The Thief of Thoth

23

WHILE EN ROUTE, Quicksilver again altered his outward appearance. Blue facial pigmentation, a scalpwig of scarlet bristles, a padded pneumatic suit, and he was now one of the Blue Nomads of Cordova 6, Aristocrat Class, and obviously a tourist from his ritual accouterments.

The ship's computer brain spoke through the wall-vox, reminding of the time. He ordered a snack.

Over a luncheon of boiled wyvern tongue and diced karoly, Quicksilver consulted the ship's small but remarkably comprehensive reference library. Ordovik's Galactic Religious and Related Symbolism gave the answer to the question of the Purple Eye he had found in the Meredith Wilsson Room above the bar.

The metallic token stood for the planet Thoth itself. And there could be little question that was more than mere coincidence. Obviously, Grey-Complexion and his pals were also after the Crown of Stars, which made yet a fourth entry in the race for the enigmatic cult object! Hautley read the relevant information in Ordovik, to see if he could learn anything else of value.

The circle within the ellipse represented the planet, which, as it happened, was ringed with a whorl of phosphorescent purple vapor. This particular form of the symbol identified its possessor as a member of the Neothothic Priesthood. Were the fanatic cultists aware their treasure was the object of plots? Or was the Eye what might be called a purple herring, planted to confuse and mislead him?

Time (as the ancient maxim ran) would tell.

Next he checked his library for information on Sol III, a planet with which he was not familiar. He learned the planet was an oblate spheroid of medium size with an oxygen-base atmosphere and one grav. Its native culture was very old indeed, although somewhat backwards technologically. The native name for Sol III was “Earth”—quaint conceit, that!—and the Centaurus Sector lay in the Orion Spur, that minor archipelago of suns that jutted rimwards from the Carina-Cygnus Arm of the galaxy.

The leading native language was called Portingee or Portuguese or something like that. Sampling it, Hautley grimaced delicately: an uncouth, barbarous jargon, but he supposed he must subject himself to it. He unfolded the hypnopedia from the wall; dialed the appropriate file number, and settled down before whirling lights for a brief snooze from which he would awaken within an hour or less, his mind artificially "imprinted" with a complete colloquial familiarity with the local native langauge, social customs, cultural mores, etc.

When he awoke, the ship bad already emerged from the mathematical paradox in which it traveled at ultraphotonic velocities, and it was with a slight headache and a sour eye that Quicksilver viewed the muddy looking planet that swam up towards him in the viewplate.

Only one moon—how bizarre!

He spiraled down into a soupy atmosphere and hung in mid-air while the sphere revolved beneath him, until the continent called South America slid beneath him. He touched down at Brasialia, and emerged from the ship.

Now to find Dugan Motley! He hoped it would not take long. As be selected an aircab—there were no glidewalks to be seen, and you could not get anywhere in the capital city of Brasilia unless you want to hoof it on the city's odd mosaic-paved stationary ways—be wondered why, of all the planets in the civilized galaxy, Dugan Motley would have chosen so remote and stagnant a backwater as this little planet, a stellar mediocrity if ever he saw one.

Probably nothing had happened here since Time began.

His aircab ascended into the steamy drizzle. The driver was surly and sullen—at first anyway. Once he sized up Quicksilver as a free-wheeling Galactic tourist with a pouch full of munits, be became more cooperative. Judging from this specimen, the Earthmen were slim, brown-skinned little people with straight black and ebon eyes. And to judge from their general demeanor, it seemed they still harbored a grudge-feud against Galactics. As the wheezing little aircab clove the rainy sky on its sputtering rotors, Hautley idly wondered how long it had been since Galactic Imperial forces had opened up quaint portion of the Orion Spur to the civilizing influences of a superior culture. A modest inquiry directed at the swarthy little driver, elicited, interspersed amongst some foul language and a number of pungent epithets, the information that the Conquest had occured way back in A.D. 1968, according to the local calendar. From the lowness of this numerical designation, Hautley assumed "1968"' must have been at the very dawn of Earthling civilization. In all the millenia since passed, the Earthlings did not seem to have improved their technological levels with particular alacrity, he noted, appraising the aircab itself, virtually a museum-piece, with its ungainly nuclear power-pack, which must have occupied a good cubic foot of space ...

Puttering along at a dismally slow crawl of 500 m.p.h., the cab left the city of Brasilia proper, and entered into airspace above its several suburbs. Before Hautley bad completed smoking his second aromatique, they were above endless squares of suburban homes, amusing antiques with their biodomes which thermostatically simulated a perfect Nordamericano climate and each with its identical elm tree on the front yard and a two-'copter garage in the rear. Now they were over the fashionable Matto Grosso suburb.

The farther they flew, the higher the fare mounted, and the higher the fare mounted, the more sizable grew the potential tip in the driver's expectant mind, and the more sizable proportions the tip assumed, the more affable grew the surly little cabby. He became, in fact, downright cordial, and, as they began to near their destination, he bad unthawed to the degree of volubly pointing out the local sights. Such as the marina at the mouth of the Orinoco River, Blasco Ibanez National Park, and the replica of the Lost City of "Z" for which a local folk hero called "Colonel Fawcett" had been searching when he met a grisly and enigmatic end somewhere in the trackless and swampy wilds of the great Amazonian jungle whose matted wilderness had once sprawled in oozy grandeur where now block after block of suburban homes marched in stereotyped squalor. (This exact-size duplicate of the City, Hautley learned from the now loquacious cabby, gratuitously passing on quaint nuggets of local color, had been coustructed entirely from tens of thousands of "Mr. Frosty" sticks contributed by the schoolchildren of the Earth. Sadly, for antiquarians such as Quicksilver, the Lost City of “Z" had been torn down some centuries ago so that a fly-in video theatre could be constructed on its site by an enterprising realty entrepeneur.)

Ah! progress! thought Hautley, wryly.