He needed attention for that wound, to stop the bleeding. Why not walk out there, look for a policeman—were there policemen here?—and give himself up, tell the truth?
The truth? What was the truth? Tell them, «You’re all wrong. This is the United States, Earth, Greeneville, New York, and it’s June, nineteen hundred fifty-two, all right—but there isn’t any space travel except an experimental rocket that hasn’t landed yet and dollars are the currency and not credits—even if they’ve got Fred M. Vinson’s signature and Washington’s picture—and there aren’t any purple Bems and a guy named L. A. Borden lives near here and will explain who I am.»
Impossible, of course. From what he’d seen and heard there was only one person here who would believe any of that and that one person would promptly be locked up in a nuthouse if nothing worse.
No, he didn’t want to do that. Not yet, anyway—not until he’d had time to orient himself a little better and find out what it was all about.
Somewhere, blocks away, sirens wailed, coming closer. Police cars, if that sirensound meant the same thing here that it did in more familiar surroundings.
Quickly he crossed the quiet side street, went through another alley and then, keeping in the shadows as much as possible, put another few blocks between himself and the main street. He shrank back into the shadow of another areaway as a squad car turned the corner with siren shrieking. It went past.
He had to find sanctuary somewhere, even though there was risk in finding it. He couldn’t wander long this way without being seen—not with blood on his sleeve and the back of his coat, he remembered now, torn.
There was a sign Rooms for Rent in the window of the next building. Did he dare take a chance? The feel of blood running down past his elbow told him he’d have to.
Keeping in the shadows as much as he could, he went to the door and looked in through the glass. Perhaps, if he kept his bad side away from the clerk …
But there wasn’t any clerk at the desk inside the door. There was a push-bell on the desk and a sign, Ring for Clerk. Perhaps …
He opened the door as quietly as he could and closed it the same way. He tiptoed to the desk and studied the rack behind it. There were a row of boxes, some with mail, a few with keys in them. He looked around carefully and then leaned across the desk and picked the key out of the nearest box.
It was numbered 201.
He looked around again. No one had seen him. He tiptoed to the stairs. They were carpeted and didn’t creak and 201 was right at the head of them.
Inside the room he locked the door behind him and turned on the light. Now, if only the occupant of 201 didn’t come in within the next half hour, he had a chance.
He stripped off his coat and shirt and studied the wound. It was going to be painful but not dangerous. The gouge was half an inch deep but the bleeding was already slowing down.
He made sure by looking in the dresser drawer that the missing occupant of 201 had shirts—within half a size of his own—and then he ripped apart the shirt he had just taken off and used it to bandage the arm, winding it around and around so that the blood would soak through slowly if at all.
Then he appropriated a dark shirt from the dresser—picking a dark one because his own had been white—and a necktie from the rack. One of three suits that hung in the closet was dark blue, a perfect contrast to his own light tan and he put it on. There was a straw hat too. At first he thought it too big for him but, with a little paper folded under the sweat-band, it served.
He made a quick estimate and translation of the value of the things he’d taken, and left a five-hundred-credit note on the bureau. Fifty dollars should be ample. The suit, the main item, was neither new nor expensive.
He made his own clothes into a bundle, wrapped with some newspaper that had been in the closet. Much as he wanted to study and read those newspapers, he knew that getting out of here and to a safer place came first.
He opened the door and listened. There was still no sound from the little lobby downstairs. He went down the stairs as silently as he had come up them and was safely outside again. Now, with a complete change of clothing, with no blood visible from his wounded arm, he needn’t fear the prowling cars. Only the druggist—or the Lunan—could identify him and he’d give the drugstore a wide berth.
He got rid of his bundle in the first handy waste receptacle and then, walking as nonchalantly as he could, ventured onto the crowded main street of the town.
Now, with his appearance reasonably changed, he dared look for sanctuary for the night—and a place where he could study at leisure the two magazines in his pocket. He had an idea those were going to be the most interesting magazines he’d ever read.
He walked in the direction opposite that of the drugstore where disaster had so nearly befallen him. He passed a man’s haberdashery, a sporting goods store, a theater at which was playing a picture he had seen in New York two months before. Everything seemed normal and ordinary. The people about him were normal and ordinary. For a moment, he wondered if—
Then he came to a newsstand with a rack of newspapers in front of it. The headline read:
ARCS ATTACK MARS; DESTROY KAPI
Earth Colony Unprepared
Dopelle Vows Vengeance
He stepped closer to read the date. It was today’s issue of the New York Times, as familiar typographically as the palm of his hand. He picked the top copy off the rack and went into the store with it. He handed the newsdealer a hundred credit note and got ninety-nine credits in change—all in bills like the ones he had except in smaller denominations. He stuffed the paper in his pocket and hurried out.
A few doors farther on was a hotel. He checked in, signing—after a second’s hesitation while he picked up the pen—his right name and address. There wasn’t any bellhop. The clerk handed him the key and told him where to find the room, at the end of the corridor on the second floor.
Two minutes later, with the door closed and locked behind him, he took a deep breath of relief and sat down on the bed. For the first time since whatever had happened in the drugstore he felt safe.
He took the newspaper and the magazines from his pocket, then got up again to hang his coat and hat on the hanger inside the door. As he did so, he noticed two knobs and a dial on the wall beside the doorway, above a six inch circular area of cloth—obviously a built-in radio with the cloth covering a speaker outlet.
He turned the knob that looked like a rheostat and it was. A faint hum responded immediately. He turned the tuning dial until a station came in clear and strong, then turned down the volume a little. It was good music—sounded like Benny Goodman, although he didn’t recognize the tune.
He went back to the bed, took off his shoes to be comfortable and propped pillows up against the head of the bed. He picked up, first, his own book, Surprising Stories. He stared again, with growing wonder, at the cover—incredibly the same picture, incredibly different.
He opened it quickly to the contents page and didn’t even glance at the table of contents until he read the statement of ownership. That was what came first … Borden Publications, Inc. … L. A. Borden, Editor and Publisher. Keith Winton, Managing Editor.
He found he’d been holding his breath a little. He belonged here then (wherever here was) and he still had a job. And Mr. Borden too—but what had happened to Borden’s country estate, the estate that had literally fallen out from under him?