"I'm soaked," came the plaintive voice of Flin in the dark.
"What d'you expect?" snapped Bulnes. "Get out a flashlight if you please." Flin had made that same remark every time they had run into a blow.
Water sloshed under the floor boards now that the automatic bilge pump had stopped. Bulnes braced himself in the confined space to look at the power plant. With the flashlight added to the beams of the headlamps he soon saw that the case was hopeless. Leads were fused all over the place, and the heart of the system — the great barium-titanite crystal, as big as a small suitcase — had split along a dozen planes of cleavage.
"Surge from the force wall," he grunted. "Raised the interface tensions and broke the crystal all to pieces. We might as well throw this junk overboard."
Bulnes began dismantling the power plant and extracting pieces of the crystal that had powered it. The motor, at least, seemed intact. With a new crystal and some repairs to the wiring, Dagmar II would again move under power.
Flin said, "Why didn't you get a spare crystal when we stopped at Marseilles for a recharge?"
Bulnes smoldered. "My dear comrade, where would you store a spare crystal in here? Go on forward and hit the sack, if you please. I'll tend to this."
"Really, I must say you don't take these things well. It's not my fault your ruddy crystal broke down."
"Oh, yes? Whose idea was this trip anyway?"
"You should have foreseen ..."
"I warned you there were risks, my dear sir. And whose wife are we hunting?"
"Mine of course. But don't try to make out that it's all on my account. You were as keen to go as I, in hope of getting a story for your magazine."
"Oh, well," said Bulnes, trying to turn off the acrimony, "I only hope that if we do find Thalia, you'll think she was worth it. Some of my old married friends would be only too glad to have the Emperor's agents kidnap their wives."
"You don't understand these things, Knut. Being a mere selfish bachelor — ouch!"
"Hit your head again?"
"Yes, dash it."
Bulnes smiled. "Where'd you put the booklet of radar instructions? I saw you looking through it today."
"Oh, I don't know — there it is on the floor."
"You mean the deck. Damn it, I wish you'd be so exceedingly kind as to put things back where they belong!"
"Sorry. What have you got in mind?"
"To run the radar from the hand-crank generator. It has an attachment, though I've never used it."
Bulnes thumbed through the waterproof instruction booklet by the light of his headlamp. Since a man lacked the strength in his arms to power the transmitting side of the radar circuit, one had to connect up the bank of condensers (C, D, E in Diagram 4) to the output, charge the condensers with the hand crank, switch the hand generator over to the scope circuit, and then close the switch (L in Diagram 6) that discharged the condenser bank through ...
"Knut," came the voice of Wiyem Flin.
"Yes? I thought you were asleep."
"I'm not sleepy. I was just thinking about wives and marriage and things."
"Well?"
"Look here, old man, why don't you and Dagmar do it? Thalia was telling me Dagmar told her she'd.be glad ..."
"Caramba!" shouted Bulnes. "My dear man, my relations with Miss Mekrei are my own damned business! When I want advice on subjects like that, I'll go to a regular psycher. Now kindly shut up and let me work."
"Oh, very well, but you needn't be so blasted touchy."
Still fuming, Bulnes screwed his last connection home. Touchy! Knut Bulnes considered himself, with reason, an even-tempered and self-controlled man, but after two weeks of Wiyem Flin, plus the strain of running the force wall, with God only knew what penalties awaiting him, and on top of that to have Flin offering unsolicited advice about Dagmar ...
He spun the hand crank. When the generator whined, he flipped the switch. The scope sprang into light, as if a brushful of luminous paint had been swirled against its surface. Bulnes strained his eyes upon the little glass disk to catch every detail before the picture faded. The disk sparkled with sea return, through which he could make out Antikithera well to their rear. There was nothing ahead. Ashe remembered the charts, there should be nothing in the northeast quadrant within sixty nauticals. By the time they had to look for the Kiklades, it would be day.
Flin's remark still rankled. Hell, Bulnes thought, the world was getting too damned well-organized and everybody in it too well-adjusted and too thoroughly conditioned to make the best of it — at least for an anachronistic individualist like himself, Bulnes thought, smiling a little. He couldn't help a certain sympathy for that fellow in the poem, Miniver Cheevy, who
[* From Miniver Cheevy, by Edwin Arlington Robinson, copr. by Chas. Scribner's Sons.]
This new Puritanism was the fault of the last three Emperors. Though denied political power by the World Constitution, they exerted real leadership in manners and morals. Hencewhile under Kaal IV men became sport fanatics, under Serj III they affected a pallid aestheticism. And whereas under the dissolute Rodri they competed in worldliness, under the strait-laced trio ending with Vasil IX, the incumbent, they ...
"Knut."
"What now?"
"Sorry, old man. Didn't mean to tread on one of your corns. But I thought you should know — I was about to tell you that was why you weren't asked to join the Sphinx Club."
"So?" said Bulnes in a changed voice. "Interesting. I was just thinking I should have lived in the twenty-first century, when a man's private life was his own affair."
"Oh, I don't think the twenty-first century was so wonderful. For uninhibited freedom, now, take Periklean Athens. Where else could a man walk down the main street stark naked without exciting the least remark?"
"That doesn't prove them unconventional. Nudity happened to be among their conventions, like eating your parents in ancient Ireland."
"A base libel on my Irish ancestors," said Flin. "The Athenians really did pride themselves on letting people do as they pleased so long as they didn't bother other people. Read your Thucydides."
"All very fine for the citizens, but I seem to remember that most of the people of Athens were slaves."
"Still, I'd give anything to see it as it was then.'' "Well, my good friend, you'll soon see it as it is now, whatever that may mean. I wonder what Vasil Hohnsol-Romano has been up to all these years?"
"That kosker!"
"You surprise me, Wiyem. Lèse majesté, no less."
"I mean it. Lenz not only turns Greece over to him for his dashed experiments, but lets him kidnap people's wives because they happen to be Greek. I say!"
"What?" said Bulnes.
"Just remembered something that might have a bearing on the Emp's activities. I was talking to old Djounz — you know, Maksel Djounz the historian — just before we left England. It seems old Djounz knows a chap named Adler — Ogust Adler — the curator of the Dresden Museum."
"Is he the one who told you your wife had been shipped back to Greece with all the other émigré Greeks?"
"No. That was Dagmar's friend Baiker. Anyway, d'you know those caves or saltmines or whatever they are in Saxony?"
"I've heard of them."
"Some years ago, Djounz says, Adler got orders from His Majesty, down the chain of command, to store some building stone and marble — all carefully crated and numbered. Trainloads of the things, enough to build a city. Took Ogust nearly a year to store them. A couple of the crates broke in handling, and he saw the blocks and says one bore a Classical Greek inscription. It's as if the Emp had dismantled all the ancient ruins in Greece and shipped the pieces to Saxony for storage."