"Yes." said the bird wearily.
"And arise reborn from the ashes?"
"Quite true."
"But." the reporter said, frowning, "I thought you were indigenous to the East."
"I was originally," the bird agreed. "However, since the phoenix is a symbol of ever-renewing youth, I decided to migrate to a more appropriate locale."
"Here in the Mississippi Valley?"
"Don't be silly," the bird said. "I was on my way to Hollywood, but I foresaw that I would die before I completed the Hight."
"You can foresee your death, then?"
"Of course, as welt as other events. I have precognition, you see."
"Precognition? That means you can predict coming events, doesn't it?"
"Yes," the phoenix said, beginning to weave a scrap of newspaper into the nest, which was nearly finished.
"Such as the outcome of the next election and who will win the World Series and…"
"Oh, thai and much more," the bird said, settling itself into the completed nest. "But don't ask me to," she said.
"Everyone's always asking for a free prediction. Very exasperating."
"1 had no intention," protested the reporter.
"Yes, you did," contradicted the bird. "Anyway, there's only a few minutes left before twelve."
"Is that when…?"
"Yes," said the phoenix. "Promptly at noon." The reporter paused and eyed the nest.
"That's not quite the nest 1 had expected," he remarked at last. "1 thought you were supposed to use sandalwood and various other exotic plants."
"Now, tell me," the bird said impatiently, "where would I get sandalwood around here?"
"You do have a point," the reporter agreed. "I notice," he added with a small glow of pride, "thai you have used my paper as part of your nest." He pointed to a large piece of newsprint bearing the masthead The Gazette and a black headline below.
"Yes. Not a very satisfactory texture, however." The phoenix squirmed uncomfortably. "Do you have the correct time?" she said.
"It's one minute to twelve," the young man offered.**I suppose you ignite spontaneously?"
"I'm afraid that part of the legend isn't quite true," tile phoenix sighed. "Usually in the past I've had help."
"Oh," said the reporter, "I didn't know. Can I offer you a match?"
The bird eyed the shred of newspaper whose black headlines said: "AEC to Test Nitrogen Super-Bomb Today Noon."
"That will not be necessary," she said.
Sphinx
An obvious symbol of divine strength might be a human body with a lion's head, or, in reverse, a lion's body with a human head. The lion. after all. was a particularly feared predator, a.'id the ' 'king of beasts.''
The Greek griffins, as f explained earlier, were creatures with the torso of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. An only slightly different composite was one with the torso of a lion, the wings of an eagle, and the head and breasts of a woman.
Such a creature was pictured as a fearsome monster from whose grasp no human being could escape. It was called a ' 'sphinx'' from a Greek word meaning ' 'to hold tightly."
The most famous sphinx in the Greek myths was one that existed just outside the city of Thebes and that stopped travelers going to that city. It posed a problem to them:
"What goes on four legs in the morning, on two at won, and on three in the evening?" Failure to answer correctly meant death. The Greek hero Oedipus, however, guessed correctly that the answer was the human being, who crawled on all fours in the morning of life, stood upright on two legs in maturity, and needed a cane in old age. The sphinx then killed itself in frustration.
The Egyptians would occasionally build lions with the heads of reigning monarchs, simply to show the strength of the monarch and, through him, of the nation. This was sympathetic magic. Showing the nation to be strong would keep it strong in actuality. (We're familiar with that sort of thing today, too.) The most famous Egyptian sphinx is the very large Great Sphinx built in connection with the Great PyramidThis Egyptian sphinx is featured in the following story.
The Pyramid Project
by Robert F. Young
The Sphinx
Daniel Hall met the enemy in the blue skies of NRGC 984-D but it cannot be said that the enemy was his. Neither can it be said that he was me enemy's. In point of fact, about all that can be said about the encounter is that it never quite came off. One minute there were two trim scout ships, one Terran and the other Uvelian, arrowing toward each other, and the next minute there were two trim scout ships veering off at right angles to each other and dropping rapidly planetward.
What happened to the Uvelian pilot will be touched upon later. Right now, the camera is focused on Daniel Hall.
He came down near the edge of a wide tableland and plowed a long furrow in a stretch of snow-white sand. The impact tore one of the viewscope brackets loose and sent it ricocheting from wall to wall. On the third ricochet it sideswiped Hall, ripping through both layers of his spacesuit and tearing open his left ann from elbow to shoulder- Still not satisfied, it struck the radio panel and smashed the transmitter. Then it gave up the ghost and dropped to the deck.
Hall hadn't meant to make such a hard landing. He hadn't meant to make any kind of landing. An invisible force had seized the controls and lorn the ship out of the sky, and he hadn't been able to do a thing about it.
He tried the controls now. He tried them singly and in pairs. No matter how he tried them, they did not respond
Next, he had a go at the radio. He knew even while he was beaming his S.O.S that it would never get beyond the stratosphere and that all he would receive for his pains would be static. He was right. He turned the radio off Well anyway, NRGC 984-D had a reasonably amiable climate and a reasonably amiable atmosphere-his instruments told him that much. So he could stay alive for a little while at least.
Hall grinned. "A little while'* was right. The Ten-an fleet's imminent engagement with the Uvelian wouldn't be postponed merely because an unimportant space scout, who had been sent on ahead to determine whether or not the planet in whose vicinity the engagement was to take place had intelligent inhabitants, failed to report back. The assignment had been no more than a token gesture in the first place-a gesture that would sound good on the flagship's tog-tape when the war was over. Whether NRGC 984-D had intelligent inhabitants or not, the commander of the Terran fleet would carry out his original orders, and if a planet-wide tectonic upheaval resulted from the side effects of the battle- and only a miracle could avert such an eventuality-Terrankind would hold themselves no more responsible for it than they held themselves responsible for Carthage, Dresden, and Deimos.
According to Terran intelligence reports, the resemblance between Terrans and Uvelians was cultural as well as physical; hence, the odds had it that the Uvelian pilot had been on a similar token assignment and that if he, too, had been rendered helpless and incommunicado it would have a similar lack of effect on the commander of the Uvelian fleet. Anyway you looked at the situation NRGC 984-D was going to have to pay dearly for being in the wrong place at the wrong time-i.e., at a point in space equidistant from Earth and Uvel at the precise moment when the crucial battle of the Earth-Uvel war was going to take place.
Hall's arm was beginning to throb, and waves of weakness were washing over him. Breaking out a first-aid pac, he sterilized the wound and dressed it. The bleeding stopped, but he still felt weak and he knew that he should rest. However, he couldn't bring himself to do so. For one thing, he knew that regardless of what he did, he was doomed anyway, and for another, during his descent he had glimpsed a number of vaguely familiar structures in the distance. He hadn't been able to make them out clearly, but structures usually spelled intelligent beings, and he was eager to find out whether or not these structures were in keeping with the rule. It was silly of him, he supposed, to want to know what kind of beings, if any, he was going to share extinction with; but he wanted to know just the same.