The Masters of Atlantis (11 page)

ON MONDAY morning Popper awoke in a tangle of blankets. He lay there and turned matters over in his head. Why could not their production of gold be further facilitated by nature? Get some bugs to eat the bagweed. Then feed the bugs to frogs and the frogs in turn to snakes. At each step of the pyramid there would be a greater accretion of gold, and at the apex, serpents of gold, their scales glittering with the stuff. He must present the idea to Cezar.

He also resolved to stop drinking and to ask June Mack to marry him.

“Today's the day, Squanto.”

He got up and for the first time in months went through his Gnomonic breathing exercises. One could fall off the Jimmerson Spiral but one could also swing back aboard. He boiled some eggs, a long business at this altitude, and made coffee with the same water. He ate two eggs and left two for Cezar. On one he idly scrawled,
Help. Captive. Gypsy caravan
. Cezar wasn't such a bad fellow. A pouting little pedant and much too full of himself but a man of some substance for all that. What was their production of gold anyway? He must ask Cezar.

“Watch this,” he said to the bird, and went about collecting bottles and pouring rum down the sink. Renunciation was not only exhilarating, it was easy.

Squanto was resting in the sunken crown of an old felt hat. His head was pulled down into his shoulders and his neck feathers were fluffed out against the cold drafts. He had the crazed look of a setting hen. Popper spoke words of assurance to him. Spring was just around the corner. June would suffuse their dreary lives with sunshine. Her very name gave promise of it.

There was a lot to be said for the ladies, he told the unblinking bird, apart from their physical charms. They were loyal. Hard workers. They were on the whole a civilizing force and had made good fathers and useful citizens out of many a slavering brute. Women were brave too and not the least bit squeamish about the corruptions of the flesh. If anything they were attracted to that muck. All those nurses. At the same time you must keep them in check or they would drive you crazy. They would presume and push. They were contentious, unreasonable, expensive, randomly vicious and would demand far too much of your attention. There was nothing meaner than a mean woman. With their gabble and nagging they could give you a preview of Hell. But that was the worst of it and there was much to be said for them.

As he was leaving, Popper paused in the doorway and said, “Just a little longer, Squanto. Hogandale is not such a bad place. We'll look back on all this later and have a good laugh together.”

He took the noon bus to Rollo and went directly to the barbershop in the basement of the Hotel Rollo. There in a back room he had a shower bath, a long steamy pounding, while his suit was being pressed and his shoes shined. Then a shave with hot towels. On the way out, with his burnished cheeks glowing like apples, he stopped in the bar for a short beer, which hardly counted as a drink. The bartender said a man had been looking for him.

“Who was it?”

“I don't know. There was something of the bill collector about him. I told him nothing.”

“Good work.”

Popper had the bar to himself. He ordered another beer and took it to the table by the big bay window. He looked out on the town of Rollo with goodwill. Seeing the post office, he was tempted again to send a postcard to Mr. Jimmerson. How thrilled the Master would be to get a Poppergram out of the blue. But the time for that had not come. Outside the courthouse he saw a deputy sheriff in Sam Browne belt reading something. No doubt a writ of some kind. A short man stood beside him, waiting. He wore a fedora and long brown overcoat that brushed the tops of his shoes. No doubt a lawyer, about to swoop.

It was true, the man was a lawyer, but he was also Special Agent Pharris White, and the deputy was reading, not a writ of attachment, but an FBI sitrep, or situation report, which ran:
Popper, Austin. Age unknown. Origins obscure. Position and momentum uncertain. Disguise impenetrable. Tracks dim. Sightings nil. Early apprehension doubtful
. The reading done, the deputy and the short man got into a green Ford sedan and drove away. Popper did not recognize White and made nothing much of the scene, now so neatly concluded.

He moved on to the Blue Hole, greeting the regulars with his usual “Keep'em flying!” They cringed on their stools from the sunlight that came streaming through the open doorway, and they too reported that a man had been looking for him. The fellow's manner had put them off. He seemed to think he was the cock of the walk, if not the bull of the woods, and the barflies had told him nothing. “Good work,” said Popper, and he bought a round and took a short rum himself so as not to put a damper on the occasion. June Mack had not yet come on duty.

Just as he settled in at the bar, Popper heard a familiar voice. He turned and saw Cezar Golescu, not where he should have been, at the old Taggert house wolfing down eggs, but here in the Blue Hole, back there in a dark booth having a glass of wine against the teachings of the Koran and talking to some crew-cut Indio.

“Cezar!”

“Yes, I saw you come in, Popper, but I can't talk to you now. I am engaged in private business.”

“What in the world are you doing here? In your belted suit?”

“A private matter. I will be with you shortly.”

Popper went back to the booth. “This won't wait, I have something that will make you sit up. Have you thought of using bugs to help process our stuff?”

“Yes, I have. No bug known to science will eat B.W. Bugs are not on my agenda today. If you don't mind, this is private business.”

“Then I will leave you to it.”

“Please do.”

Popper returned to the bar and Golescu resumed his lecture to Thomas, the Ute Indian. Thomas drove a coal delivery truck. He was a man about sixty years old with close-cropped gray hair. No consumptive oriental type with flat face and thin limbs, he was a big strapping Plains Indian with fierce Armenoid features. He had just finished eating fifteen dollars worth of fried oysters, the house specialty, and was now smoking a cigar and drinking a mixture of beer and tomato juice. Golescu was paying.

On the table between them the professor had spread out his many membership cards for Thomas to see. He had already taken measurements of Thomas's skull and was now going through the epic tale of Mu once again, of how, after the cataclysm, a handful of survivors had been left perched on rocks in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the water lapping at their feet, and how from that remnant Thomas and all his red brothers had sprung.

Thomas had understood most of this the first time around. He found it only a little less convincing than the story of how his people had hopped from rock to rock across the Bering Strait, at low tide, but he still couldn't see how it affected him personally, or his coal route, and had said little in response.

“Yes, I am sitting here face to face with a living, breathing fossil,” said the professor. “I have dreamed of this moment. You, Thomas, are nothing less than a degraded Muvian.”

Thomas said nothing. Golescu tried another approach. “Just for the moment let us forget the rest and look at the two languages and how they so nicely correspond.” He spread his fingers and pushed them together in an interlocking way to give an example of correspondence. “Like that. See? It is amazing how the language of Mu and your own tongue, the Uto-Aztecan tongue—not your physical tongue, of course—” Here Golescu pointed to his own tongue with jabbing motions, and shook his head no.

“Did I hear you right? Did you call me degraded?”

“Please, no, a scientific term. There is no offense. ‘Devolved,' if you like. I myself am a degraded Roman. I boast of it. Does that surprise you? I know you have heard of the great Roman Empire. Those were my people, Thomas. Did you think I was a Slav or a Goth? What a funny joke. My people came to Dacia under Trajan's Roman Eagle. I am more Roman than Mussolini, who pretends he is restoring the Empire. Is my name not Cezar? What the hell kind of name is Benito? Mexican? Names are important. I will tell you that if Remus had killed Romulus then the Roman Empire would have been the Reman Empire and the Catholic peoples would go on their pilgrimages to the eternal city of Reme and I myself would be a degraded Reman. But all that is by the way and my point is simply this, that each of us has a noble heritage. And yet what is mine compared to yours? Nothing. Agriculture, metallurgy, bathrooms, celestial navigation, radios, typewriters—all these things your people of Mu invented many years ago. And your calendar! So accurate! Like a fine watch of seventeen jewels!”

June arrived, wearing loose, pajamalike trousers that were gathered in at the ankles. Popper moved to meet her at the door. He took her hand but before he could speak she said, “Austin! You look so nice! You've heard the news, then? It sure gets around fast in Rollo these days.”

“What news is that?”

“Cezar and I have an understanding.”

“A what?”

“We are seeing each other now. You were so silly last night. Cezar took me home and we fell in love right there on Bantry Street.”

“Cezar Golescu took you home?”

“Yes, and shame on me, I let him get fresh. It was like lightning hit us, Austin.”

Popper dropped her hand and leaned forward on his stick for support. He had a vision of June sitting on Cezar's lap. He saw little beardless Golescus crawling around on the floor of Mack house and peeping out at the guests from behind the furniture. How bold she was. Nothing of the stammering maiden twisting a handkerchief in her hands.

“This is hard to believe, June.”

“We can still be friends, can't we?”

“Why yes, certainly.”

She turned about in a modeling move to show her red Scheherazade pants. “How do you like my new outfit?”

“Very nice.”

“Cezar doesn't want other men looking at my legs.”

“I see.”

“There was something else I wanted to tell you but I can't remember what it was.”

“This will do for now.”

Rising voices came from the Golescu booth.

Thomas said, “It sounds to me like you're leaving God out of this.”

Golescu said, “I have not mentioned God.”

“Wasn't that what I said?”

“But this is about Mu.”

“I don't see how you can leave God out of this unless you're cut off from God yourself. He is right here at this table.”

“In a sense, yes. I fully agree.”

“God made the sun. I don't worship the sun and never did.”

“Not you personally, no, but in Mu they saw the sun as the central manifestation of God's glory, as did so many early peoples. In Colonel Churchward's book you will find it all clearly explained.”

“I wouldn't have that book in my house. I wouldn't have it in my truck.”

“Please—”

“Where are you from anyway, you Nazi devil? You dog eater. You call me a fossil and you say I'm degraded but I'll tell you something, mister, you're the one who is cut off from God and not me. I have felt His burning breath on my face.”

“I am hearing it, the poetry of Mu!”

Thomas left in anger, pausing at the bar to turn and point his finger at Golescu and say, “There's no way in the world I can walk with that man and walk with God at the same time.”

Popper went to the booth and slid into Thomas's seat. “Who's your pal?”

“His name is Thomas. A private matter.”

“He left his cap.”

“He will come back for it.”

It was a railroad man's cap, made of some striped material like mattress ticking. The high bloused crown was blackened with coal dust and hardened from repeated soakings of sweat.

“I'm not so sure,” said Popper. “This cap has seen plenty of hard service. He may well write it off and buy a new one. Something with earflaps this time.”

“Thomas will come back and apologize to me. I know these people better than they know themselves.”

“No, Thomas can't walk with you and neither can I. We're finished, Cezar. Where are you keeping our stuff? I want an accounting. I want my gold and I want it now.”

“Very well.”

Golescu took the buzzard feather from his coat pocket and removed a tiny plug from the end of the shaft. He tapped out a little powdery heap of gold on the table. “There. Banco. Half is yours. Take it and go.”

“There's not enough gold there to crown a tooth.”

“About six dollars' worth.”

“Where's the rest of it? This is one of your desert tricks.”

“There is no more. That is our winter's work. That is our golden harvest from eleven hundred pounds of leaves.”

“You've gone wrong somewhere in your recovery methods.”

“No, I have not gone wrong. I have tried everything—zinc, cyanide, caustic soda, chlorine, distillation, sublimation, calcination, fulmination. Let us not forget high temperature incineration. Always the result is the same. This dirt, that dirt, always the same result. The production of gold is constant but small. It is not a function of the soil. Your idea was no good. Very stupid. Gold from the earth, you said, and you bring us out here to the headwaters of the Puerco River to get rich. I listen to a foolish American who never in his life taught science. Bagweed does not take up bits of gold from the earth, you stupid man. No, it
makes
gold. It
synthesizes
gold. All you have done is waste my valuable time.”

“What you're saying is that creeping bagweed is a hoax. In Washington you told me you could work wonders. You had me worrying about swamping the market with gold. Now you tell me we have broken our backs for six dollars.”