The memorygram clutched onto everything he said, organized it, and jammed it deep into my bruised synapses. I stifled a groan and took another painpill. By sunrise I felt I had enough of a command of the language to add to it by myself and switched off the machine. My companion fell over asleep and clunked his head on the rock without waking. I let him sleep and disentangled us both from the electronic equipment. After the nightlong session I was tired myself, but a stimtab took care of that. Hunger growled plaintively in my gut, and I broke out some rations. Slasher awoke soon after and shared my breakfast, eating one of the bars only after he saw me break off the end and consume it myself. I belched with satisfaction, and he echoed eructatingly. He eyed me and my equipment for some time before he made a positive statement.
“I know who you are.”
“So tell me.”
“You’re from Mars, dat’s what.”
“What’s Mars?”
“The planet, you know.”
“Yeah, you might be right. It don’t matter. You gonna do what I said, help me get some loot?”
“I told you. I’m on parole. If I’m grabbed, they’ll throw the key away.”
“Don’t let it bug you. Stick with me and they won’t lay a finger on you. You’ll be rolling in bucks. Do you have any of these bucks? I want to see what they look like.”
“No!” he said, and his hand went to a bulge in a flap of material affixed to his lower garments. By this time I could detect his simple lies without my equipment.
Sleepgas quieted him, and I worked a sort of hide envelope from his clothing that contained flimsy scraps of green paper, undoubtedly the bucks he had referred to not having. To look at them was to laugh! The cheapest copying machine could turn out duplicates of these by the barrelful—unless there were hidden means of authentification. To check I went over them with the most delicate equipment and found no trace of chemical, physical, or radioactive identification. Amazing. The paper did appear to contain short threads of some kind of substance, but a duplicator would print replicas of these on the surface which would do fine. If only I had a duplicator. Or did I have a duplicator? Toward the end there they were hanging every kind of equipment on me that they could. I rooted through the pile, and sure enough, there was a tiny desk model duplicator. It was loaded with a block of extremely dense material that was expanded in some cellular fashion inside the machine to produce a sheet of smooth white plastic on which the copies were made. After a number of adjustments I managed to reduce the quality of the plastic until it was as rough and crumpled as the bucks. Now when I touched the copy button, the machine produced a buck that appeared a duplicate of the original. The largest denomination Slasher had was a ten-buck note, and I made a number of copies of this. Of course, they all had the same serial number, but my experience has been that people never look very closely at the money they accept.
It was time to move into the next phase of my penetration of the society of this primitive planet. Earth. (I had discovered that Dirt was not correct and had another meaning altogether.) I arranged about my person the equipment I might need and left the remainder in the cave with the space suit. It would be here whenever I needed it. Slasher mumbled and snored when I floated him back across the lake and low ova the trees toward the road. There was more traffic on it now during the day, I could hear the vehicles rumbling by, so I once more dropped down into the forest. Before waking Slasher, I buried the grav-chute with a radio transponder that would lead me back to it if needs be.
“What, what?” Slasher said, sitting up as soon as the antidote took effect. He looked around uncomprehendingly at the forest.
“On your hooves,” I told him. “We gotta move out of here.”
He shambled after me, still half-asleep, though he woke up rather quickly when I ruffled the wad of money under his nose.
“How do these bucks look to you?”
“Great—but I thought you didn’t have any bread?”
“I got enough food, but not enough money. So I made these. Are they OK?”
“A-OK, I never seen better.” He flipped through them with the appraising eye of the professional. “The only way you can tell is that the numbers are all the same. This is high-class green.”
He parted with them only reluctantly. A man of little imagination and no compunction; just what I needed. The sight of the bucks seemed to have driven all fear of me from him and he actively joined in planning to obtain even more money as we trudged along the road.
“That outfit you’re wearing, it’s OK from a distance, like now, no one in the cars notices nuttin’. But we gotta get you some threads. There’s kind of a general store foot of this hill. You wait away from the road while I go in and buy what you need. In fact, maybe we get some wheels before that; my feet are killing me. There’s some kind of little factory there with a parking lot. We’ll see what they’re selling.”
The factory proved to be a squat, squarish building with a number of chimneys that were puffing out smoke and pollution. An assortment of multicolored vehicles were arranged to one side, and following Slasher’s example, I bent low as we moved quickly to the nearest one in the outside row. When he was sure we were unobserved, my companion released a catch on a swollen purple thing, with what appeared to be a row of metal teeth at one end, and lifted a large lid. I looked in and gasped at the excessively complex and primitive propulsion engine it contained. I was indeed in the past. In response to my questions, Slasher described it as he shorted some wires that seemed to control the ignition.
“An intoinal-combustion engine we call it. Almost new, should be three hundred horses there. Climb in and we’ll make tracks out of here before anybody sees us.”
I made a mental note to inquire later about the theory behind this intoinal combustion. From earlier conversation I had understood that horses were a rather large quadruped, so perhaps it was an animal miniaturizing process to get a large number of them into the machine. But primitive as the device looked, it certainly moved quickly enough. Slasher manipulated the controls and twisted the large wheel, and we shot out onto the road and were away—apparently without being detected. I was more than satisfied to let Slasher drive while I observed this world that I had arrived on.
“Where is all the money kept? You know, like the place where they lock it up.”
“You must mean the banks. Places with thick walls, big vaults, armed guards. They got at least one in every town.”
“And the bigger the town, the bigger the bank?”
“You’re catchin’ on.”
“Then drive on to the nearest big town and find the biggest bank. I need plenty of bread. So we’ll clean it out tonight.”
Slasher gaped in awe. “You can’t mean it! They got all kinds of alarms and stuff.”
“I laugh at their Stone Age gadgets. Just find the town, find the bank, then find some food and drink. Tonight I’ll make you rich.”
Chapter 5
In all truth I have never robbed a bank more easily or cracked a simpler crib. The establishment I selected was in the center of a city with the improbable-sounding name of Hartford. It was severely constructed of gray stone, and all the openings were covered with thick metal bars—but these defenses were negated by the fact that there were other buildings joined to the bank on both sides. A rat rarely enters by the front door. It was early evening when we set out, and Slasher was jittery and nervous despite the large quantity of low-quality alcoholic beverage he had consumed.