ner. He stiffened and swelled and rasped towards the shrubbery: “Come out at once. All of you.”
They came out, shambling and puzzled. They realized that something was very wrong. There was the Duchess on the ground and she wasn’t telling them what to do the way she’d been telling them for weeks now. They wanted to oblige her in any little way they could, like shooting strangers, or scrounging canned food for her, but how could they oblige her while she lay there slowly turning purple? It was very confusing. Luckily there was somebody else to oblige, the professor.
“Go away,” he barked at them. “Go far away. We do not need you any more. And throw away your guns.”
Well, that was something a body could understand. They smiled and threw away their guns and went away in their obliging and considerate fashion.
I eased up on the Duchess’s throat. “What was that guff about the New Lemuria?” I asked her.
“You’re a rude and ignorant young man,” she snapped. From the corner of my eye I could see the professor involuntarily nodding agreement. “Every educated person knows that the lost wisdom of Lemuria was to be revived in the person of a beautiful priestess this year. According to the science of pyramidology—”
Beautiful priestess? Oh.
The professor and I stood by while she spouted an amazing compost of lost-continentism, the Ten Tribes, anti-fluoridation, vegetarianism, homeopathic medicine, organic farming, astrology, flying saucers, and the prose-poems of Khalil Gibran.
The professor said dubiously at last: “I suppose one must call her a sort of Cultural Diffusionist. . . .” He was happier when he had her classified. He went on: “I think you know Miss Phoebe Bancroft. We wish you to present us to her as soon as possible.”
“Professor,” I complained, “we have a roadmap and we can find La Plume. And once we’ve found La Plume I don’t think it’ll be very hard to find Miss Phoebe.”
“I will be pleased to accompany you,” said the Duch-
a
ess. “Though normally I frown on mechanical devices, I keep an automobile nearby in case of—in case of—-well! Of all the rude—I”
Believe it or not, she was speechless. Nothing hi her rich store of gibberish and hate seemed to fit the situation. Anti-fluoridation, organic farming, even Khalil Gi-bran were irrelevant in the face of us two each standing on one leg, thumbing our noses and sticking out our tongues.
Undeniably the posture of defense was losing efficiency. It took longer to burn away the foolish glow. . . .
“Professor,” I asked after we warily relaxed, “how many more of those can we take?”
He shrugged. “That is why a guide will be useful,” he said. “Madame, I believe you mentioned an automobile.”
“I know!” she said brightly. “It was asana yoga, wasn’t it? Postures, I mean?”
The professor sucked an invisible lemon. “No, ma-dame,” he said cadaverously, “It was neither siddhasana nor padmasana. Yoga has been subsumed under Functional Epistemology, as has every other working philosophical system, Eastern and Western—but we waste time. The automobile?”
“You have to do that every so often, is that it?”
“We will leave it at that, madame. The automobile, please.”
“Come right along,” she said gaily. I didn’t like the look on her face. Madam Chairlady was about to spring a parliamentary coup. But I got my briefcase and followed.
The car was in a nearby barn. It was a handsome new Lincoln, and I was reasonably certain that our fair cicerone had stolen it. But then, we had stolen the Ford.
I loaded the briefcase in and took the wheel over her objections and we headed for La Plume, a dozen miles away. On the road she yelped: “Oh, Functional Epistemology—and you’re Professor Leuten!”
“Yes, madame,” he wearily agreed.
“I’ve read your book, of course. So has Miss Bancroft; she’ll be so pleased to see you.”
“Then why, madame, did you order your subjects to murder us?”
“Well, professor, of course I didn’t know who you were then, and it was rather shocking, seeing somebody in a car. I, ah, had the feeling that you were up to no, good, especially when you mentioned dear Miss Bancroft. She, you know, is really responsible for the re-emergence of the New Lemuria.”