"Boadiles," he mused, poking a finger into his ear and leafing through the files inside. "They're definitely of the class reptilia-of that much we're certain. Whether they're of the order crocodilia, suborder of their own, or whether they're of the order squamata, suborder lacertilia, family neopoda-as a colleague of mine on Taler half-seriously insists-we are not certain. To me they are somewhat reminiscent of pre-Three Day photo-reproductions of artists' conceptions of the Mesozoic phytosaurus with, of course, the supernumerary legs and the constrictive ability. So I favor the order crocodilia myself."
He leaned on the rail and stared out across the shimmering water.
I saw then that he wasn't about to say anything else, so, "So how many legs on one?" I asked again.
"Eh? Legs? I never counted them. If we're lucky we might get a chance to, though. There are lots around here.-The young one I had didn't last too long."
"What happened to it?" asked Myshtigo.
"My megadonaplaty ate it."
"Megadonaplaty?"
"Sort of like a duck-billed platypus with teeth," I explained, "and about ten feet high. Picture that. So far as we know, they've only been seen about three or four times. Australian. We got ours through a fortunate accident. Probably won't last, as a species-the way boadiles will, I mean. They're oviparous mammals, and their eggs are too large for a hungry world to permit the continuance of the species-if it is a true species. Maybe they're just isolated sports."
"Perhaps," said George, nodding wisely; "and then again perhaps not."
Myshtigo turned away, shaking his head.
Hasan had partly unpacked his robot golem-rolem-and was fooling with its controls. Ellen had finally given up on simicoloring and was lying in the sun getting burnt all over. Red Wig and Dos Santos were plotting something at the other end of the vessel. Those two never just meet; they always have assignations. Our felucca moved slowly along the dazzling waterpath that burns its way before the great gray colonnades of Luxor, and I decided it was time to head it in toward the shore and see what was new among the tombs and ruined temples.
The next six days were rather eventful and somewhat unforgettable, extremely active, and sort of ugly-beautiful-in the way that a flower can be, with its petals all intact and a dark and runny rot-spot in the center. Here's how…
Myshtigo must have interviewed every stone ram along the four miles of the Way to Karnak. Both in the blaze of day and by torchlight we navigated the ruins, disturbing bats, rats, snakes and insects, listening to the Vegan's monotonous note-taking in his monotonous language. At night we camped on the sands, setting up a two hundred meter electrical warning perimeter and posting two guards. The boadile is cold-blooded; the nights were chill. So there was relatively little danger from without.
Huge campfires lighted the nights, all about the areas we chose, because the Vegan wanted things primitive-for purposes of atmosphere, I guessed. Our Skimmers were further south. We had flown them to a place I knew of and left them there under Office guard, renting the felucca for our trip-which paralleled the King-God's journey from Karnak to Luxor. Myshtigo had wanted it that way. Nights, Hasan would either practice with the assagai he had bartered from a big Nubian, or he would strip to the waist and wrestle for hours with his tireless rolem.
A worthy opponent was the rolem. Hasan had it programmed at twice the statistically-averaged strength of a man and had upped its reflex-time by fifty percent. Its "memory" contained hundreds of wrestling holds, and its governor theoretically prevented it from killing or maiming its opponent-all through a series of chemelectrical afferent nerve-analogues which permitted it to gauge to an ounce the amount of pressure necessary to snap a bone or tear a tendon. Rolem was about five feet, six inches in height and weighed around two hundred fifty pounds; manufactured on Bakab, he was quite expensive, was dough-colored and caricature-featured, and his brains were located somewhere below where his navel would be-if golems had navels-to protect his thinkstuff from Greco-Roman shocks. Even as it is, accidents can happen. People have been killed by the things, when something goes amok in the brains or some afferents, or just because the people themselves slipped or tried to jerk away, supplying the necessary extra ounces. I'd had one once, for almost a year, programmed for boxing. I used to spend fifteen minutes or so with it every afternoon. Got to thinking of it as a person, almost. Then one day it fouled me and I pounded it for over an hour and finally knocked its head off. The thing kept right on boxing, and I stopped thinking of it as a friendly sparring partner right then. It's a weird feeling, boxing with a headless golem, you know? Sort of like waking from a pleasant dream and finding a nightmare crouched at the foot of your bed. It doesn't really "see" its opponent with those eye-things it has; it's all sheathed about with piezoelectric radar mesentery, and it "watches" from all its surfaces. Still, the death of an illusion tends to disconcert, I turned mine off and never turned it back on again. Sold it to a camel trader for a pretty good price. Don't know if he ever got the head back on. But he was a Turk, so who cares?
Anyway-Hasan would tangle with rolem, both of them gleaming in the firelight, and we'd all sit on blankets and watch, and bats would swoop low occasionally, like big, fast ashes, and emaciated clouds would cover the moon, veil-like, and then move on again. It was that way on the third night, when I went mad.
I remember it only in the way you remember a passing countryside you might have seen through a late summer evening storm-as a series of isolated, lightning-filled still-shots…
Having spoken with Cassandra for the better part of an hour, I concluded the transmission with a promise to cop a Skimmer the following afternoon and spend the next night on Kos. I recall our last words.
"Take care, Konstantin. I have been dreaming bad dreams."
"Bosh, Cassandra. Good night."
And who knows but that her dreams might have been the result of a temporal shockwave moving backwards from a 9.6 Richter reading?
A certain cruel gleam filling his eyes, Dos Santos applauded as Hasan hurled golem to the ground with a thunderous crash. That particular earthshaker continued, however, long after the golem had climbed back to his feet and gotten into another crouch, his arms doing serpent-things in the Arab's direction. The ground shook and shook.
"What power! Still do I feel it!" cried Dos Santos. "Ole!"
"It is a seismic disturbance," said George. "Even though I'm not a geologist-"
"Earthquake!" yelled his wife, dropping an unpasteurized date she had been feeding Myshtigo.
There was no reason to run, no place to run to. There was nothing nearby that could fall on us. The ground was level and pretty barren. So we just sat there and were thrown about, even knocked flat a few times. The fires did amazing things.
Rolem's time was up and he went stiff then, and Hasan came and sat with George and me. The tremors lasted the better part of an hour, and they came again, more weakly, many times during that night. After the first bad shock had run its course, we got in touch with the Port. The instruments there showed that the center of the thing lay a good distance to the north of us.
A bad distance, really.
… In the Mediterranean.
The Aegean, to be more specific.
I felt sick, and suddenly I was.
I tried to put through a call to Kos.
Nothing.
My Cassandra, my lovely lady, my princess… Where was she? For two hours I tried to find out. Then the Port called me.
It was Lorel's voice, not just some lob watch operator's.
"Uh-Conrad, I don't know how to tell you, exactly, what happened…"
"Just talk," I said, "and stop when you're finished."
"An observe-satellite passed your way about twelve minutes ago," he crackled across the bands. "Several of the Aegean islands were no longer present in the pictures it transmitted…"