“Maltby,” added Dick, “was pretty much astonished to know that the ancients knew one metal would displace another from solution. They actually electroplated gold and silver—using meteoric iron to displace the noble metals because it was considered magic.” [This is fact. Electroplated objects have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs—Murray Leinster.]
The tall man’s eyes were still intent.
“That would be it,” he said slowly. “Yes. No Hall effect in liquids. Displacement-deposition from liquids. The same as electroplating of a mixed metal. Absolutely. Given copper and bismuth, I think I could do it myself.” Then his features turned wry. “Where’ll I find some bismuth? The masters won’t let it loose, one may be sure! I’ve no idea even where its ore is found or what it looks like I But any drugstore on Earth could supply me with at least some bismuth compounds!” He asked hopelessly. “Would you know bismuth ore?”
Dick shook his head.
“Given time, we might find a slave who could. Probably not here, though. In some other slave pen of some other villa. Which gives an aspect of reason to my acquired instinct to kill overseers and ruhks. I shall concentrate on that. We will try to destroy our master here, and then wage a holy war on others—for bismuth!”
“We’re going to try to capture a doorway back to Earth from a cage-trap,” protested Dick.
The tall man shook his head, in turn.
“Our masters are fools—our master and all the others,” he observed dispassionately. “They waste all the intelligence of their slaves by brutality which has no purpose but the protection of their stupidity. But they are not such fools as to keep any slave-traps out, with doorways to Earth in them, while there’s a galley full of slaves at large and in revolt! They’ll have called in all slave-traps and the doorways in them. Every one will be at the villa. And they’ll destroy every one of them if they have to run away from us to get help to destroy us. In absolute emergency they might even retreat to Earth. But I don’t think they’d like Earth!”
He grinned at that idea and went to the others. Dick turned his attention to the immediate problem of preparing to shave and otherwise disguise as many slaves as they had costumes for, to play the part of overseers.
Men continued to fish and to babble at the top of their voices. The galley was perhaps two hundred yards from shore, but this was the shore that was the Bronx on Earth. It was separate alike from Manhattan Island and from the Long Island equivalent where Queens should have existed, and on which the villa of the master stood. With all the known boats of the villa in their hands, Dick’s followers had no reason to fear bullets from the shore.
But now, suddenly, a naked figure appeared on a bluff where deep water apparently came close to the land. The figure was bent low and running. Behind it, gaining at every bound, there was the snarling shape of a ruhk. The naked man ran like a deer, reached the edge of the bluff no more than three yards ahead of the beast, and leaped magnificently. The ruhk seemed to falter in its stride, and then plunged savagely after the man. Its faltering had come with a glimpse of the galley at anchor offshore. But it plunged. Man and beast were in the air at the same time, though the man splashed and went deep before the ruhk touched water. The beast had estimated with cold ferocity that he should be able to overtake and kill the man before help could come from the galley.
The man stayed under for seconds. The ruhk rose almost instantly and paddled dog-fashion, snarling as it looked about for the man to reappear. On the galley and in the cutters howlings arose. Dick’s voice straightened out the confusion. Men piled into a single cutter and hastily shipped oars, while one with a spear crouched at the bow, grinning savagely. The cutter got under way.
The fugitive broke water, flinging back his head. The ruhk started for him, bloodcurdling sounds coming from its throat. The man in the water faced it. He dived, suddenly. The men in the cutter strained at their oars as they had never strained even under their overseer’s lashes. The ruhk growled and made for where the man had been. It swam, of course, but diving was not a part of its instinct or of its intelligence.
It screamed suddenly, and thrashed violently in the water. The man’s head momentarily appeared, five feet away. He gasped for breath and dived again. The ruhk suddenly swam powerfully for the shore. But the man rose behind it. He grabbed fiercely at its tail. His other arm rose and fell, and rose and fell, and the ruhk whirled, snarling, and a confusion of spray and foam erupted.
From the galley, Dick could see nothing but spray and battling portions of man and beast. The cutter sped for the spot, its crew straining every nerve. Then, abruptly, a sobbing cry sounded, and there was only stillness with ripples around something quite unrecognizable.
Then the man’s head popped up. The men in the cutter extended hands to him as the boat’s bow reached the floating thing. The spearman in the bow stabbed it and stabbed it and stabbed it. It did not stir.
Minutes later the cutter came back with the man who had been swimming. He was pale, but grinning. He held fast to one arm with the hand of the other, to stop the blood that came welling out from a deep bite in the flesh. A galley slave shouted, “Bring him here! I’m a doctor!”
They handed him up. Cloth that would have made part of an overseer’s robe went to make a bandage—a tight compress dipped in the salt tidal water overside for lack of a better antiseptic. Dick went to the improvised surgery and asked questions.
The newly-escaped slave, still grinning, told his tale. He had been sent—with a ruhk as guard—to carry a message to the nearest other villa up the Hudson. It should have been a two days’ journey. There was a small, one man boat still at the villa, and it had put him and his guard ashore. He’d started upriver. He’d made the journey before. As the trail ran close by the water, over a rise in the ground he caught a glimpse of the galley and the cutters at anchor. He knew of the bluff beyond him and the deep water below it. The ruhk, its eye-level lower than his, had not seen the galley. When it heard the chattering, babbling noise the exuberant slaves were making, it stopped short to listen. The slave had gone on. When it growled to him to stop, he’d started to run. It had been close, but he’d made it to the water.
“And I was in the Pacific, once,” he said, grinning more widely still. “Stationed on an atoll with a lotta natives that could swim from ‘way back. I learned some tricks from them. I’d been figurin’ on tryin’ a getaway anyhow. I hadda dagger-thorn hid in my hair. I figured if I could kill a shark, I oughta handle a ruhk. An’ I did ...”
The dagger-thorn was a monstrosity, all of ten inches long with a point like a needle. Since slaves were never barbered, he had been able to conceal it in his long hair. No tree of Earth ever bore such thorns, but here—
“What was the message you carried?” asked Dick. His face was tense. Their situation was bad enough without help coming to this villa from others.
The messenger brought out a packet neatly wrapped in modern oiled silk. Inside was a brightly-polished section of chromium-plated brass tubing, with a cork in each end. The corks yielded readily. A rolled-up sheet tumbled into Dick’s hand.
“It’s no good,” said the messenger. “It’s crazy picture-writing. I know that much!”
But Dick regarded it professionally. It was a parchment-like paper, the most beautiful and thick and glossy of hand-made writing material. It was written on in colored inks, very beautifully, and the beginning and end glittered with gold-dust or gold-filings dropped upon adhesive ink while it was still wet. It was written in hieroglyphic Egyptian characters.