So, after removing the cumbersome outer section of his spacesuit and taking off his helmet, he opened the scout ship's locks and stepped outside. NRGC 984 was well past meridian. Using it as a reference point, he oriented himself.
To the north and to the east, the tableland dropped away into hazy foothills; far to the west, stalwart snow-crowned mountains rose sheeriy into the sky. The structures which he had glimpsed lay to the south. There were four of them altogether, and three of them were pyramidal in shape. The fourth stood a little to the east of me others and was radically different from them. It looked like-it looked like- Hall squinted his eyes against the glare of the sunlight. If he hadn't known that such a thing was impossible, he would have sworn that the fourth structure was a sphinx.
NRGC 984 was a KO star. However, if the rays which were raining down upon me tableland were a dependable criterion, it wasn't very far from attaining GO-hood. Hall felt dehydrated before he had gone half a mile. By the time a mile lay behind him, he was ready to drop.
He wet his mourn repeatedly from the vacuum container of ship's water which he had brought along, each time swallowing as much of the icy contents as he dared. He could see the pyramidal structures quite clearly now-clearly enough to know that in mentally referring to them as "pyramidal structures" instead of as "pyramids" he was only kidding himself. He could see the fourth structure quite clearly, too-clearly enough to know that in the strict sense of the word it wasn't a; structure, but a huge statue, and to know that whether such a V thing were possible or not, the statue was a statue of a sphinx.;
As he progressed, reeling now and then from the heat and from his increasing weakness, he began to wonder whether he had somehow been catapulted back through space to Egypt-to the plateau ofGizeh, upon which the Great Sphinx Hannachis guarded the Great Pyramids of Cheops, Chephren, and Mykerinos, and at whose base the Terran capital of Kafr el Haram stood. And as he progressed still farther he began to wonder whether he had somehow been catapulted back through space and time to the Egypt of over five thousand years ago when the Great Pyramids and the Great Sphinx were new; for these pyramids and this sphinx were new-make no mistake about it. The pyramids looked as though they had been built yesterday, and as for the sphinx, its excellent condition lent it a realism so remarkable that Hall momentarily expected to see it rise up on its columnar legs and come thundering over the tableland to welcome him.
Or to annihilate him.
There was a third possibility, of course, and on the surface it made more sense than the other two: maybe his growing weakness and the merciless rays of the sun had combined forces and were causing him to hallucinate.
But if he was hallucinating, why hadn't he chosen a subject more in keeping with his character? Specifically, why hadn't he projected an image of a garish street lined with nepenthe nooks and fun bars, or an image of a blue mountain lake with a shack on its wooded shore and a canoe drawn up on its beach ready to take him gliding over the cool and limpid waters? Like many adventurers. Hall pursued both solitude and sin and found peace in neither, but they were at least a part of his makeup, and Egyptology was not. He had visited the plateau of Gizeh and seen the Great Pyramids and me Great Sphinx, and he had read about Cheops, Chephren, and Mykerinos in Herodotus* History: but the pharaohs and their sepulchers and their monuments were relatively unimportant items in the synthesis of real and vicarious experiences that constituted his character, and it was highly unlikely that he would be "seeing" a sphinx and three pyramids now.
He decided that the best way to find out whether or not he was imagining them would be try to walk right through them, and with this in mind, he forced himself to go on, even though he knew that he would do better to return to his ship and forget about the whole thing.
Gradually, the pyramids took on greater detail, particularly the largest of the trio. It stood in the foreground, and several hundred yards to the east of it stood the Sphinx, The Gizeh sphinx measured in the neighborhood of 189 feet in length, 70 in height, and 30 from forehead to chin. If anything, this one exceeded those dimensions- Lord, suppose it were to stand up. Hall thought. Why, it would tower almost a hundred feet above the ground!
Had the Sphinx read his mind? It would seem so. At any rate, the huge head had turned and the great golden eyes were fixed upon his face. As he watched in disbeliving fascination, it stood erect on its four legs and regarded him contemplatively across the half a hundred yards of tableland that separated them.
Everything caught up to Hall then-his weakness, the rays of NRGC 984, the heat rising from the white sand, the doubts that had been multiplying in his mind ever since he had participated in the destruction of the Deimos Dissenters-and he sagged to the ground. The ground, he discovered presently, was trembling. Well it might. The creature walking over it probably weighed several thousand tons.
He felt the coolness of shade. Looking up, he saw the massive humanoid face looming above him, the great golden eyes gazing down into his own. Slowly, the huge head began to lower, relentlessly, the gigantic jaws began to open. Belatedly, Hall tried to draw his laser pistol, only to discover that he no longer had charge of his right arm. He retreated way back into his mind then. found a deep dark cave, crawled into it, and closed his eyes.
Cheop's Daughter
Wherever else he might be, Hall decided some time later, he was no longer in the cave. Nor was he, apparently, in the belly of the Sphinx. There was the softness of eiderdown beneath his back and a pleasant perfume upon his nostrils. He was completely relaxed, and the throbbing in his arm had died away. Feeling fingers lightly touch his forehead, he opened his eyes.
There was a girl standing over him. Her face was narrow, the forehead high and rounded, the nose high-bridged and slender, me chin somewhat pointed. She had night-black hair, and her head was fitted with a ridiculous headdress that flared up into a flat crown. She was stim, but startlingly welldeveloped, and she was wearing a tight-fitting hatter and a tight-fitting knee-length skirt. The headdress, the hatter, and the skirt were golden in color, and, peering over the edge of the padded platform on which he lay. Hall saw that webbed sandals of similar hue encased her small feet. Her skin was the color of olives.
Despite her unusual attire and her equally unusual development, plus a queenly hauteur that somehow went well with both, her eyes still managed to be the most remarkable items in her feminine inventory. They were almond-shaped, slightly slanted, golden brown, and pretematurally large. In addition, there was a liquid quality about them that came close to devastating the defenses which Hall made haste to throw up around himself.
Well anyway, she made as much sense as the pyramids and the Sphinx did, he thought resignedly. As a matter of fact, she seemed to belong in such a setting. "I suppose you're going to tell me your name is Cleopatra," he said, even though he knew that the all-purpose English words were bound to be Greek to her.
She had withdrawn her hand from his forehead and had stepped back from the platform the minute he opened his eyes. But she hadn't been in the least disconcerted, nor was she in the least disconcerted now. "Behold, I have dressed thy wound," she said. "Is it not enough that a pharaoh's daughter should have thus demeaned herself without her having to demean herself still further by giving thee her name?"
Suddenly puzzlement crinkled her forehead, and she looked intently at his smartly tailored inner spacesuit. Actually, in combination with his snappy black spaceboots it constituted as sharp an outfit as the Terran Space Navy had ever come up with, but she certainly didn't seem to think so. "Where didst thou learn to speak the language of Egypt, slave from a far land?" she asked.