But that was all he had gotten from the alien's pockets. It was a curiously ordinary and unexciting mess of nothing, there was no trace here of anything not human. But it did give him one thing: his destination.
And whoever had put him on the train knew that too.
The first porter he found let slip, luckily, that his name had been given as Mr. Pringle. Where they got that one, or how they got him on the train, Web was never to know. And yessir, why sutinly, sir, said the porter, looking at him oddly, as he had every right to look, this here now train sho' does stop at Chicago.
When he left the train at Chicago it was after midnight.
Dammit, he said to himself bitterly, I got to do everything at night.
He had planned to dodge around the station a bit before leaving, but there was no crowd. The place was wide and bare, stony, with a few night travelers dozing on benches. None of them he could see had sharp noses.
But now he was not sure whether they were after him or not, because—
—who in God's name had put him on the train?
He brooded for a while in a small coffee shop, but it got more and more complicated. Since the aliens had not killed him, and in fact obviously meant for him to go to Chicago and look up this man Bosco, there was no way to understand the bombing of the pod, or the empty trucks, or anything. Were there two kinds of aliens, the good guys and the bad guys? That was possible. His mind opened up. If you accept the presence of one alien, you might just as well accept dozens.
And that was quite a thought. As a matter of fact, how many aliens were there, really? The whole darn world could be shot through with aliens, skinny ones, fat ones, straight ones, bent ones, maybe all the odd-looking people he knew were aliens. Maybe even, maybe Dundon was an alien.