sprockets as they picked him up—he looked ridiculously like a faculty member about to be tossed in a blanket by a bunch of roughhousing fraternity boys. He was thumbing the communicator.
“Gomez! Final firing sequence! Now! Now!”
The dune at the foot of the gangplank shifted. Became a hand. A large brown hand that began to scrabble up the incline.
Shrieking, Shapiro bolted from that hand.
Cursing, the captain was carried away from it.
The gangplank was pulled up. The hand fell off and became sand again. The hatchway irised closed. The engines howled. No time for a couch; no time for anything like that. Shapiro dropped into a crash-fold position on the bulkhead and was promptly smashed flat by the acceleration. Before unconsciousness washed over him, it seemed he could feel sand grasping at the trader with muscular brown arms, straining to hold them down—
Then they were up and away.
Rand watched them go. He was sitting down. When the track of the trader’s jets was at last gone from the sky, he turned his eyes out to the placid endlessness of the dunes.
“We got a ’34 wagon and we call it a woody,” he croaked to the empty, moving sand. “It ain’t very cherry; it’s an oldy but a goody.”
Slowly, reflectively, he began to cram handful after handful of sand into his mouth. He swallowed ... swallowed ... swallowed. Soon his belly was a swollen barrel and sand began to drift over his legs.
The Reaper’s Image
“We moved it last year, and quite an operation it was, too,” Mr. Carlin said as they mounted the stairs. “Had to move it by hand, of course. No other way. We insured it against accident with Lloyd’s before we even took it out of the case in the drawing room. Only firm that would insure for the sum we had in mind.”
Spangler said nothing. The man was a fool. Johnson Spangler had learned a long time ago that the only way to talk to a fool was to ignore him.
“Insured it for a quarter of a million dollars,” Mr. Carlin resumed when they reached the second-floor landing. His mouth quirked in a half-bitter, half-humorous line. “And a pretty penny it cost, too.” He was a little man, not quite fat, with rimless glasses and a tanned bald head that shone like a varnished volleyball. A suit of armor, guarding the mahogany shadows of the second-floor corridor, stared at them impassively.
It was a long corridor, and Spangler eyed the walls and hangings with a cool professional eye. Samuel Claggert had bought in copious quantities, but he had not bought well. Like so many of the self-made industry emperors of the late 1800’s, he had been little more than a pawnshop rooter masquerading in collector’s clothing, a connoisseur of canvas monstrosities, trashy novels and poetry collections in expensive cowhide bindings, and atrocious pieces of sculpture, all of which he considered Art.
Up here the walls were hung—festooned was perhaps a better word—with imitation Moroccan drapes, numberless (and, no doubt, anonymous) madonnas holding numberless haloed babes while numberless angels flitted hither and thither in the background, grotesque scrolled candelabra, and one monstrous and obscenely ornate chandelier surmounted by a salaciously grinning nymphet.
Of course the old pirate had come up with a few interesting items; the law of averages demanded it. And if the Samuel Claggert Memorial Private Museum (Guided Tours on the Hour—Admission $1.00 Adults, $.50 Children—nauseating) was 98 percent blatant junk, there was always that other two percent, things like the Coombs long rifle over the hearth in the kitchen, the strange little camera obscura in the parlor, and of course the—
“The DeIver looking-glass was removed from downstairs after a rather unfortunate ... incident,” Mr. Carlin said abruptly, motivated apparently by a ghastly glaring portrait of no one in particular at the base of the next staircase. “There had been others—harsh words, wild statements—but this was an attempt to actually destroy the mirror. The woman, a Miss Sandra Bates, came in with a rock in her pocket. Fortunately her aim was bad and she only cracked a comer of the case. The mirror was unharmed. The Bates girl had a brother—”
“No need to give me the dollar tour,” Spangler said quietly. “I’m conversant with the history of the Delver glass.”
“Fascinating, isn’t it?” Carlin cast him an odd, oblique look. “There was that English duchess in 1709 ... and the Pennsylvania rug merchant in 1746 ... not to mention—”
“I’m conversant with the history,” Spangler repeated quietly. “It’s the workmanship I’m interested in.