up images of Washington and Jefferson at the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
“I call ’em Urim and Thummim,” the professor announced. “Or the Ambassadors from Mars. Don’t know what they call themselves.”
The creatures who now stood before Lloyd were remarkable individuals by anyone’s standards. Short but not exactly dwarfs, they were obviously brothers—both microcephalics, or pinheads. They were Negroid, perhaps, but pale-skinned, with highly distorted features and an animalish clicking-grunting type of language.
“Why do you call them the Ambassadors from Mars?” Lloyd asked.
“I don’t plan to outside the smaller burgs,” replied the professor. “Wouldn’t do a’tall to get the tar bubbling.”
“You mean to fool folks,” the boy chided.
“My young friend, let me say this about that. As a rule, people like to be fooled. If you mean inspired, surprised, delighted—made to wonder and to wish for things. If I can make the world bigger and brighter for a moment for some boot stone or put even a tintype star in the eye of some leather-skinned lass, where’s the crime in that? But when you say fool, you not only make it sound cheap, you make it sound easy—and t’aint always so. You can’t fool or enlighten all the people all the time, son. That’s why it’s so very important to be clear about who you are trying to fool or enlighten at any given time.”
“But they’re not from Mars, are they?” the boy continued (which stirred the Ambassadors into a fit of clicking and grunting).
“No,” agreed the professor, twisting his mustache. “They’re from Indiana, far as I know. That’s where I found ’em, at any rate. But their story is just as hard to swallow, in its own way. The free niggers looking after them swore on the Bible that these two were dropped out of a tornado.”
“A tornado?” Lloyd puzzled.
Mulrooney held his hand over his heart. “Urim and Thummim came down out of the storm unharmed about two years ago, they said. No hint of where they started from or who their real family was. The niggers took it as a sign from the Almighty and took ’em in, but they kept ’em hidden in their barn for fear of someone doing ’em harm.”
“So you bought them?” Lloyd asked, thinking back to how he had been hidden away in the family barn.
“The nigger and his wife were damn grateful when I proposed taking the boys off their hands. But now, when you see the lads in the sumptuous duds designed by the Ladies Mulrooney, prognosticating and pontificating in their mumbo-jumbo, who can but conclude that they are emissaries and apostles from some distant kingdom of celestial grandeur far beyond our ken?”
This assertion prompted more clicking and grunting from the Ambassadors, and the showman observed how closely the boy was listening.
“You look like you understand them.”
“I think I could, with a little time,” Lloyd replied.
“Balderdash! You can’t tell me there’s anything to their doggerel. Or if there is, only they know it!”
“No,” Lloyd answered. “I think it’s a real language—a spoken one, anyway.”
“Oh, they write, too—if you can call it that,” the professor remarked.
“Could I see?” Lloyd cried, unable to hide his interest.
“My boy, you’re as curious a specimen as they are in your own way,” the professor replied. He went to a trunk, which made Lloyd wince with the recollection of Miss Viola, and produced a large handful of paper scraps all covered with a tiny but precise cuneiform-like writing. Holding the dense lines of unknown symbols together was a repeated icon that resembled the spiral shape of a tornado.
“Now don’t be telling me you can read this!” the professor scoffed.
“Well, not yet,” Lloyd agreed. “But maybe …”
“Son, all the clever men in the world would be a long while in unraveling the secret of this doodling. And it may well be that there is no secret—that they’ve just scribbled and scrawled to please themselves and what looks good is good enough.”
Lloyd noticed a wooden matchbox, or what he first thought was a wooden matchbox, edging out from under the Ambassadors’ bed. It was in fact triangular in shape, rather like a hand-size metronome, and when he picked it up he was surprised by the almost total lack of weight. Its surface, which had the smoothness and hardness of metal, not wood, had been covered, but here the writing had been engraved. The weird ciphers flowed in their swimming lines, but the lines took on a larger shape of the cyclonic spiral.