The fat man with some kind of machine in a leather case who had occupied the next seat in the bus coming out, wrinkled his nose as they descended. "Nasty stink they have around here," he remarked. "What is it anyway?"
Finch sniffed. It was there all right; acid and somehow disgusting, a spoiled meat odor that with intensification would bring one to the edge of retching. But before he could say anything, this matronly-looking woman who had been the only other person to get off the bus, smiled.
"That, my friend," she said, "is the smell of death. ... Hello, Dr. Finch; I'm Irene Galvin, from Dietetics."
"How do you do?" said Finch vaguely, as they approached a gate presided over by a young man with a beard curled like Finch's own, and attired as an Assyrian infantryman, with conical white helmet, short-sleeved tunic and calf-high boots. A touch of incredibility was added to his costume by the fact that in addition to straight short-sword, he wore a thoroughly modern rifle slung over one shoulder. He lifted one hand in friendly salute as the little group approached.
"Going on duty early tonight, Dr. Finch? You missed the fun."
"What happened?"
"Guy tried to get out; had to shoot him in the leg. Lou Bubbard, the big red-head at the south gate, handled it. He says the dope was a Hebe prophet an' claimed he had to go into a mountain and prophesy, but you know Lou. I think he just plugged him for target practice." He barred the way of the fat traveller. "Who might you be?"
"I got the diathermic machine here to treat the man you were just talking about."
"Gotta see your papers. Go ahead, Dr. Finch."
Finch entered a tunnel of boards and almost lost his footing at the head of a flight of steps. He estimated that the tunnel beyond the steps, dimly lit by a row of bulbs strung along its roof, was well underground.
Another tunnel came in from the left. A rumble of wheels warned Finch to dodge as a string of little electric trucks around a motor unit came around the bend, bearing packing-crates, and catching a whiff of fennel as the cars clattered by, remembered that the Assyrians, "that bitter and hasty nation," ran as pronouncedly to salad vegetables in their food tastes as they did to blood in their preferences for amusement.
He discovered that if he did not bother to think where he was bound his feet carried him smoothly enough through the maze of tunnels, and presently there was a door set in a recess with DIRECTORS ONLY on it. He went in.
It contained a ladder leading to a trap door in the ceiling; a light table with a typewriter; and various oddments of Assyrian costumery hanging from hooks in the wall. A heavy bench held several piles of slabs. Finch bent to investigate them, but even before his fingers came in contact that trick of subconscious memory brought forth the answer that they were records—slabs of soft wet clay, with a dry powder of the same material to keep them from sticking.
He gazed rather apprehensively at the garments, a couple of short-sleeved shirts, and three of what looked like shawls with elaborate fringes but were probably some kind of toga. No pants; and his subsidiary memory failed him completely when he demanded of it how to get into the things.
He was just about to give it a try on logic alone when the trapdoor banged open, and a pair of legs appeared, followed by the rest of a chunky, baldish man, puffing out his cheeks with effort. The newcomer carefully set a little pile of clay tablets and a stylus on the typewriter table, made a precise little bow, said, "Good morning, Doctor," with formal courtesy, then sat down, yawned, and ejaculated "Himmel!"
"Good morning, Doctor," returned Finch. "What seems to have gone wrong?"
The newcomer threw up an arm and shook it, revealing bracelets that jangled. "Folk! Race! The ver-damned asses! Judenroech!" He spat with vigor into a corner of the room.
Finch's eyes opened wide. "I suggest," he said, "that if you exercised your brain on this reconstruction as vigorously as you seem to be exercizing your emotions, the results would be more interesting as research."
For a moment Finch was favored with a stare of distinct hostility. Then the other guffawed heavily, slapping one knee. "Ha, ha," he said. "That is your American sense of humorous, no? and it is right to laugh, because why do we make important these things? Only it, is not so funny for Papa Hilprecht that his whole theory in ruin sees."
He finished with a sad little shake of the head and began to get out of his Assyrian garments. Finch observed that part of the fringed toga formed an ankle-length skirt, while the rest went around the torso spirally. "Oh, come," he said, "it's hardly that bad, is it?"
"In ruin! The news has just come to the court that Zilidu has beaten the Egyptians, and what do they discuss? How many of these prisoners, these Copts, shall be taken to Nineveh to marry with Assyrian women, and how many Egyptian women there will be to bear children for Assyrian males. It is racial pollution, and Hans Guenther was right; the possession of the heartland is without value unless the race has a consciousness of its own mission."
"But look here," protested Finch, his hand leaping to one ear-lobe, "I thought you geo-politicians always held that race was important."
Hilprecht turned round from the typewriter where he had seated himself, laid one finger beside his nose, and assumed an expression of prodigious foxiness. "Ach, you would make controversy with me, no?" he said. "My report will answer these things. But now I say so much: these Assyrians, they are virile, it is self-evident. They are a true heartland folk; war they see as the high good, and they have no Christian scruples to rot out strength. You give so much?"
"Yes, but—wait, no! Didn't you say something about adopting the Egyptian prisoners?"
"Ach, du bis so eilengierig! Excuse, I forgot. Wait— they have captured Anak; you will see. I say you they have no rotten Christianity; they kill."
"Seems rather horrible to me."
Hilprecht's eyebrows jagged up. "My friend, you have not the true scientific mind. You talk like a ver-damned humanitarian; I could a report make on that remark and you would lose the directorship. But do not worry; Papa Hilprecht will not betray you. I continue: the folk is virile, but it has no race-culture, it pollutes its own blood with races that have the slave moral."
Finch felt as though-his mind were being tossed on a sea of conflicting ideas. "But wait a minute," he said. "I don't see how you can say this ruins all your theories. It seems to me that what you're doing is setting up an entirely new theory for the decline of Semitic militancy."
Hilprecht swivelled round in his chair, his jaw falling open. "But—" he began, then clapped one hand to his forehead with a resounding slap. "Semites! I forgot!" A beautific expression spread across his face. "So that is why they possess no culture-creating energy, that is why they are cowardly imitators without folk feeling! They are not a race, but a dilution of races. I see it all now. I will found a new school of geo-politics and it will be senior to all the others. The division of Hilprechtian geo-political science!"
He leaped from his chair and wrung Finch's hand warmly. "You have saved my life and my reputation! Now leave me, my friend, I must work."
Twenty:
Finch climbed through the trap door and found himself in semi-darkness. His eyes gradually made out the roof and walls of a large but slovenly tent, smelling of camel, and a floor piled, high with disorderly bundles of short arrows. Another pile would be prepared clay tablets. He gathered up a small armful and stepped out, into the sunshine.