! – getcher Malachi while there’s still time,” said Bee. “Can’t get a Malachi while a materialization’s going on!”
That was true. The rule was that the concessionaires had to close their shutters five minutes before Winston Niles Rumfoord and his dog materialized. And they had to keep their shutters closed until ten minutes after the last trace of Rumfoord and Kazak had disappeared.
Bee turned to her son, Chrono, who was opening a fresh case of Malachis. “How long before the whistle?” she said. The whistle was a great steam whistle inside the estate. It was blown five minutes in advance of materializations.
Materializations themselves were announced by the firing of a three-inch cannon.
Dematerializations were announced by the release of a thousand toy balloons.
“Eight minutes,” said Chrono, looking at his watch. He was eleven Earthling years old now. He was dark and smoldering. He was an expert short-changer, and was clever with cards. He was foul-mouthed, and carried a switch-knife with a six-inch blade. Chrono would not socialize well with other children, and his reputation for dealing with life courageously and directly was so bad that only a few very foolish and very pretty little girls were attracted to him.
Chrono was classified by the Newport Police Department and by the Rhode Island State Police as a juvenile delinquent. He knew at least fifty law-enforcement officers by their first names, and was a veteran of fourteen lie-detector tests.
All that prevented Chrono’s being placed in an institution was the finest legal staff on Earth, the legal staff of the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. Under the direction of Rumfoord, the staff defended Chrono against all charges.
The commonest charges brought against Chrono were larceny by sleight of hand, carrying concealed weapons, possessing unregistered pistols, discharging firearms within the city limits, selling obscene prints and articles, and being a wayward child.
The authorities complained bitterly that the boy’s big trouble was his mother. His mother loved him just the way he was.
“Only eight more minutes to get your Malachi, folks,” said Bee. “Hurry, hurry, hurry.”
Bee’s upper front teeth were gold, and her skin, like the skin of her son, was the color of golden oak.
Bee had lost her upper front teeth when the space ship in which she and Chrono had ridden from Mars crash-landed in the Gumbo region of the Amazon Rain Forest. She and Chrono had been the only survivors of the crash, and had wandered through the jungles for a year.
The color of Bee’s and Chrono’s skins was permanent, since it stemmed from a modification of their livers, Their livers had been modified by a three-month diet consisting of water and the roots of the salpa-salpa or Amazonian blue poplar. The diet had been a part of Bee’s and Chrono’s initiation into the Gumbo tribe.
During the initiation, mother and son had been staked at the ends of tethers in the middle of the village, with Chrono representing the Sun and Bee representing the Moon, as the Sun and the Moon were understood by the Gumbo people.
As a result of their experiences, Bee and Chrono were closer than most mothers and sons.
They had been rescued at last by a helicopter. Winston Niles Rumfoord had sent the helicopter to just the right place at just the right time.
Winston Niles Rumfoord had given Bee and Chrono the lucrative Malachi concession outside the Alice-in-Wonderland door. He had also paid Bee’s dental bill, and had suggested that her false front teeth be gold.
The man who had the booth next to Bee’s was Harry Brackman. He had been Unk’s platoon sergeant back on Mars. Brackman was portly and balding now. He had a cork leg and a stainless steel right hand. He had lost the leg and hand in the Battle of Boca Raton, He was the only survivor of the battle – and, if he hadn’t been so horribly wounded, he would certainly have been lynched along with the other survivors of his platoon.
Brackman sold plastic models of the fountain inside the wall. The models were a foot high. The models had spring-driven pumps in their bases. The pumps pumped water from the big bowl at the bottom to the tiny bowls at the top. Then the tiny bowls spilled into the slightly larger bowls below and …
Brackman had three of them going at once on the counter before him. “Just like the one inside, folks,” he said. “And you can take one of these home with you. Put it in the picture window, so all your neighbors’ll know you’ve been to Newport. Put it in the middle of the kitchen table for the kids’ parties, and fill it with pink lemonade.”
“How much?” said a rube.
“Seventeen dollars,” said Brackman.
“Wow!” said the rube.
“It’s a sacred shrine, cousin,” said Brackman, looking at the rube levelly. “Isn’t a toy.” He reached under the counter, brought out a model of a Martian space ship. “You want a toy? Here’s a toy. Forty-nine cents. I only make two cents on it.”
The rube made a show of being a judicious shopper. He compared the toy with the real article it was supposed to represent. The real article was a Martian space ship on top of a column ninety-eight feet tall, The column and space ship were inside the walls of the Rumfoord estate – in the corner of the estate where the tennis courts had once been.
Rumfoord bad yet to explain the purpose of the space ship, whose supporting column had been built with the pennies of school children from all over the world. The ship was kept in constant readiness. What was reputedly the longest free-standing ladder in history leaned against the column, led giddily to the door of the ship.
In the fuel cartridge of the space ship was the very last trace of the Martian war effort’s supply of the Universal Will to Become.
“Uh huh,” said the rube. He put the model back on the counter. “If you don’t mind, I’ll shop around a little more.” So far, the only thing he had bought was a Robin Hood hat with a picture of Rumfoord on one side and a picture of a sailboat on the other, and with his own name stitched on the feather. His name, according to the feather, was Delbert. “Thanks just the same,” said Delbert. “I’ll probably be back.”
“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.