Casually Elliot started down Fifth Avenue again, observing the gaudy spectacle around him. Two male transvestites passed 60
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by arm-in-arm. New Orleans jazz mixed in the street with infrasonic rock. Pushcart odors—sweet, then garlicky—wafted by his face. Brief clouds of warm, moist smoke vented out of cinema cabarets into the street, slowly there to dissipate. He was smiled at several times by streetwalkers, managing to ignore them until a more assertive one—his own age, quite pretty, and wearing an expensive evening gown with stole—started walking alongside him. “Hi,” she said.
Elliot continued walking and nodded curtly. “Hello.”
“Would you like to have a date with me?”
Elliot could not resist looking her over but answered politely, “Thank you, but no.” He speeded up a bit. She matched his pace. “I’m different from the others.” Elliot glanced over as if to say, Oh? “For five thousand blues I’ll do it in my pants.”
Elliot reflected that all the weirdoes were certainly out, than gave her another glance. He couldn’t resist. “Run that by me again?”
She smiled, continuing to match his pace. “I said that for five thousand blues, I’ll go to the bathroom in my panties. I’ve been holding it in all day. You can watch me—even feel it if you want to. I wet myself, too. How about it?”
Elliot studied her with a fascinated horror mounting within him. He was almost jogging now. “You can’t be serious.”
“But I am. You’ll like it. It’s really—”
Her voice cut off as she stopped short, her face losing all expression. Almost automatically Elliot also stopped, thinking that she was about to faint. But several seconds later when she did not, Elliot knew with certainty what had caused her to stop. He backed slowly away.
“Oh, damn,” she said in a baby-soft voice. “Now you’ve made me do it.”
Five minutes later, he escaped into the lobby of the New Alongside Night
61
York Hilton from Sixth Avenue entrance. After hurrying into a telephone booth, he tried both the Rabelais Bookstore and Phillip again. There were still no answers.
Elliot then sat in the booth, taking account of his assets. He found that he had twenty-six thousand and some-odd blues in his wallet—a fair-sized sum. This surprised him. His allowance was generous, but not that generous. Then he remembered closing out his savings account just several days before to prevent the final erosion of his few remaining New Dollars. For the first time in hours, he remembered the gold he was carrying. The idea started percolating through his mind that perhaps this might be the means of financing his family’s release, whether through bribery, lawyer’s fees, or even hiring criminals for a prison break. He knew that the gold was not his but his father’s; nevertheless, his father had said that if by
“‘losing it’ or paying it as a bribe” he could improve their escape chances one iota, he wouldn’t have hesitated “for one second.”
In the meantime, though, the gold was illegal and unconverted—of no immediate use. He was hungry and still not sure whether he wanted to take a room. After first visiting the lobby magazine shop, where he bought a paperback copy of Between Planets by Robert A. Heinlein, he rode the escalator down to the Taverne Coffee Shop on the lower level. There he ate a Monte Cristo sandwich with several cups of quite good coffee (but then eating out always seemed a luxury; hotels and restaurants were not rationed at consumer level) and he read about half the novel. Elliot was a science-fiction fan, Heinlein by far his favorite author. This particular novel was an old friend that he had read many times before. Its seventeen-year-old protagonist was in a similar predicament. Unfortunately, the specific problems he encountered had their solution on Venus, not Earth. At half past ten, Elliot paid his check and called Phillip again. 62
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No answer.
Ten minutes later, Elliot had taken a single room for $11,500, registering as Donald J. Harvey, the hero of the Heinlein novel. An exorbitant bribe to the room clerk, added to advance cash payment, forestalled any questions about identification or travel permits.
The room was clean, comfortable, warm, and well lit. Though as functionally nondescript as a thousand other hotel rooms, its very anonymity made it more beautiful to Elliot than almost any other place he had seen. He punched a do-notdisturb notice into the hotel computer, locked and chained the door, then undressed for a leisurely whirlpool bath, hanging his precious belt on the towel rack so he could keep an eye on it.
He took the opportunity to examine his shoulder. On it was a purple-and-red bruise. He thought it strange that such an ugly wound did not hurt very much, but restrained from questioning his luck. The injury did not seem to require any immediate attention, though, nor would he have known what to do if it had.