Vickers dug into his pocket and pulled out folded bills.
"Gosh, mister…"
Out of the corner of his eye, Vickers saw the policeman standing on the sidewalk, watching him. The policeman took a step, started across the lot.
"Here," said Vickers.
He grabbed the top and tossed the folded bills into the boy's lap. He straightened and ran, heading for the alley.
"Hey, you!" the policeman shouted.
Vickers kept on running.
"Hey, you! Stop, or I'll shoot!"
A gun exploded and Vickers heard the thin, high whine of a bullet going past his head. The policeman could not even have guessed what he was doing or who he was, but the morning paper must have left everyone frightened, on edge.
He reached the first of the buildings in the alley and ducked around it.
He couldn't stay in the alley, he knew, for when the policeman came around the corner of the building, he would be a sitting duck.
He ducked into a passageway between two buildings and realized, even as he did it, that he'd turned in the wrong direction, for the passageway would lead him back onto the street on which lay the wrecked and battered car.
He saw an open basement window and knew, without even thinking of it, that it was his only chance. He gauged his distance and threw himself, feet first, and was through the window. The sill caught him in the back and he felt the fire of pain run along his body, then his head smashed into something and the basement was a place of darkness filled with a million stars. He came down sprawling and the wind was knocked out of him and the top, flying from his hand, bounced along the floor.
He clawed himself to his hands and knees and ran down the top. He found a water pipe and grasped it and pulled himself erect. There was a raw place on his back that burned and his head buzzed with the violence of the blow. But he was safe, for a little while.
He found a stairs and climbed them and saw that he was in the back room of a hardware store. The place was filled with haphazardly piled rolls of chicken wire, rolls of roofing paper, cardboard cartons, bales of binder twine, lengths of stove pipe, crated stoves, coils of Manila rope.
He could hear people moving up in front, but there was no one in sight. He ducked behind a crated stove and from the window above his head a splash of sun came down so that he crouched in a pool of light.
Outside, in the alleyway, he heard running feet go past and from far away he heard men shouting. He hunkered down, pressing his body against the rough board crating of the stove and tried to control his labored breathing, afraid that if someone came into the room they might hear his rasping breath.
He'd have to figure out some way to get away, he knew, for if he stayed where he was they finally would find him. They would start combing the area, police and citizens alike. And, by that time, they would know who it was they hunted. The boy would tell them he had found the top lying near the car and someone then might remember they had seen him park the car and the waitress in the restaurant might remember him. From many little bits of information, they would know their fugitive was the man whose Forever car they'd smashed.
He wondered what would happen to him when they found him. He remembered the bulletin from St. Malo, about the man hanging from the lamp post with a placard on his chest.
But there was no way to escape. He was caught and there wasn't, for the moment, much that he could do. He couldn't sneak out into the alley, for they'd be watching for him. He could go back into the basement, but that wasn't any better than the place he was. He could saunter out into the store and act like a customer, finally walk out into the street, doing his best to look like an ordinary citizen who had dropped into the place to look at some treasured gun or tool he wished that he could buy. But he doubted that he could carry it off.
So the illogic hadn't paid off, after all. Logic and reason were still the winners, still the factors that ruled the ordering of men's lives.
There was no escape from this sun-lit nest behind the crated stove.
There was no escape, unless — He had found the top again. He had the top there with him.
There was no escape — unless the top should work, there was no escape.
He put the top's point on the floor and spun it slowly, pumping on the handle. It picked up speed; he pumped the faster. He let go and it spun, whistling. He hunkered in front of it and watched the colored stripes. He saw them come into being and he followed them into infinity and he wondered where they went. He forced his attention on the top, narrowing it down until the top was all he saw.
It didn't work. The top wobbled and he put out a hand and stopped it.
He tried again.
He had to be an eight-year-old. He had to go back to childhood once again. He must clear away his mind, sweep out all adult thoughts, all the adult worry, all sophistication. He must become a child.
He thought of playing in the sand, of napping under trees, of the feel of soft dust beneath bare feet. He closed his eyes and concentrated and caught the vision of a childhood and the color and the smell of it.
He opened his eyes and watched the stripes and filled his mind with wonder, with the question of their being and the question of where they went when they disappeared.
It didn't work. The top wobbled and he stopped it.
A frantic thought wedged its way into his consciousness. He didn't have much time. He had to hurry.
He pushed the thought away.
A child had no conception of time. For the child, time went on forever and forever. He was a little boy and he had all the time there was and he owned a brand new top.
He spun the top again.
He knew the comfort of a home and a loved mother and the playthings scattered on the floor and the story books that Grandma would read to him when she came visiting again. And he watched the top, with a simple, childish wonder — watching the stripes come up and disappear, come up and disappear, come up and disappear — He fell a foot or so and thumped upon the ground and he was sitting atop a hill and the land stretched out before him for miles and miles and miles, an empty land of waving grass and groves of trees and far-off, winding water.
He looked down at his feet and the top was there, slowly spinning to a wobbling halt.
CHAPTER THIRTY
THE land lay new and empty of any mark of Man, a land of raw earth and sky; even the wildness of the wind that swept across it seemed to say that the land was untamed.
From his hilltop, Vickers saw bands of dark, moving shapes that he felt sure were small herds of buffalo and even as he watched three wolves came loping up the slope, saw him and veered off, angling down the hill. In the blue sweep of sky that arched from horizon to horizon without a single cloud a bird wheeled gracefully, spying out the land. It screeched and the screech came down to Vickers as a high, thin sound filtered through the sky.
The top had brought him through. He was safe in this empty land with wolves and buffalo.
He climbed to the ridgetop and looked across the reaches of the grassland, with its frequent groves and many watercourses, sparkling in the sun. There was no sign of human habitation — no roads, no threads of smoke sifting up the sky.
He looked at the sun and wondered which way was west and thought he knew, and if he was right, the sun said it was midmorning. But if he was wrong, it was midafternoon and in a few hours darkness would come upon the land. And when darkness came, he would have to figure out how to spend the night.
He had meant to go into «fairyland» and this, of course, wasn't it. If he had stopped to think about it, he told himself, he would have known that it would not be, for the place he had gone to as a child could not have been fairyland. This was a new and empty world, a lonely and perhaps a terrifying world, but it was better than the back room of a hardware store in some unknown town with his fellow men hunting him to death.