Harse stared, with his luminous pale eyes. But it was true; there was
such a law, for the parks of the city lately had become fields of honor
where rival gangs contended with bottle shards and zip guns, where a
passerby was odds-on to be mugged.
"High Command must know this," Harse grumbled. "Must proceed, they
say, to Nexus Point. But then one finds the aboriginals have made laws!
Oh, I shall make a report!"
"_Sure_ you will," Mooney soothed; but in his heart, he was prepared to
bet heavily against it.
Because he had a new strategy. Clearly he couldn't get the survival
kit from Harse. He had tried that and there was no luck; his arm still
tingled as the bellboy's had, from having seemingly absent-mindedly
taken the handle to help Harse. But there was a way.
Get rid of this clown from the future, he thought contentedly; meet
the Nexus Point instead of Harse and there was the future, ripe for
the taking! He knew where the rescuers would be--and, above all,
he knew how to talk. Every man has one talent and Mooney's was
salesmanship.
All the years wasted on peddling dime-store schemes like frozen-food
plans! But this was the big time at last, so maybe the years of
seasoning were not wasted, after all.
"That for you, Uncle Lester," he muttered. Harse looked up from his
viewer angrily and Mooney cleared his throat. "I said," he explained
hastily, "we're almost at the--the Nexus Point."
* * * * *
Snow was drifting down. The cab-driver glanced at the black, quiet
library, shook his head and pulled away, leaving black, wet tracks in
the thin snow.
The pale-eyed man looked about him irritably. "You!" he cried, waking
Mooney from a dream of possessing the next ten years of stock-market
reports. "You! Where is this Vale of Cashmere?"
"Right this way, Harse, right this way," said Mooney placatingly.
There was a wide sort of traffic circle--Grand Army Plaza was the name
of it--and there were a few cars going around it. But not many, and
none of them looked like police cars. Mooney looked up and down the
broad, quiet streets.
"Across here," he ordered, and led the time traveler toward the edge of
the park. "We can't go in the main entrance. There might be cops."
"Cops?"
"Policemen. Law-enforcement officers. We'll just walk down here a way
and then hop over the wall. Trust me," said Mooney, in the voice that
had put frozen-food lockers into so many suburban homes.
The look from those pale eyes was anything but a look of trust, but
Harse didn't say anything. He stared about with an expression of
detached horror, like an Alabama gentlewoman condemned to walk through
Harlem.
"Now!" whispered Mooney urgently.
And over the wall they went.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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