Quarter after five. Parker rode a rocket with wooden seats past suns and satellites to the end of the black-light Voyage Through the Galaxy. He got out of the rocket at the end of the trip, went into the control room, and turned off the electricity. Then he followed his flashlight beam back along the black-painted floor under the stars and moons.
They were all hung by wire from the ceiling, the wire thin enough to be invisible but strong enough to hold some fairly heavy models. Parker found metal rungs in one wall, went up them to a catwalk, and from the catwalk reeled in a Saturn, a communications satellite and some rockets and stars. He removed them from their wires and left them lying together on the catwalk, then undid the wires from the ceiling. He carried the wires back down to floor-level and tied them in new places.
When he was done, he went outside again. At the corner, he could look down past the Island Earth amusement rides section — a whip, a caterpillar, whirling pots — at the gates. Not yet.
The other way was Pleasure Island. Parker walked through Pleasure Island, past the carousel with its mournful ponies and on into Hawaii.
Five-thirty. The underwater ride was a vessel that rode almost completely submerged in water. Two streams ran across Fun Island from the moat that surrounded the place, and several rides and attractions were built on, or otherwise made use of, the water. Where the water was indoors, as in the Desert Island black-light ride, it had not yet frozen, but outdoors, as here, a thin crust of ice had formed.
There were four of the underwater vehicles, three of them enclosed in a small service area behind the main ride, and the fourth out by the entrance and the ticket booth. Parker opened the hatch of one and went down inside, where a long row of seats faced portholes in the side wall. He had to stoop to walk down to the far end, where a separate seat faced all the rest. This is where in summer the boy would sit who delivered the spiel during the ride.
What Parker was looking for was an underwater exit, even a small hatch, but there didn’t seem to be one, so he went back outside to look around. He walked back and forth, and in the service area he found a loose length of pipe with an elbow at one end. It was lying on the ground near one of the vehicles. He picked it up, carried it back to the first vehicle, and lowered it into the water. It would reach the portholes. Good. He put the pipe in the ticket booth and walked on down past the Polynesian restaurant to look down the main central blacktop path toward the gates.
Still not.
Twenty minutes to six. Parker took the ax from the executioner’s hand and squeezed the blade. It cracked in two, it was wax, like the masked executioner, like the kneeling victim, like the two priests looking on with hands clutched together at their breasts and fiendish smiles of joy on their faces.
The wax museum was useless. Parker left it and walked through the thin powder of snow to the Alcatraz Island shooting gallery. His tracks were spreading out all over the park now, they wouldn’t lead anybody directly either to him or to the money.
The shooting gallery was boarded up. When he broke in through the door at the side, Parker found that the rifles were not along the counter, the chains hung there empty. He looked around, and they were stowed in a wooden crate at the back of the gallery. They were air rifles, firing pellets of pressed cardboard. Parker fired one, and the pellet had no force at all. It would sting, no more. He threw the rifle back into the crate and went outside again.
What else did Alcatraz have to offer him? The wax museum had been no good, the shooting gallery was no good. There was left the roller coaster, an outdoor gunboat ride and a restaurant. Parker went to check them out.
Five minutes to six. Parker climbed to the bridge of the pirate ship. Far down at the other end of the park were the gates, livening was beginning to come on, the temperature was dropping, but the bunch outside still hadn’t made their move.
Were they really waiting for darkness? Didn’t they realize that would only cut their advantage over him? The more time they gave him and the more darkness they gave him, the better off he’d be, didn’t they know that?
Or maybe they were still waiting for their two cop friends to come back. It could be they’d decided not to come in after him without those two, and the cops hadn’t gotten off duty yet. With the manhunt still out for Parker, it might be quite a while before they came off duty.
In the meantime, Parker only had the one gun, and that one not the best for this kind of situation. A Smith & Western Terrier, it was a five-shot .32 revolver with a two-inch barrel. Not enough bullets, not enough punch to the shot, and not enough barrel for long-range accuracy. With luck, he could get five of them at close range, but there were going to be more than five coming in after him. Somewhere in Fun Island he had to find other weapons, other ways to defend himself and disable them.
He left the bridge, went down the stairs and across the deck and down the gangplank off the pirate ship. He walked up to the long low building with the huge name out front: BUCCANEER! Again he had to break through a side door to get inside.
This was another black-light ride, like Marooned! and Voyage Through the Galaxy. The customers rode in small pirate ships this time, through a channel of water like the one in Marooned! and past many similar displays and effects.
This time Parker stopped his vessel halfway through, and stepped out into a miniature representation of New Orleans under pirate attack. Various colored lights flickered and gleamed on the mechanical movements of the dolls. Parker used one of the ornamental lines from his small boat to tie it to a building in the display, and then began to follow the wiring from the lights.
They came together in a small box with an On-Off switch. Parker turned it off, and the display abruptly went dark. The rest of the displays along the route were still working, only this one had stopped.
He had to work by flashlight, removing the wiring from several of the lights and fastening it carefully elsewhere. When he was done, he didn’t turn the display back on. He untied his boat, got back into it, and rode it the rest of the way through the ride. Since in stopping the boat he’d stripped it of its connection to the track, he was borne along by the water flowing through its winding metal trough inside the building, down to the end of the ride.
Ten minutes after six. Parker took the hunting knife from a fake-leather sheath that read Souvenir of Fun Island and balanced it along one finger. The center of gravity was where it should be, where blade met handle. He held it at the point between thumb and finger and flicked it with a snap of the wrist the room. The point thudded into the gift-shop wall, the quivered there.
It was pretty good, better than he’d expected. There was a small cardboard carton containing a dozen of the knives under a counter in the gift shop, the only useful items there. He put the carton under one arm, retrieved the first knife from the wall; and went outside to one of the narrow streets of New York Island, a sentimentalized version of New York City in the gay nineties. He’d been through the other shops, glanced into the camera store and restaurant and nickelodeon, but none of them seemed to contain anything he could use.
It was getting darker. And colder. The gloves he’d found in the watchman’s office were coming in handy, though later on he wouldn’t be able to wear one on his right hand.
At the end of the last street in New York Island he paused to look down toward the gate, but it was all silent and unmoving down there. He walked on to begin sowing his knives.
Twenty minutes to seven. Parker walked into the theater in Voodoo Island. It was a small place, with hard wooden seats, but the stage was surprisingly well furnished. It even had a fly loft, a space above the stage where backdrops and flats could be lifted when they weren’t needed onstage. The ropes ran up from the pipes on which the backdrops were hung, went over pulleys just under the roof, and came down to one side of the stage, where a complicated series of counterweights kept the backdrops well enough balanced to be raised or lowered by one man.