“Quite a grip, skyman,” said David Daumier. “You crushed an iron probe that was built for durability. But my contrivance had already answered my question for me. You have no mental reservation as to the stone. I will go get the money now. My people will keep you company, skyman, and the contrived one will repair himself meanwhile.”
David Daumier left on his errand.
“I meant to say something else,” chittered Structo (Penta 9) when its master was gone, “but you squeezed the thought out of me. My nexus at the moment was in my hand which you crushed.”
“You intended to say, gentle contrivance, that I knew the stone was good, too good,” said Hodl, “and that I was laughing in my mind. Of course I was! I’m a merry man, and it gladdens me to give away a thing too good to keep.”
The contrivance put on another hand and busied himself hooking it up. The two human c.s. characters, glowering gunmen, studied Hodl with sleepy evil eyes and seemed more mechanical than their mechanical comrade.
After a decent interval, David Daumier returned with a tightly-wrapped brown paper package. It was of fair size and was marked with a deformed Greek M, Daumier’s own code for the amount in the packet.
“Now we will make the exchange,” David said softly, and he laid the paper-wrapped package openly on the bar. “Lay the ring beside it. Then I open and count.”
“The ring won’t come off easily,” said Hodl. He worked and turned it vigorously. It was quite tight. “There is an amusing story of how the ring came off the finger of the last owner,” Hodl told them. “I finally used a bolt-cutter.”
“The band doesn’t show it,” said David. “An expert must have rejoined it.”
“The band wasn’t cut, the finger was,” said Hodl. “Say, that man did make a noise about it! ”
“I’ll send for a jewelers’ saw,” said David. “I don’t mind the band being cut.”
“Soap and hot water are quicker,” said Hodl. “It’ll slip off easily with that.”
And soap and hot water were already there. The basin was brought by a counter-man in a dirty apron. And who notices a counter-man? Especially who notices that he is a pun? So the only one who recognized the man in the dirty apron as Willy McGilly was Hodl.
Hodl soaked his great hand, and the ring came off. Hodl held it dramatically (while the counter-man made his counter unseen) in one of his great hands with their deep lines that betokened genius, and the faint islands in the Head Line that in any other man would indicate something a little peculiar about that genius.
“It’s a nice ring,” said Hodl with regret. “Now we count.”
Two of the comic strip characters patted their arm-pits to indicate that the bulge there had a reason for being, Henry Hazelman the spotter lounged in the doorway of the tavern to spot anything that should come, and David opened the package and began to count out the hundreds. Those bills sing a soft song to themselves when they fall on each other.
When he had reached the count of thirteen, David’s eyelid flickered and he paused, but for much less than a second, only long enough to check and recheck in his rapid mind and to put down a faint surge of panic.
When David had reached thirty, Hodl reached out and lightly touched one of the bills. “It is nice looking money,” he said. He removed his hand, and David continued to count.
Only one who knew the diamond-factor well, or who knew all men well, could have known that David was nervous. Only a very quick eye could have detected that his hand trembled when he passed the fifty mark. And only a consummate genius like Hodl could have known that the throat of David was dry, or have guessed why it was.
Hodl reached out and touched another bill, the sixty-third or the sixty-fourth, it does not matter which.
“It is nice-looking money, David. Possibly too nice-looking,” he said. “Continue to count.”
The comic strip characters made moves towards their weapons, but David gulped and went on with the count.
Seventy . . . eighty... ninety ... ninety-nine, one hundred. There was ripe finality about it. And David waited.
“It’s a nice pile,” said Hodl. “I have never seen such pretty money. Who makes your money, David?”
The comic strip characters and Henry Hazelman started their moves again, but Hodl froze them at half-reach. There is a proverb that a gun in the hand is worth three in a shoulder holster, and Hodl had one in his hand so fast that it sparkled in all their eyes.
“I’m surprised at you, Mr. Daumier,” Hodl said softly. “I did not know that you dealt in funny money. To offer a poor price to a poor skyman is one thing. To pay even that in counterfeit is another. The deal is off, sir! I will keep my ring, and you may keep your pile.”
“It can’t be,” David groaned bedazed. “I never take a bad bill. I sure never took a hundred of them. I myself have just got it from my own safe.”
“It
does
look good. It is almost the best I have ever seen,” said Hodl “But, David, you have handled a million bills. You know what it is.”
“You switched the package,” said David, hoarsely.
“I have not. Your men and your machine have scanned me the whole time. I have nothing on me but this ring now back on my hand, and this little thing back on my other hand. And my pockets which I turn out for me contain nothing but twelve cents Earth coin, a small luck charm (a coney’s foot), and a Ganymede guilder. Your machine can read me as to physical things without contact.”
“That’s right, Mr. Daumier,” said Structo (Penta 9). “That’s all he’s got on him.”
“I came with this, and with this I leave,” said Hodl.
They looked at the stocky skyman with the forearms like a lion’s and the little gun in one of his deep-lined hands. And they were afraid to jump him.
David still didn’t know how the switch had been made. But now he knew when.
That evening in another tavern, and this a secluded one down in Wreckville, Hodl Oskanian and Willy McGilly and some of their friends sat and drank together. And from a bundle of bills similar to David’s, Willy McGilly now counted out bills, ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred; and these were valid.
“They have multiplied the Earth by billions and made all things intricate,” said Willy. “Men are not the same as their fathers were, and a man would need three brains to comprehend all the new devices. And yet in quiet places, like a Green Valley, some of the simple and wholesome things endure—old friends, old customs, old cons—sweet frauds that are ever young. We are like ancient handicrafters in an automated universe, but we do fine and careful work.
“They have multiplied it all, but the basic remains the same: The Setting (and the hands of Hodl
do
set the thing off well): the Bait (and the Stone would have to be the finest ever or we’d have worn it to dust using it for bait); the Warning, to give fun to the game; the Counter-Play; and then the Innocent Disclaimer.”
Hodl once more gazed at his hands, and he spoke.
“It was a nice touch, Willy, to use his own brown paper to wrap your own bundle, and to tape it so similarly with his own ‘David Daumier Jeweler’ tape. It was nice to find out and reproduce his own peculiar mark for the amount, and to learn all the little details while you were in his establishment, even though you could not get into The Safe Itself. I hope you didn’t help yourself to trinkets while you were there. It would be wrong to burglarize his premises, but it is licit to take a taker in honest corn-bat. You were the good switch-man, Willy, while I was the strong magnet to hold their eyes.
“But, Willy, the water was too hot, and the soap was too strong. You are inconsiderate in so many ways.”
“And you are always perfectly considerate yourself?” Willy McGilly asked, cocking an eye-brow like a soaring hawk.
“Always,” said Hodl. And he studied his hands with their deep Heart Lines passing through the Mounds of Rectitude and Magnanimity and Piety and Sympathy and Generosity and Gentleness and all the Virtues.
Dean R. Koontz is another of the younger generation of science fiction writers. Here he proves that the alien among us may not necessarily come from a far and distant star...
Cottery was a knife man. He carried six of them laid flat and invisible against his lean body, and with these half dozen confidence boosters giving him adequate courage, he challenged Louis to a fight, for he envisioned himself as the leader of the gang. It was over inside of two minutes. Louis moved faster than he had any right to. He avoided Cottery’s blades just as if he already knew from which directions they would be swung. He delivered several punches to Cottery that looked like a small boy’s blows in a playful bout with his father, but he crippled Cottery with them as surely as he would have wielding sledgehammers. The knife man went down and threw up all over his own shoes.
It was an object lesson.
One was all we needed.
Louis had many holds on us. Although he did not look it, the fight with Cottery proved that he was somehow our physical superior. Of course, there was also the fact that only Louis knew who we were; none of the gang members could remember any past, beyond joining the gang. I’m sure that all of us, at one time or another, tried to find out who we were, but beyond the moment when we were enlisted by Louis, our memories ended at a tall, obsidian wall that could not be breached. Indeed, it was mentally and physically painful to try to remember. Ask
Louis? He would only smile and walk away, and that just made us twice as curious.
And only Louis knew our future.
It seemed that there was some purpose to the gang, to the slow growth of our numbers, though no one could fathom what it might be. But leave the group and make our own futures? Butch, our barbarian giant, tried that. He had driven his cycle only a hundred yards on his break for freedom when the cramps hit him and he took the spill at thirty-five miles an hour, skinning himself real bad.
Louis was our jailer; the gang was our prison; and the heavy, black cycles were the bars that contained us.
Then came the run down the Atlantic coast, the pounding of the cycles in the super-heated air, nights on the beaches buffeted by the sound of the waves as we slept, plenty of beer that Louis bought for us (he was the only one with money). On that run, I found out what I was. And what Louis was. And what was going to happen to all of us...
Cruising the ocean roads to take in the tourist trap towns like White City, Ankona, Palm Beach, and Boca Raton, we made a wild sight. Flowery-shirted tourists and their matronish wives always pulled off to let us go by, their faces white, the men wiping sudden perspiration from their brows. There were twelve of us in the gang, plus Louis. As in any group, there were those who stood out. Butch was six and a half feet and three hundred pounds, another twenty-five pounds for boots and chains and levis. There was Jimmy-Joe, a stiletto thin little bastard with skin like candle wax and wild, red-rimmed eyes like the eyes of a hunting hawk. He giggled and talked to himself and did not make friends. Yul was the weapons nut. His glittering head (even the eyebrows gone, yeah) distracted your attention from the bulges on his clothing: the pistol under his left arm pit, the coiled chain on his right arm.
The rest of the crew ranged along similar lines, though each seemed a weaker parody of those three. Except for me. I was a natural standout. Although I could be no more than twenty-five, my hair was pure white—eyebrows, chest, pubic, everything. They called me Old Man Toomey.
Then there was Louis.
Louis (you could not call him Lou; it would be like calling Jesus Jess) did not belong in the gang. You could see that in the fine lines of his facial bones, the aristocratic look and bearing that indicated a good private schooling in manners and carriage as well as mathematics and grammar. He didn’t have the constitution for the rugged life either, for he was small—five eight, a hundred and twenty pounds, no muscle on him. Yet he was the undisputed leader, the one who had brought us together and was planning what to do with us next.
It was two o’clock on the third day of our coast run, and we were just outside of Dania, Florida, when things began to change. Ahead, a souvenir shop loomed out of the sand and scrub, announced by huge hand-painted signs decorated with pictures of alligators and parrots. Louk raised his arm and motioned us off the highway. We followed him, thumping onto the berm and crunching across the white gravel between half a dozen parked cars. When the clatter and growl of our engines died, Louis dismounted and stood before his cycle, skinny legs spread wide.
“We’re casing it,” he said. “Don’t cause any trouble. We’ll be back tonight.”
We had never cased a place before. This was the changing point in our existence. Somehow, I knew it was a change for the worse.
We moved inside the shop, fingering the stuffed alligators, carved coconuts, shell jewelry, and genuine Indian thatchwork. The patrons stayed clear of us, their faces pale, their voices lower, more strained than the voices of people on vacation should be. The gang always garnered this sort of reaction from the straight citizens who came into contact with it. We all got a kick out of the sensation of power our appearance gave us, even though most of us must have sensed the basic psychological sickness in such an attitude.
Louis pushed past the sales counter at the back of the store and moved toward a thick, beaded curtain that closed off another room. The clerk, a tanned and wizened little man with gray hair and a prune’s share of wrinkles, grabbed him by the arm. “Where do you think you’re going?’ he asked. His fear quaked down in the bottom of his throat like a wet frog.
Louis didn’t answer. He turned and stared at the clerk, then down at the hand that held his arm. After a moment, the clerk let go and stood rubbing his cramped fingers. I could see dark bruises on his hand, though Louis had not touched him. His face had gone totally white, and there was a tic beginning in the comer of his left eye. His finger seemed paralyzed; he rubbed them frantically as if to restore circulation.
Free now, Louis continued to the beaded curtain and lifted some of the strands to peer through. I was near enough that I could see what was back there: an office of some sort, small, stacked with boxes of trinkets, containing a single desk and chair. Louis seemed satisfied, dropped the beads, and came back past the clerk who made no attempt to stop him this time.