Pyramid Scheme by Dave Freer and Eric Flint

Liz stared openmouthed. “Oh—shit!”

Jerry nodded.

Odysseus gabbled something. He seemed oddly cheerful.

Jerry translated: “He’s saying we’ll have to head for Ithaca after all. No way to get through that.”

“I think that would be wise,” fawned Salinas.

Liz snorted. “We’ll be slaves in a heartbeat. Nope. Let’s just hold our position, while we think this one out. Tell him to tell them to stop rowing.”

Jerry translated her reply. The broiled clams wanted to leave him. And they’d been truly delicious. That had been then. Even the thought of food was repugnant now.

Odysseus bellowed at his rowers.

And they yelled back.

Jerry swallowed, twice, before passing it on. “They say the wind is pushing the ship into the gap. It’s pushing us forward faster than they can row.”

“Get that sail down!!!” The order rang out in Greek and English almost simultaneously.

Liz peered at the sea. The foam lines suggested a current running counter to the wind. “Sea anchor. Have these idiots got one?”

Again, Jerry translated. It was soon obvious that neither Odysseus nor his men had any idea what the biologist was talking about.

“Ships in this day and age,” Jerry explained, “rarely used any kind of anchor. They were usually beached at night.”

Liz scowled ferociously. “Legendary fucking seamen, is it? ‘Argonauts,’ is it? Hah!” Her eyes began scouring the ship, looking for the wherewithal. “I’ll show ’em some magic . . . ”

* * *

Odysseus looked at the way the vessel was holding her position. Then at Liz. Speculatively. Very speculatively indeed.

“You say she can do goats as well as sea-magic?” he asked Jerry in a quiet voice. “You and I could make a bargain, you know. She’d be none the wiser.” He looked meaningfully at the breaker line along the rocky shore. “Or I could toss you overboard. Then she wouldn’t know where we were going, eh?”

Jerry looked uneasily at the towering “clashing” rocks. At the rock-toothed shoreline, which at least wasn’t moving up and down. Being tossed overboard might be better than losing your insides overboard puking. Still, to survive the surf and ascend those cliffs afterwards . . .

“She’d put a curse on you,” he said, with as confident a tone of voice as he could muster. Nonetheless he stepped away from the gunwale, to where Liz, Lamont, and Cruz were preparing little “boats,” hastily whittled from a broken oar. Each of the finished ones had a long splinter mast and a paper sail.

Would it work? And what did she hope to achieve by it?

* * *

The answer, Liz was sure, lay in the timing. The wandering rocks had taken seconds to rush forward through the water. They’d groaned their way back considerably more slowly. If it was a mechanical process, then if they could time it right they should be able to sail through. The second bizarre possibility was that the rocks were alive and aware. Well, in this weird place anything was possible. Then the answer might be to tire them out. She tried to imagine what sort of creature the rocks might be. Siliceous? Calcareous? A filter-feeder of some sort, thriving on the detritus? She’d bet that it wasn’t a biological niche that had a high requirement for intelligence.

The first of the little ships was launched. It rode, on a slightly less than even keel, toward the gap.

“I’ve lost it,” said Liz, squinting into the water-reflected brightness.

Cruz shook his head. “I can’t see it, either.”

“There!” McKenna pointed. “Coming up on the crest. In the foam. It’s just going into the gap.”

“Time it,” snapped Liz.

Luck and a ride with the wave enabled them to see the little model ship clearly.

It rode safely through.

“I suppose if they attacked little things like that they’d attack every bit of driftwood,” mused Liz, looking down at the pile of miniature boats they’d prepared.

“Can’t just be size,” said Cruz analytically. “The rocks took out a bird.”

She cocked her head at him. “What then? Movement? Or an intelligent decision? If it is movement, we should be able to just drift through. Except—”

She pursed her lips. “If we’re wrong. The other problem is—besides taking a chance on being turned into jam—we’re going to need Halitosis and Co. to keep rowing to give us headway to steer with. Or we’ll just wind up on the rocks anyway.”