Tom touched the scrollmode on the revolutionactivator, thinking of the proper stockcodes #765NRLDYL and #6500: .::. . Instantly the first appeared, something reminiscent of a giant gray chicken gizzard, which rose joint by joint on segmented legs. “Come on, Valentino,” Tom said. “Time to make some bacon.” Nrldyl had haired antennae in place of eyes and ears, and at the end of its single arm was not a hand but a rubberish shovel like thing. Tom understood that this particular genus had intercourse by means of manual seminal congestion: It took its semen out of itself with the scoop and stuffed it into its mate. True passion, Tom thought.
#6500: .::. . appeared next. “Ah, Blob Man,” Tom commented, noticing the bucket. It was nice to know that earth was not the only sphere in the universe that used buckets. He carried it down the pass, as Nrldyl dumbly followed. Tom didn’t have to worry about the holotypes getting rowdy; the ganglionstaticreflexpulsemodificationdischargenodes implanted into their nervous systems would zap them a nutcracker at the faintest negative thought. That way they couldn’t rough up the female surrogates.
Tom decayed the radiophaseshifttriionizer, which paved the way for successful antirejectorybifertilization. He took the two holotypes into the warren. “Girls!” he announced. “I’m back! With your new dream dates!”
Stella began to visibly jerk. Liddy managed a muffled whine from deep in her chest.
“Go to it, fellas.” Tom set the bucket between Liddy’s feet and nudged Nrldyl toward Stella. “If you guys need a godfather, let me know. I could be available.”
Nrldyl was hopping up and down in pure alien excitement. Clumps of its semen were already visible within the slit of its spermonic duct. The grotesque thing then knelt between Stella’s legs and began to tenderly transfer the globs of its off-blue semen, via the scoop hand, into Stella’s vaginal vault. The scoop packed it in nice and tight, leaving poor Stella bloated like a blueberry turnover with too much filling. What a way to fuck, Tom thought. Nrldyl chortled. Stella vomited a yard into the air while at the same time convulsing in multiple orgasms.
Meanwhile the thing in the bucket had already dumped itself out. The brown blob spurtled, groaning, surging upward as if against tremendous gravity. After several strenuous attempts, it managed to stand upright, sporting a dripping, long erection that looked sort of like a giant chewed Tootsie Roll. Liddy screamed through her paralysis when the thing climbed between her legs.
Tom plugged his key into the extromitter. But before he left, he turned and offered a final commiseration. “Have no fear, girls. You’ll live forever. You’ll be cosmic mothers of miracles—forever.”
But where did that leave him? As he fed the thought “Student Shop” into the extromitter, he wondered. They said he would live forever too. But how could that be, when already shreds of his own flesh were beginning to peel off?
—
CHAPTER 20
“Museums? No,” Professor Fredrick said. “None within hundreds of miles, I’m afraid.”
Lydia had come to Fredrick at 9 A.M. sharp. Fredrick was Exham’s chairman of the archaeology department. She’d wanted to know where a three hundred year old cutting tool could be found near the campus. And he’d told her. Nowhere.
“May I see those photographs?” Professor Fredrick asked. The shots were microphotos she’d taken of the impactations at the stables.
Fredrick lit a pipe with a face on it. “There’s no scale here,” he remarked. “How long would you say this strike mark is?”
“A little over ten inches.”
“That’s a long blade for an ax. It’s perfectly flat too. But the angle width of the cutting bezel interests me more.”
“Sir?”
Fredrick pointed to the grainy shot with his pipe end. “I mean the angle at which this tool was honed” —he squinted— “you can see that the left side of the blade is a flat plane, while the right bears the honing surface.”
Lydia had already noted this.
“And your police scientist told you—”
“It was an estimation,” she clarified. “There were no exact classifications in the indexes. This ax is definitely iron, and definitely forged over three hundred years ago. That’s all we know.”
“This isn’t an ax,” Fredrick said.
“What?”
“It’s plain to see. It’s not an ax. It’s not a mattock, an adze, or a froe either.”
“Then what is it?”
Fredrick’s brow rose over his aging face. He tapped his pipe into a glazed Babylonian bloodtap turned ashtray. “The tool you’re looking for is a beam hewer. It’s the only tool within your estimated time period that had this kind of cutting edge.”
Lydia frowned. “What the hell is a beam hewer?”
“A tool used by colonists to turn round logs into square beams. There were many different types of hewers, mind you, but only the beam hewer possessed a planed left blade side, so the scores of the dogged log could be sliced off evenly.”
Scores of the dogged log, Lydia thought. “I’m not exactly an expert on beam hewers, Professor.”
Fredrick laughed, for the first time displaying a comprehension of humor. “Beam carpenters were the most vital tradesmen of the early colonial period. The procedure involved the following steps. One, a tree was cut down. Two, the felled tree was held to the ground by a dogging clamp. Three, the dogged tree was scored with axlike tools called adzes. Four, the scored tree was hewn—four flat planes were cut along the scores. The beam hewer had the appearance of an oddly shaped ax. The cutting edges were commonly a foot long, to clear each score.”
Lydia tried to picture an ax with a foot long cutting edge. “They were huge, you mean.”
“Yes, and heavy—twenty to thirty pounds. The left blade sides were perfectly level, or ‘basilled,’ so as to cut the scores off flat. A good beam carpenter could turn a thirty foot tree into an evenly sided beam in about an hour.”
Fredrick rose to take down some books. Lydia understood that he’d been on digs all over the world. Years of blazing sun had cragged his face, toughened his skin to leather. He slid aside a small statue of Chinnamasta, the Bengalian goddess of decapitation, and presented to Lydia an old book opened to a block of pictures.
“That,” he said, pointing to one, “is a typical beam hewer.”
Lydia nearly shit her police pants.
“And that,” he paused to add, “is me.”
The ghostly field photograph was dated March 19, 1938. “New Excavations at Kent Island,” it read, and the text: “Sophomore F. Fredrick displays one of dozens of newly disinterred artifacts found at Maryland University’s latest Kent Island dig, a beam hewer probably forged by William Claiborne’s blacksmiths in 1632. Note the hewer’s extraordinary size.”
In the picture, a young and dusty Professor Fredrick smiled as he held up the hewer for the camera. Its handle was nearly as long as Fredrick was tall, and its cutting edge easily cleared a foot. The bizarre blade was configured like an upside down, L. Lydia had never imagined a cutting tool so large.
“The hewer’s impractical size was necessary. Too small and they would not be able to cut each score in a single swipe. Needless to say, next to flintlocks, the beam hewer was the weapon of choice during Indian attacks.”