The archaelogist reddened. "Whose idea was it anyway to send you down here instead of a decently educated team?" she said through clenched teeth. "The nerve. The greatest archaeological find in history, and I've got nobody except an ignorant child, the oldest man in the world, and a buffoon in a T-shirt!"
"Look, lady. For what it's worth, this buffoon just saved your life. Which, from what I can see of your sparkling personality and charm, wasn't worth a fart in a bottle to begin with."
She rolled her eyes and made disdaining clucking noises with her mouth.
"If you weren't a woman, I'd smack you," Remo said, realizing that he was shouting, but not caring.
"Go ahead," Lizzie shrilled. "Prove what a male chauvinist hotshot you are. You men, with your little peckers, your little fists—"
"Your little red ass," Remo muttered, walking toward her. She screamed.
"Stop, stop," Chiun said, clapping his hands over his ears. "This bickering is unbearable for one of my years. Shouting. Arguments. There can be no serenity where there is discord such as this. I must have tranquility in the twilight of my life." He smiled sweetly to Lizzie.
"Then go back to the old folks' home where you belong," she yelled.
Chiun's jaw clamped shut. "Remo, this woman," he whispered.
"Yeah, I know. She brings out the best in a guy, doesn't she?"
"Remo! Chiun!" Po shouted from the far corner of the temple. The corner was piled high with fallen rock. The boy's head peered out from an opening between them. "Come here. Look."
"This is no place for children's games," Lizzie said, passing Remo en route to the boy. "He might damage something. It's bad enough to have two grown-up fools in here, but a child..."
Remo followed her, step for step, speaking directly into her ear. "I've had just about all the lipping off I'm going to hear out of you," he began. "I know how to shut you up." He reached a hand toward her throat, then noticed that Chiun had disappeared between the rocks. Po waited at the entrance, beckoning. He entered into a narrow passageway between the rocks when Remo arrived.
"What is it?" Remo asked.
"This way," Chiun's voice echoed from within the rubble.
The passageway through the rocks was low. Remo got on his hands and knees and felt his way through the darkness.
"I'm not going in there," Lizzie called from outside the tunnel of fallen rock.
"Good," Remo said.
"But I'm alone out here," she shouted. "What if those maniacs with the guns come back?"
"Maybe they'll shoot you," Remo said. "Death is just another way to get peace and quiet."
His heart sank as he heard the scuffle of hands and feet behind him. "Watch. Now we'll all be trapped," Lizzie complained, her voice echoing around him like a bad odor. "Some rescuers."
"Here it is," Po said in the darkness.
Chiun answered, "Ah, yes."
Remo's eyes adjusted automatically to the darkness in the tunnel. At the end, he saw Chiun and the boy standing in front of what looked like a refrigerator.
"What's this?" he asked, touching its surface as he rose to full height. It cracked beneath his fingers.
The object was oval, about five feet high, and metal. Metal that crushed on contact. On its left side was a handle of some kind. "I think it's a door," Remo said. He reached for the handle, then jumped back in surprise when it was suddenly bathed in a circle of light.
The light jiggled. Remo whirled around.
"Flashlight," Lizzie said. "Naturally, I'm the only one who remembered to bring one."
"You are the only one with eyes so weak as to need one," Chiun said. He brushed Remo's hands away and opened the metal door. Remo, Lizzie, and the boy followed him into the chamber beyond.
Inside, the flashlight's bobbing circle illuminated a strange sight. It was an aisle, made of linoleum, it seemed, only glossier, sturdier. The ceiling of the structure was rounded, as if they were standing in a long tube, and made of the same material. Everything looked crisp and new except for the sides of the structure. Along the walls, for some reason not apparent to any of them, hung ghostly gray layers of thick, rotting cloth, as fragile as cobwebs.
Remo squeezed past Lizzie back to the oval door and pushed on its rim with the heel of his hand. It disintegrated under the moderate pressure. "This is the same metal the laser guns were made of," he said. "But the floor's plastic." He moved to the cobwebby hangings suspended from the ceiling. "And these things..."
"Don't touch anything!" Lizzie bellowed. "We don't know how old this is."
"Oh, come on," Remo said. "This metal isn't even rusted."
"Some of these temples contain tombs that are nearly airtight," Lizzie said huffily. "At Palenque, for example—"
"It's a plane of some kind," Remo interrupted. "It's got to be. The aisles, the airlock door, the..."
His eyes automatically followed the light from Lizzie's flashlight. It was quivering on the far end of the tubular structure they were standing in.
"God, what's that?" Lizzie whispered.
The light rested on still another door. But this one was round and made of hard white plastic. The surface it rested on was a sphere. A giant plastic ball.
"Don't tell me that's five thousand years old," Remo said.
"Oh, God. Not the spaceman theory. It can't be." Lizzie's hands shook as she walked toward the white globe. She opened the door.
The spheroid interior was heavily and uniformly padded with some kind of springy orange plastic. Six sets of seat belts dangled from the walls as if the pod were a ride at an amusement park, a luxurious, expensive version of the Tilt-A-Whirl.
Chiun and the boy explored the round, soft chamber as Lizzie fingered the seatbelts. Could this have been the discovery that the first archaeological team had written to the university about— the thing that was so important that they dared not put it down on paper? The thing the naked tribesmen were willing to kill to protect?
Her mind was racing. She had not seen the vehicle when she first arrived at the Temple of Magic. Apparently a wall had been erected around it. The Mayans did that; it made sense. The temple within the temple.
"I'm going to take a look at the other end," Remo said.
Lizzie jumped out of her reverie. "I'll come with you." She stepped awkwardly out of the pod, following Remo down the smooth aisle.
"Get back," Remo said. His voice was quiet, imperative.
"Don't bully me," she said. "I'm the archaeologist. I have every right—"
"Get back!" He shoved her toward the pod. She fell, landing on her rump outside the open door.
"How dare you," she seethed. But the floor was moving beneath her, and she recognized the tremors. "Earthquake!"
"Get in there," Remo shouted, picking her up bodily and tossing her into the padded ball. "You'll be safer in there."
The floor heaved crazily. The shock propelled Remo backward, sending him crashing against the fragile, cobwebby hangings. His back struck something hard and plastic. A knob. No, a switch, Remo thought. A plastic switch imbedded into some material that shattered like glass from the weight of his body.
The cloth in front of it exploded into dust. Outside, in the main chambers of the temple, more rocks were falling, crashing thunderously to earth.
"Hurry," Chiun said. He had picked the screaming woman off the floor and buckled her into one of the safety belts. The boy Po strapped himself in wordlessly.
A good kid, Remo thought, pulling himself with small, rapid steps toward the padded pod. He's keeping his head. Chiun was right about him. He'd been right about the girl, too. Pain in the ass from the word go. Without her, the two of them would have been able to get out into the open with the boy. He was small and kept himself still. But they'd never make it with a hysterical, screaming adult hampering every movement.