Chapter 6

Oh, clever Mooney! He crouched under a snowy tree, watching the man from the future speed effortlessly away ... in the wrong direction.

The cop was hailing him; clever cop! All it had taken was a couple of full-throated yells and at once the cop had perceived that someone was in the park. But cleverer than any cop was Mooney.

Men from the future. Why, thought Mooney contentedly, no Mrs. Meyerhauser of the suburbs would have let me get away with a trick like that to sell her a freezer. There’s going to be no problem at all. I don’t have to worry about a thing. Mooney can take care of himself!

By then, he had caught his breath--and time was passing, passing.

He heard a distant confused yelling. Harse and the cop? But it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was getting to the Nexus Point at one minute past one.

He took a deep breath and began to trot. Slipping in the snow, panting heavily, he went down the path, around the little glade, across the covered bridge.

He found the shallow steps that led down to the Vale.

And there it was below him: a broad space where walks joined, and in the space a thing shaped like a dinosaur egg, rounded and huge. It glowed with a silvery sheen.

Confidently, Mooney started down the steps toward the egg and the moving figures that flitted soundlessly around it. Harse was not the only time traveler, Mooney saw. Good, that might make it all the simpler. Should he change his plan and feign amnesia, pass himself off as one of their own men?

Or--

A movement made him look over his shoulder.

Somebody was standing at the top of the steps. “Hell’s fire,” whispered Mooney. He’d forgotten all about that aboriginal law; and here above him stood a man in a policeman’s uniform, staring down with pale eyes.

No, not a policeman. The face was--Harse’s.

Mooney swallowed and stood rooted.

“You!” Harse’s savage voice came growling. “You are to stand. Still?”

Mooney didn’t need the order; he couldn’t move. No twentieth-century cop was a match for Harse, that was clear; Harse had bested him, taken his uniform away from him for camouflage--and here he was.

Unfortunately, so was Howard Mooney.

The figures below were looking up, pointing and talking; Harse from above was coming down. Mooney could only stand, and wish--wish that he were back in Sea Bright, living on cookies and stale tea, wish he had planned things with more intelligence, more skill--perhaps even with more honesty. But it was too late for wishing.

Harse came down the steps, paused a yard from Mooney, scowled a withering scowl--and passed on.

He reached the bottom of the steps and joined the others waiting about the egg. They all went inside.

The glowing silvery colors winked and went out. The egg flamed purple, faded, turned transparent and disappeared.

Mooney stared and, yelling a demand for payment, ran stumbling down the steps to where it had been. There was a round thawed spot, a trampled patch--nothing else.

They were gone...

Almost gone. Because there was a sudden bright wash of flame from overhead--cold silvery flame. He looked up, dazzled. Over him, the egg was visible as thin smoke, hovering. A smoky, half-transparent hand reached out of a port. A thin, reedy voice cried: “I promised you. Pay?”

And the silvery dispatch-case sort of thing, the survival kit, dropped soundlessly to the snow beside Mooney.

When he looked up again, the egg was gone for good.

He was clear back to the hotel before he got a grip on himself--and then he was drunk with delight. Honest Harse! Splendidly trustable Harse! Why, all this time, Mooney had been so worried, had worked so hard--and the whole survival kit was his, after all!