Miggy Tremelo sat at his desk staring at the pages of Henri's "diary of events," desperately trying to find something that could convince the Powers That Be to cancel the use of the tactical nuke which was scheduled to take place in—
He glanced at his watch. Nine hours. The scowl on Miggy's face deepened. They'd have to evacuate the area themselves before much longer. Granted, the bomb was the nuclear equivalent of a shaped charge. Nor did Miggy doubt the claims of the nuclear technicians that the device would create minimal destruction everywhere except the target. "Minimal," at least, by nuke standards.
But he was even more certain that the effect on the alien intruder would be catastrophic. Every time energy had been applied to the black pyramid in the hopes of destroying it, the thing had simply grown—and in direct proportion to the energy involved. Tremelo saw no reason to assume that the tac nuke would cross some magic threshold. He expected the pyramid to expand enormously, which, among other things, would engulf his own office in the snatch radius. He wasn't worried about that from his own point of view, but there was no way he was going to risk Marie being snatched. With Lamont already gone, the Jackson kids would be orphans.
"Idiots!" he hissed.
One of Miggy's technicians burst into Tremelo's office without stopping to knock. He hardly stopped to open the door. "The alien object has just reduced in size!" he squeaked. "Registered on all our instruments!"
Tremelo's eyes narrowed. "I wonder if someone just got away . . . "
Marie burst into the cluttered office through another door. "They're back! It just came on the news!"
A moment later, Miggy and Marie were part of the small crowd standing in front of the little television in the nearby lunch room. The man being interviewed on the screen bore a startling resemblance to Indiana Jones. Except he seemed smaller, dirtier, more disheveled, and a lot smarter.
" . . . not try to attack the thing," he was saying. "I repeat—DO NOT launch any kind of attack on the Krim device. The material element involved in its construction is minute and essentially impervious to damage. The Krim device is a probe, essentially. I don't know how it works, because the science involved is way beyond our knowledge. But I do know that the thing survived passage through an interstellar wormhole. Check with any reputable astrophysicist and I'm sure they'll tell you that the energies and stresses involved in such a wormhole passage far exceed anything we're capable of creating."
"Get Milliken on the phone," growled Tremelo to Marie. "No—to hell with Milliken! Get me the damned President!"
Marie nodded, but made no move to comply. Her face seemed almost pale with strain. Belatedly, Miggy realized that the man on the TV screen—Professor Lukacs, obviously, even if he didn't look much like his photographs—had so far said nothing about the survivors.
"Not right now, Marie," he murmured, putting a comforting arm around her shoulders. "It'll keep for a while."
Lukacs was blithering on about the Krim device. For all his own desperate desire to learn as much as he could, Tremelo felt a sudden flash of anger at the mythologist. Damn all absent-minded professors, anyway! What about Marie's husband? Is he still alive, you—you jerk!
" . . . only thing we can do is quarantine the pyramid. Evacuate everybody far enough away that its powers—the Krim call it prukrin, which seems to refer to some kind of psychic energies, which bears some similarities, as near as I can determine, to Jung's notions concerning the collective unconscious although—"
Blither, blither—damn all scholars, anyway!
" . . . hasten to add that I'm just speculating. But what I do know is that it relies on psychic input from the people it snatches. And it can only snatch people within a certain range. So evacuation—quarantine—is an effective way—"
Tremelo saw Liz De Beer come up behind Jerry, cradling her arm. She was scowling at him. The expression held an odd mixture of fondness and exasperation, almost like that of a wife dealing with one of her husband's foibles.
"Stop lecturing, Jerry!" she said firmly. "You're supposed to tell Lamont's wife about him, remember? And if you blather all day you'll blow our date." She planted a kiss on his neck and moved away from the camera.
The scientist on the TV screen jerked to a sudden halt in his logorrhea. A look of surprise and chagrin crossed Lukacs' face.
"Oh. Sorry. Forgot." Lukacs leaned forward and peered intently into the camera. "Mrs. Jackson, are you there?"
Marie stiffened. Her hand covered her mouth.
Jerry Lukacs' face broke into a smile. "Well, I hope so. Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that Lamont's fine. He's back with the rest of us and in perfect health. In fact—"
Marie sobbed, once. Then, her eyes leaking tears of joy, she pressed her face into Tremelo's shoulder and began hugging the elderly physicist. He returned the hug with his own, stroking her hair, while he continued to watch Lukacs.
The disheveled, scholarly tough-looking face on the screen turned away for a moment. There seemed to be a lot of noise in the background.
"In fact, I'd say he's having a run of luck at the casino's tables. Big run of luck, from the sound of it."
A balding, shrewd-eyed, managerial face thrust itself into the camera, puffing on a huge cigar. "Made over a million bucks so far. Remember, folks—this is all happening at the Luxor casino. The Luxor. Best casino in the world!"
The face pulled away and Jerry's visage reappeared from the fading cloud of blue smoke. "Yeah, he's fine. And as you can see"—his face colored a bit—"Dr. Elizabeth De Beer made it back also, in good shape except for a broken arm. And so did Sergeant Anibal Cruz and Corporal Jim McKenna. Even got new girlfriends."
The camera panned sideways, catching Liz, Cruz and McKenna sitting at nearby tables. Liz was ignoring the camera altogether, while she practically swigged a large cup of coffee. Corporal McKenna couldn't really be seen properly, because he was fiercely kissing a young woman perched on his lap wearing nothing but a bathrobe.
Sergeant Cruz, on the other hand, was grinning at the camera. His arm was around a beautiful woman sitting on a chair right next to him. Both he and the woman had children perched on their laps.
"Yeah, that's right," he announced. "I'd like to introduce everybody to my new family. The kids are called Priones and Neoptolmeus. My old lady's name is Medea. That's the 'Medea,' by the way, so if la migra'sgot any wild ideas about deporting them 'cause they don't got papers, think again."
A new voice intruded. "Who is this La Migra?" it demanded, booming. A dwarf stepped into the camera's field of vision and stood by Cruz's side. For all its short stature, there seemed something enormously powerful about the figure. The fact that the lion-looking face was scowling ferociously added to the effect.
"Someone threatens you, friend Cruz?" the leonine dwarf demanded.
The sergeant shrugged. "Immigration and Naturalization Service. We swarthy types just call it la migra." Cruz looked back at the camera, grinning widely, and jerked his head at the dwarf. "Let me introduce Bes, also. He's an Egyptian god."
Then, to Bes: "La migra are pretty much the world's champion dwarf tossers."
The camera seemed to shake a bit and move backward, as if the cameraman was staggered by the incredible roar of fury which erupted from Bes. A moment later, still a bit shakily, the camera followed the dwarf god's progress as Bes bounded over to a nearby statue of a hieracosphinx and proceeded to . . .
"He's demolishing that thing," whispered one of the technicians in the room. "Crushing a statue with his bare hands."
Tremelo gave Marie a last little squeeze. "You okay, now?" He felt her head nod, and heard the happy little gurgle. "Better get me the President, Marie. I can see we're going to need him to grant some people political asylum, too. Before those idiots at the INS get it into their heads to pull a raid."
The image on the TV switched to an outside view, from a different camera. Two giant winged snakes—dragons?—were being fed by a line of hotel employees bearing platters. A huge sphinx was practically mobbed with tourists, tossing the monster candy bars when they failed to answer its riddles properly.
"Quick, Marie!" hissed Tremelo. "The President'll have to invoke the Endangered Species Act, too."
Marie was watching the screen now. Her little gurgle of happiness turned into a riotous laugh.
"Yeah—but which species is being endangered?"
After she left, Tremelo shook his head. "Damned if I know. Oh, brave new world, that hath such people in it."
One of Miggy's assistants was staring at him. "What're we going to do, Professor?" He pointed at the TV screen, which was now filled again with the face of Jerry Lukacs, resuming his lecture. "If that guy's right, we can't touch that damned pyramid."
Tremelo shrugged. "Do about it? Get us all on a priority flight to Nellis Air Force Base, for starters. We can talk about it on our way to Las Vegas."
He burst into laughter himself, now. "What the hell? We'll live with it, I imagine. Just another illegal alien, that's all."
Miggy grinned at the TV, which was now showing an image of the Krim pyramid. "No, that's politically incorrect! Let's call it the undocumented interstellar probe. Frustrated because it can't find a job."