Pyramid Scheme by Dave Freer and Eric Flint

“Get a bigger hammer,” she muttered.

* * *

Marie dropped Miggy off at the front of the building which held his office. Then she drove around to Tremelo’s “officially designated” parking space. She was not surprised to see that a Humvee loaded with soldiers was occupying it while they had lunch.

These soldiers knew her, since they were assigned as guards for the building. When she pulled up the car and leaned her head out of the window, they greeted her with grins. Like most veterans of the campaign against the pyramid, they were quite cheerful and relaxed.

Service against the alien device was a unique experience in military history. In the first five hours, casualties were about 10%—all of which seemed random, and almost all of which were fatal. At least, only one of the 87% who had returned had still been alive. No one yet knew what had happened to the other 13% of the snatchees. But thereafter, it was no more dangerous than a traffic jam.

“Gonna have us towed, Marie?” called out one of the soldiers.

She matched the grins with a bigger one of her own. “I wouldn’t do that, boys, and you know it. But if you don’t move it, I will put a dent in that fancy expensive U.S. government vee-hicle, and let you fill out all the forms. You think I care about this jalopy of mine?”

With Marie, it was never entirely clear when she was joking. The driver of the Humvee pulled it out of the space and made room for her to park the Buick. After she got out and began walking away, one of the soldiers tried a riposte.

“Are you in that big a hurry to get back to your Sugar Daddy?”

The other soldiers in the Humvee frowned. That joke was crossing a line none of them much appreciated.

Marie stopped, spun around, and planted her hands on her hips. “You think I’m humping the Professor?”she demanded. “A nice married woman like me?”

Then, with a laugh: “Shit! I’d kill the old man.” She sashayed off, swinging her hips.

The soldier who’d made the wisecrack fumbled for a response. Failed. The other soldiers laughed derisively.

“You wanna trade slams with that lady, Hannon,” chortled one of them, “you’d better get yourself a bigger hammer.”

PART VII

My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.

—William Butler Yeats, “On a Picture of a

Black Centaur by Edmund Dulac”

31

I want my Mummy.

It was the same river. It wasn’t the same place.

The village they’d landed at had disappeared. So had Odysseus’ struggling crew. The snatchees were in knee-deep water.

Well . . . calf-deep anoxic mud, and the rest water, at the edge of the dense papyrus reeds. Obviously the water dropped off sharply in front of them. Jerry realized that there were tiny fish nibbling at his hand.

He saw a piece of floating gnarled old log move. It opened an eye, which was an unusual thing for a log to do. It was a very big log.

“Keep together. Let’s try and get out of the water.” Liz’s voice had that steely edge of control in it. “That is a crocodile. Don’t run.”

“ÇøaðÞøø?” asked Medea.

Despite the crocodile, Jerry closed his eyes briefly. Medea’s translation spells obviously didn’t work here. He’d gotten himself repromoted to chief translator . . .

Damn. While Jerry had studied liturgical Coptic, which was as near as anything came to ancient Egyptian, he was willing to bet it wasn’t that close. And the vocabulary at his disposal was rather limited.

Herodotus had described the Egyptians as the most religious of men. That made ancient Egypt an interesting hunting ground for a mythographer. It also made it a place you didn’t necessarily want to experience firsthand. For starters, it had crocodiles. For seconds . . . lots of gods. If something was taking possession of these gods this could a bad place to be.

They edged back from the water cautiously. The crocodile regarded them with interest. A sudden frantic splashing in the reeds sent them up the slippery muddy bank. It was only a lapwing, but it was enough to have the group forget systematic retreat and fling themselves up the bank.