He led her down a huge hall that seemed to run parallel to the outer wall of the castle for an indefinite distance. At least it was lighted electrically, and not by torches or some other affectedly antique means. For even a small part of the wealth represented here, Vera would have yielded to any proposal that Palma might make—except that, being a practical woman, she knew the only way of securing a slice would be by having a firm legal hold on the owner.
The djinn stopped at an open door and announced: "Mrs. Adrian Tobias!"
He bowed Vera into the room. It was a big library, ornately furnished. There were what looked like rare books on glass-covered lecterns with fluorescent lights over them. There was a pair of globes, a terrestrial and a celestial globe, each about a yard in diameter. The celestial globe had the stars marked by jewels.
Vera got only a brief blurred impression of all this at first, because she was too busy looking at her host and his companion. She still recognized Sigmund Palma. The years had lined his sharp, aquiline features and put a touch of distinguished gray on his temples, but otherwise had changed him little. But his costume...
It was something between a Greek hoplite and a Napoleonic cuirassier. It included several pieces of armor, either of silver or silver-plated. Under his left arm Palma carried a helmet of sphero-conical shape with a nasal and a chain-mail camail. He wore a shining cuirass, a tartan kilt, a pair of high laced boots of the type used for camping about the year 1900, and over these a pair of gleaming greaves. A sword hung in a jeweled scabbard from a baldric over the cuirass. Metal wrist-guards encircled his forearms. He was a spectacle.
The other person was a tall slant-eyed woman with orange hair, clad in a long clinging half-transparent sea-green gown. She lounged in a languid attitude on a sofa.
PALMA STRODE forward, gleaming and glittering like a Christmas-tree. He clicked the heels of the 1900 boots and bowed. Then he came on again with his hand outstretched."Well, Vera!" he said."How nice to see you
"How nice to see you too!"
"You don't look a day older."
"You look younger if anything."
"Oh, let me present Gnoth. Gnoth, this is my old friend Vera Munch—only I should say Vera Tobias."
The slant-eyed woman nodded."Delighted."
"So am I," said Vera.
"Will you have a wassan?" said Palma.
"What's that?" said Vera.
"A cocktail made by the Retf of Fleury's planet. Fairly harmless and not like anything you've ever tasted."
"All right."
Palma clapped. The djinn appeared. Palma said: "Three wassans." He turned back to Vera."I brought Gnoth from Fleury's planet too, you know."
"How interesting," said Vera without warmth. Her recollection of Clarke Li's "The Inhabited Universe" was that the Fleurians were civilized but far from human. No extraterrestrials were that human."How about that butler? Is he from Fleury's planet too?"
"No, Selim was made in my own factory—ah, here we are."
Selim was there with three glasses on a tray. The liquid was deep purple with little flashing lights. Sigmund Palma set down his helmet and each took a glass.
"Zla seiru," said Palma.
The cocktail was different, though Vera would have found it hard to say just how. It tasted like an arctic sun set.
"We've both come a long way," said Palma.
"So we have," said Vera."You've done marvelously."
Palma shrugged, as well as one can in a cuirass."Fate took a hand. As Mrs. Kelly tells me, the Powers decided it was time my spirit were given another run, to see if its character had developed in proportion to its other qualities."
"Who's Mrs. Kelly?" said Vera. She noticed that the beautiful Gnoth had not drunk. Instead she sat holding her cocktail with the unnatural immobility that zooids assume when not carrying out their masters' orders. Vera, though she had never had a zooidal servant, knew that zooids did not consume human food and drink. They drank a liquid that one bought from Sigmund Palma, Incorporated: a mixture of hydrocarbons, carbohydrates, soluble proteoids, and other components; more like a motor-fuel than the food of a zoon.
Perhaps Fleurians acted like that, too. Still, Vera felt that things were not what they seemed, even though what they seemed was bizarre enough.
"My medium," said Palma.
"You mean a Spiritualist medium?"
"She is of higher grade in the occult sciences than a mere Spiritualist."
"What did she tell you?"
"She revealed to me that I was a reincarnation of many great conquerors and adventurers."
"Is that why you dress like that?"
"Yes, to honor them, since after all they're just earlier and less perfect versions of me. The cuirass is one Alexander of Macedon might have worn. The helmet is for Harald Hardraada. The kilt is for Rob Roy Macgregor."
"How extraordinary!"
PALMA MADE a deprecatory movement with his open hand."Some might think it a bit odd, but I'm only doing what many men would like to do if they could and if they dared. The sword, now, is like that used by Rasalu of Atlantis."
"Atlantis? Now how could you find out about that? I thought scientists had decided it never existed?"
"Mrs. Kelly told me all about it, even down to the design of the sword. And I have a fur hat I wear when I feel like Attila, but only in cold weather."
With a slight shudder, Vera began to recast her plans. If she should land Sigmund, she would have to have him committed to an asylum. She would not need to be greedy. With all his billions, she could afford to make him an allowance, big enough to support him in comfort. She said: "What about those things on the grounds, Siggy? Those dragons and things. Are they all zooids, or are some of them from Fleury's planet too?"
"They're all zooids. Did you have any trouble with them?"
"N-not exactly. A couple made passes at me, but the giant shouted at them and they went away. He shouted some foreign word I never did catch."
Palma grinned, "That was the password for tonight. Nobody can move about my grounds without it.
"The advantage of zooids is that you can build them with just enough intelligence to understand the idea of a password, but not enough to demand rights or pay. That's why the unions don't like them."
In the doorway, Selim said, "Dinner is served."
The big dining room had half-timbered walls and a low beamed ceiling. The walls were hung with crossed weapons of all kinds and ages. The food was excellent though not unconventional. Gnoth did not eat.
"Tell me about yourself, Siggy," said Vera between bites of pheasant-breast. This was the oldest gambit in the game between men and women, and it still usually worked."What's this great mystery the papers keep hinting at?"
"They hint because they don't know. A man in my position has to protect his privacy, you know."
"Well?"
"Oh, I don't mind telling you. You won't repeat it, will you?"
"Of course not." Vera calculated how, if Palma showed no signs of being hooked, she could get a ghost writer to put the material into salable form.
"Well, the only mystery is how I got the proteoid formulas from Fleury's planet. You know the Fleurians have a scientific religion—or, I should say, they make a religion of science. The god Ytluc symbolizes the law of gravity; the goddess Thra, the theory of evolution, and so on. Now, when I settled in Cigrath, I got to know Gnoth, the daughter of Senemos the high priest.
"From her I learned the Fleurians were ahead of us in one science: biochemistry. They had worked out the formulas for making proteoids. Our chemists have long known these were theoretically possible, but each proteoid is a particular combination of guanidino-sulfonic acid molecules, arranged in a particular way, just as with proteins. The chance of hitting the right one of the possible ways is—well, suppose there were one grain of sand different from all the other grains of sand in the world, and you knew this one grain was lying somewhere on some beach on earth. Your chance of finding this grain at the first try, by going to some beach at random and picking up one grain, would be much better than your chance of making a proteoid without these formulas."