The Totems of Abydos

CHAPTER 14





“By the gods of ten worlds,” exclaimed Rodriguez, in fury, rummaging through his things.

“What is missing now?” asked Brenner, looking up.

“The walnut-brained, grapefruit-headed, thieving little monkeys!” said Rodriguez.

“Do not blame them,” said Brenner. “They are curious, they like things, they pick them up, they steal them away. It is their nature.”

“Inoffensiveness and innocence are apparently no guarantee of honesty,” said Rodriguez.

“No more than in a child,” said Brenner. “What is missing now? “

“My shaving mirror,” said Rodriguez.

The Pons could indeed be nuisances, thought Brenner. But the shaving mirror was certainly less of a loss than that of certain other items which had similarly vanished, usually when he and Rodriguez were out of their hut.

They had now been in the village for several weeks.

The map in which Rodriguez had been recording their journey, and the compass he had used, had been amongst the first items missing. To be sure, they had disappeared in the journey itself, possibly lost in the fording of a small stream. More serious, since the white guide rocks were still visible, like a necklace connecting the village with the vicinity of Company Station, was the loss of the two radios. That had occurred on the eleventh day in the village. Without them there was no way to expeditiously contact Company Station. Similarly, its air cars, and air trucks, would not have a signal on which to home, in case of emergency.

In the beginning Brenner had been somewhat alarmed by these losses, for it had seemed to him that there might be something of a methodicality in them, as the Pons might, at least in some dim way, understand the meaning of the compass and map, and the radios. They had not taken the rifle, but then it was apparently a mere optical instrument, of no more intrinsic potency than field glasses. Perhaps they had not taken it because they did not understand what it was? But later Brenner’s suspicions, absurd as they were, had been fully allayed, when trinkets like a watch, a ring of keys, thimbles from a sewing kit, and, now, a shaving mirror, had also disappeared. In this way he understood that the losses were no more meaningful than what might be attributed to the furtive predations of the home-world’s burglar rat or the tiny bandit bird of Chios.

“You can use mine, my shaving mirror,” said Brenner.