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 goodluck piece on Mars. It was still his goodluck piece on Earth.
The goodluck 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.
“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 goodluck 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.
“Could we have done any better if he’d left us in charge of our own lives?” said Bee. “Would we have become any more – or any less? I guess I’m glad he used me. I guess he had a lot better ideas about what to do with me than Florence White or Darlene Simpkins or whoever I was.
“But I hate him all the same,” said Bee.
“That’s your privilege,” said Brackman. “He said that was the privilege of every Martian.”
“There’s one consolation,” said Bee. “We’re all used up. We’ll never be of any use to him again.”