The Nail and the Oracle (19 page)

Her attack was so sudden that even though her figure was small and her pert face soft, Happy could pack a surprising wallop. She hit the policeman’s blue-clad chest as if she had been fired from a cannon, like the girl in the circus. The policeman staggered back, tripped over the pudgy man’s leg, which stuck out from under the table, and went down like tall timber.

For a blind moment the smoke of fury curled around Hap’s brain and she saw nothing—only a blur. Then her vision cleared.

Two broken chairs. A table and some dishes in a rubble on the floor. The still figure of the pudgy man. And the policeman, groaning, feebly feeling the side of his head where it had struck the counter. He rolled over and began to drag one knee under him.

Happy uttered a mouse-like squeak and fled.

This was the end. This was the complete, utter, final finish of everything.

She ran, sobbing, down the street, not caring where she was going. She had attacked a policeman, wrecked the restaurant, maybe cost Hart Calway everything he had worked so hard to accumulate. And now Hart would never want to see her again.

She ran right into his arms.

“Oh, oh dear!” she gasped. “Policeman. Oh, Hart! The little man couldn’t pay lamb chops hit him on the head!”

“What?”

There were two men with Hart. One of them said, “Sounds like someone got hit on the head with some lamb chops.”

“Shut up, Frank. There’s something wrong here. Bill, blow your whistle.”

A shrill blast ripped out. For some reason it loosed a flood of tears in Happy.

Hart put an arm around her shoulders. “Come on, Happy darling,” he said gently. “Let’s go back and straighten it all out.”

Happy looked up into his face. She had caught one word, and fixed on it. She said it. “Darling.”

“Why—Happy!”

“Come on!” said the man called Bill.

Somehow Happy got her feet under her and found another breath or two. They ran back down the street. At the corner near the restaurant they were joined by two policemen.

“Who blew that whistle?”

“Come on!” Hart said urgently. They skidded to a stop in front of the restaurant. One of the policemen barked, “Down! Get
down!
”

The next thing Happy knew she was sitting on the pavement in front of the restaurant, dragged down by Hart. “Sorry, darling, but that man inside’s got a gun.”

Slowly she raised her head. She could just see into the restaurant.

The big policeman who had hit the deadbeat was behind the counter with his hand in the cash drawer. He was staring at the pudgy man, who was walking toward him on the balls of his feet. Suddenly the little man ran two delicate steps and leaped over the counter.

The policeman tried to reach his gun, but before he could grasp it, the little man was on him like a dervish. There was a flurry of
action and the little man backed off, the gun in his hand.

The two policemen, the three merchants, and Happy crowded into the restaurant. One of the policemen said, “Why—it’s the Chief!”

The pudgy man straightened up. “Hello, boys,” he panted; “Get the handcuffs on him. We’ll book him for everything from armed robbery to impersonating an officer. Know him?”

Hart looked at the limp blue figure behind the counter. “I know him,” he said.

“Me too,” said the man called Frank. “That’s Eddie Lowell. He was bootlegging from the back room of a drug store, and the Merchants’ Association ran him out. No wonder he’s been working us over, one by one.”

Happy’s head was whirling. “Please,” she said faintly. “Will s-somebody tell me what—I mean—are
you
the Chief of Police?”

The pudgy man smiled and nodded. “You, young lady, are worth your weight in gold. I mean it. This fellow has a record as long as my arm, and rewards to go with it.

“Chief,” said Hart in a bewildered voice, “will you please start from the beginning and tell me just what’s been going on here?”

“Why, sure, son.” The Chief leaned back against an undamaged table. “The way I got into it—well, I must confess that you Association men shamed me into it. If merchants have to get together for protection against a holdup man, instead of relying on the police, why, it’s a sad business. I put on these old clothes and mooched around trying to think like a criminal. I spotted this place as a natural for a holdup. Only a girl to watch it—but what a girl! Know what she did? She booby-trapped the cash drawer, and on top of that, she knocked Lowell down and ran for the police.”

“Knocked—” Hart looked at her with amazement. “And what do you mean, booby-trapped the cash drawer?”

Happy gulped. “I was scared about the cash. So I b-broke into your locker, Hart, and got all your fishhooks and sewed them into the cash bag with their points downward. And I nailed the bag to the bottom of the drawer, so if anyone tried to get it out, they couldn’t, and they’d have to reach into it for the money and
—oh!
”

“What’s the matter?” asked the Chief.

Happy said, “You really did leave your wallet in your other clothes, didn’t you?”

The Chief’s eyes twinkled. “I really did. I never want you for an enemy, young lady. You had sparks flying out of you! Anyway, this crook Lowell didn’t recognize me. He was probably going to pretend to guard me while he sent the girl for the police. Then he’d take the money and run, and the poor old deadbeat—me!—would be in for it. Of course, I knew he wasn’t one of my boys the minute I laid eyes on him, so I decided to sit tight and try to catch him in the act. You beat me to it, young lady,” he finished, wagging his head admiringly.

After they had all gone, after Hart had laughingly waved off the Chief’s insistence that he owed him for a meal, Happy turned to right the overturned table. Hart caught her arm. “Hap—” She waited.

“Hap, I—” She had never heard him stumble over his words before. “Hap, what do you suppose a fellow works for—works hard and saves and tries to build something up?”

“To get ahead.”

“Yes, but not only in business. Hap, I’ve worked twice as hard since I—you came here. Some day maybe I’ll have enough—
be
enough to—to—” He stopped, turned her to face him. “Would you wait until then?”

She lowered her voice. “If I had a part interest in this place I don’t think I’d break things, Hart.”

“You mean you—”

“—and with the reward money I get, you could buy a cash register and—and—because husbands and wives can jointly own—oh,
Hart!
”

Once upon a possible (for though there is only one past, there are many futures), after twelve hours of war and forty-some years of reconstruction, and at a time when nothing had stopped technology (for technological progress not only accelerates, so does the
rate
at which it accelerates), the country was composed of strip-cities, six blocks wide and up to eighty miles long, which rimmed the great superhighways, and wildernesses. And at certain remote spots in the wilderness lived primitives, called Primitives, a hearty breed that liked to stay close to nature and the old ways. And it came about that a certain flack, whose job it was to publicize the national pastime, a game called Quoit, was assigned to find a person who had never seen the game; to invite him in for one game, to get his impressions of said game and to use them as flacks use such things. He closed the deal with a Primitive who agreed to come in exchange for the privilege of shopping for certain trade goods. So …

The dust cloud had a chromium nose and a horrible hiss. It labored down the lane, swinging from side to side, climbed the final rise, slowed beside the rustic gate with the ancient enameled legend O
URSER
over it, slewed around and stopped, whereupon it was enveloped in its own streaming tail. The hissing subsided, and the dust cloud seemed to slump at its swirling heart. In the silence the dust settled on and around the ground-effect vehicle, its impregnable, scratchproof, everlasting finish ignominiously surrendering its gleam and glitter to the pall of bone-dry marl. There was a moment of silence, accented by the
râles
of cooling metal and the barbarous comments of faraway frightened crickets and a nearby unabashed frog. Then the vehicle emitted a faint rising whine as a circular section in a side window began to spin; in a second the sound was up
out of the audible range and the dust vanished from the rotating part of the window, presenting a dark porthole in which a jovial head appeared, browless, hairless, and squinting nervously at all the unconditioned air. It stared through the bars of the gate at what would have been a footpath except that there were two of them, parallel and winding up through the meadow to a stand of maples. From these, in due course, issued an impossibility outside the pages of some historical treatise—not annealed plastic, but formed metal; not hovering, but wheeled; streamlined outlandishly only where it showed and, most surprising of all, producing constant sound from the power plant.

The man in the hovercraft watched with incredulity the stately progress of this wheeled fossil as it bumped across the meadow and came to a stop on the other side of the gate. From it stepped a tall man dressed embarrassingly, bearing a burden of some kind. He closed the door of his antique and locked it with a key, and walked to the other side to try the door there. At last he turned to face the hovercar. He did so with an expression of distaste, which he wore the whole time he approached.

The hairless man touched a stud on the dash and listened intently to the murmur that came from surrounding speakers. Then he palmed a pale spot on the dash and the side panel snicked out of sight, gone up, down, sidewise—who could tell?—and repeated what the recorder had told him: “Hello. Hello. Bil Ferry speaking. Is Mr. Ourser there?”

The tall man put out a searching hand, found that there was indeed an opening and got in. The driver brushed the pale spot and the opening went
snick!
and was no longer an opening. The newcomer winced, then said, “I’m Ourser.”

“Did I get it right?” asked Bil Ferry.

“You mean the ‘hello, hello’ bit? That’s for the telephone,” said Mr. Ourser mercilessly.

“Damn dim research department,” grumbled the flack, and started the hovercraft. “Anyway, I tried.”

“Nobody but a Primitive
tries
,” said Mr. Ourser starchily. “There’s no reason to.”

“Passpoint unreason there, classmate,” said Bil Ferry rapidly. “Y’ll know it, comes Ol’ Florio flippin.”

“I,” said Mr. Ourser, “am a scholar, and among other things I am devoted to the purity of the tongue. I do not dig you one bit, man.”

“Sorr, so sorr. All I mean, you’ll see Florio put out lots effort, plenty, today. You find me?”

“I follow the general trend. This Florio, I take it, is your favorite and champion.
Slow down, you idiot!
” The hovercraft, as always when not automatically guided, had begun to indulge in its proclivity for heading at forty-five degrees to the direction it was traveling. Bil Ferry wrestled the tiny figure-eight–shaped wheel, corrected the heading and said, unabashed, “Positive, poz-poz-poz,” and slowed to a comparative crawl. “Every rockhead in the world thinks he’s an expert driver,” grumbled the Primitive. “Not me, classmate,” said the other cheerfully. “Who needs it? I am expert flack.”

The hovercar hissed over the undulating marl road with its high wide white mantle of dust airborne in its wake. In time it turned onto the remains of a blacktop feeder road, the potholes and weed patches of which the craft ignored, and came at last to the superway approach. Bil Ferry placed the vehicle carefully on the center stripe of the approach ramp and accelerated to match the flowing patches of violet on its buff background. There was the soft syllable of a gong, and a saucer-sized purple light appeared at the center of the dash. Bil Ferry sighed, folded up the steering wheel with a snap and pushed it forward, where it was swallowed without a trace by a gateway in the dash. The flack sighed again and swung his seat around on its pivot with his back to the windshield. Mr. Ourser was sitting rigid, perspiration starting visibly from his temples and his eyes tight closed, as the hovercraft swept around the curve of the ramp accelerating (100, 130, 150, 165) to the straightaway.

“What’s the matter, classmate?”

“I hate these things,” said Mr. Ourser. “Hate this.”

Bil Ferry settled himself comfortably. “Now I got a chance to brief you about the Q this after.”

“Please don’t,” said the Primitive. “It never made any sense to
me before and I don’t think it or anything else would make any sense to me just now.” He opened his eyes, took in the blur of continuous village at the sides, the hurtling hovercraft that preceded them a precise one hundred yards ahead and the other, which followed one hundred yards behind, all three vehicles strung on the broad yellow stripe of the center line. He glanced at, and winced from, the luminous yellow figures that seemed to hang unsupported three inches away from the dash, with the information (175) he so little desired at the moment. “Talk if you want. Just don’t ask me to think.”

“Kay,” said the unpuncturable Bil Ferry agreeably. “You don’t got a Q stadium your place, poz?”

“We haven’t, we can’t, we wouldn’t and, as you say, we don’t.”

“What you do instead?”

“Instead of what?”

“Sitement. Root. You trace me? The big game.”

“Oh. Well, football. Then in the winter there’s basketball and hockey. And some of us like tennis. But the main thing is baseball.” The flack shook his head. “Not baseball. Nobody can und’stan’ baseball.”

“Not understand baseball?” cried Mr. Ourser.

“I researched baseball,” said Bil Ferry. “Chit and chat with you, home ground, friendly, you find me? I don’t und’stan’ it. RBI. MVP. Earned runs. Hittin zungos.”

“Fungos. Anyone can understand baseball! Why—”

And so it was that the Primitive began to lecture the flack, the one still tensely gripping the sides of his seat and averting his eyes from the outscape, the other relaxed and puzzled, listening with birdlike cockings of the head and bright, unreceptive eyes. It would have been clear to Mr. Ourser, had he been observing the evolution of the flack’s expression from interest through perplexity, that the flack had eventually tuned him out and was just listening to the noise.