Cycle of Nemesis Read Online Free PDF Page B

dust motes dancing in the sunbeams had stopped trembling.
    "Khamushkei the Undying,” Hall Brennan said, on a breath, his head held up, chin high, his fine eyes chips of azure beneath his thick brows. “I speak of the Time Beast in his Vault of Time.”
    I swallowed, about to venture some remark, when Pomfret said, “I don’t know the fellow. What’s he got to do with Bert’s globe?”
    And the moment of timelessness fractured.
    Phoebe laughed and shivered and her fingers tightened in mine.
    “The first time I stumbled across the name,” Brennan said with most of his attention focused on me, as much as to say that even though I owned the globe he could at least find a kindred spirit in me and not, alas, a Philistine ass like George or a beautiful numbskull like Phoebe. If he did think that, as I for a moment had guessed he thought, then he would be wrong. Probably I did him an injustice. Brennan went on: “I was poking around some of those very early city-sites they’ve recently discovered and begun to excavate out into the desert from the pipeline from Kirkuk. Of course, all around there and mostly southeasterly is well dug over; I mean, further south, Akkad and Sumer are archaeological tourist traps now.”
    “I thought they’d brought the desert back into cultivation now, with grass and seedlings and water and weather control.” I tried not to let my interest in these things cloud my defense of my globe.
    “Oh, yes.” Brennan laughed. “Archaeology out there isn’t like the old days, with trial trenches, and thousands of natives for labor, and machines if you have the money, and digging and digging and more digging. How those old boys must have worn out spades by the basketful!”
    “What’s this got to do with that—” began Phoebe.
    I pressed her hand. “We don’t know, Phoebe,” I said in a low voice although not a whisper, “that what we saw has anything to do with Mr. Brennan.”
    “Anything at all has to do with me if it affects my life’s work!” said Brennan with restrained fierceness, as though what he had spoken were a self-evident truth.
    “I’ll grant you that,” I told him with a smile. “Get on with the story. You have my interest, at the least.”
    “The Tigris, what they called the Hiddekel, has changed its course from time to time, and so has the Euphrates, the Great River. I struck more southerly, had a flier and a couple of friends, and we went archaeologically probing southward, off the usual run. Actually hit some real old-time desert, too. We found ourselves a city.”
    The way he spoke convinced me of his sincerity.
    “When was this?” I asked. “The last major city discovered, as well as I recall, was that remarkable complex on the outskirts of what had been the Indian Thar desert—fascinating—" I shot it at him. “I don’t remember any new Assyrian city in connection with your name.”
    “Point taken,” he returned like a tennis player negligently flicking back a weak backhand. “Naturally, I didn’t publish anything.”
    “Naturally?”
    His smile chilled me for the first time in our short acquaintance.
    “My two friends—good hearted, fine in an emergency —I won’t tell you their names—they’re dead. Both of them. Dead. Khamushkei the Undying. You don’t advertise too much—”
    “Go on ! ”
    “That city was an eye-opener. Oh, I know we’ve dug up ceramic pots and bits of copper wire and from that theorized that the Babylonian priests worked their idol’s miracles through a crude form of electricity. And much of what we do find we can’t fully understand. You turn up a broken statuette of a nude woman and at once scream ‘Primitive goddesses! Ishtar ! ’ when in all probability what you’ve found is the remains of little Lulu’s best doll. The most simply explained models and pictures in terms of children’s toys or pictures for enjoyment and decoration are invariably given a god or goddess appellation. Nothing ever found is ever