I could start the water again easily enough, but there was no fuel left in the reactor.
But I wasn't going to play with the fuel problem at all. It would be far easier for me to install a new power plant. I had one in the ship that was about a tenth of the size of the ancient bucket of bolts. Before I sent for it, I checked over the rest of the beacon. In two thousand years there should be some signs of wear, tear, and fatigue.
The old boys had built well, I'll give them credit for that. Ninety percent of the machinery had no moving parts and had suffered no wear whatever. Other parts they beefed up figuring they would wear, but slowly. The water-feed pipe from the roof, for example. The pipe walls were at least three meters thick — and the pipe opening itself no bigger than my head. There were some things I could do, though, and I made a list of parts.
The parts, the new power plant, and a few other odds and ends were sorted into a neat pile on the ship. I checked all the parts by screen before they were loaded into a small metal crate. In the darkest hour before dawn, the heavy-duty Eye dropped the crate outside the temple and darted away without being seen.
I watched the priests through the Pryeye while they tried to open it. When they had given up, I boomed orders at them through a speaker in the crate. They spent most of the day sweating the heavy box up through the narrow temple stairs, and I enjoyed a good sleep. It was resting inside the beacon door when I woke up.
The repair didn't take long, though there was plenty of groaning from the blind lizards when they heard me ripping the wall open to get to the power leads. I even hooked a gadget to the water pipe so their Holy Waters would have the usual refreshing radioactivity when they started flowing again. The moment this was all finished, I did the job they waited for.
I threw the switch that started the water flowing again.
There were a few minutes while the water began to gurgle down through the dry pipe. Then a roar came from outside the pyramid that must have shaken its stone walls. Shaking my hands once over my head, I went down for the eye-burning ceremony.
The blind lizards were waiting for me by the door and looked even unhappier than usual. When I tried the door, I found out why — it was bolted and barred from the other side.
"It has been decided," a lizard said, "that you shall remain here forever and tend to the Holy Waters. We will stay with you and serve your every need."
A delightful prospect, eternity spent in a locked beacon with three blind lizards. In spite of their hospitality, I couldn't accept.
"What! You dare interfere with the messenger of your ancestors!" I had the speaker on full volume and the vibration almost shook my head off.
The lizards cringed, and I set my Solar for a narrow beam and ran it around the doorjamb. There was a great crunching and banging from the junk piled against it, and then the door swung free. I threw it open. Before they could protest, I had pushed the priests out through it.
The rest of their clan showed up at the foot of the stairs and made a great ruckus while I finished welding the door shut. Running through the crowd, I faced up to the First Lizard in his tub. He sank slowly beneath the surface.
"What lack of courtesy!" I shouted. He made little bubbles in the water. "The ancestors are annoyed and have decided to forbid entrance to the Inner Temple forever. Though, out of their eternal kindness, they will let the waters flow. Now I must return — so on with the eyeball ceremony!"
The torture-master was too frightened to move, so I grabbed his hot iron out of the coals. A touch on the side of my face dropped a steel plate over my eyes, under the plasti-skin. Then I jammed the iron hard into my phony eye sockets and the plastic gave off an authentic odor.
A cry went up from the crowd as I dropped the iron and staggered in blind circles. I must admit it went off pretty well.
But enough was enough. Before they could get any more bright ideas, I threw the switch and my plastic pterodactyl sailed in through the door.
I couldn't see it, of course, but I knew it had arrived when the grapples in the claws latched onto the steel plates on my shoulders. I had got turned around after the eye-burning and my flying beast hooked onto me backward. I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing into the sunset; instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made the most of a bad situation and threw them a snappy military salute. Then I was out in the fresh air and away.
When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I counted off on my talons to see if I had forgotten anything.
One: The beacon was repaired.
Two: The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage, accidental or deliberate.
Three: The priests should be satisfied. The water was running again, my eyes had been duly burned out, and they were back in business. Which added up to—
Four: The fact that they would probably let another repairman in, under the same conditions, if the beacon conked out again. At least I had done nothing, like butchering a few of them, that would make them antagonistic toward future ancestral messengers.
I stripped off my tattered lizard suit back in the ship, very glad it would be some other repairman who would get the job.
BRAVE NEWER WORLD
Livermore liked the view from the little white balcony outside his office. Even though the air at this height, at this time of year, had a chill bite to it. He was standing there now, trying to suppress a shiver, looking out at the new spring green on the hillsides and the trees in the old town. Above and below him the white steps of the levels of New Town stretched away in smooth elegance. A great A in space with the base a half-mile wide, rising up almost to a point on top. Every level fringed with a balcony, every balcony with an unobstructed view. Well designed. Livermore shivered again and felt the loud beat of his heart; old valves cheered on by new drugs. His insides were as carefully propped up and as well designed as the New Town building. Though his outside left a lot to be desired. Brown spots, wrinkles, and white hair; he looked as weathered as the homes in Old Town. It was damned cold — and the sun went behind a cloud. He thumbed a button, and when the glass wall slid aside, went back gratefully into the purified and warmed air of the interior.
"Been waiting long?" he asked the old man who sat, scowling, in the chair on the far side of his desk.
"Well, you asked, Doctor. I was never one to complain, but…"
"Then don't start now. Stand up. Open your shirt. Let me have those records. Ahh, Grazer, I remember you. Planted a kidney seed, didn't they? How do you feel?"
"Poorly, that's the only word for it. Off my feed, can't sleep. When I do I wake up with the cold sweats. And the bowels! Let me tell you about the bowels. Hey!"
Livermore slapped the cold pickup of the stethoscope against the bare skin of Grazer's chest. Patients liked Dr. Livermore but hated his stethoscope, swearing that he must keep it specially chilled for them. They were right. There was a thermoelectric cooling plate in the case. Livermore felt that it gave them something to think about. "Hmmrr…" he said, frowning, the earpieces in his ears, hearing nothing. He had plugged the stethoscope with wax a year earlier. The systolic, diastolic murmurs disturbed his concentration; he heard enough of that from his own chest. Everything was in the records in any case, since the analysis machines did a far better job than he could ever do. He flipped through the sheets and graphs.
"Button your shirt, sit down, take two of these right now. Just the thing for this condition."
He shook the large red sugar pills from the jar in his desk drawer and pointed to the plastic cup and water carafe. Grazer reached for them eagerly: this was real medicine. Livermore found the most recent X rays and snapped them into the viewer. Lovely. The new kidney was growing, as sweetly formed as a little bean. Still tiny now beside its elderly brother, but in a year's time they would be identical.