Burton went back after Goring and asked him if he’d heard about any survivors on the other side of the lake or any who’d gone through on the cliffpath above the strait.
“No,” Goring said. “If there had been any, they’d have been reported.”
Burton tried not to show his excitement.
Goring, however, said, smiling, “You think that X is here, don’t you? At hand but in disguise?”
“You’re deucedly clever,” Burton said. “Yes, I do, unless he’s been killed. Strubewell and Podebrad were agents, I don’t mind telling you that now, and they were killed. So perhaps X was also.”
“Did anyone see Strubewell and Podebrad die?” Goring said. “I know Joe Miller thinks Strubewell was dead because he didn’t see him get out of the pilothouse after it fell. But Strubewell could have gotten out later on. All we know about Podebrad is that he was seen no more after the vessels collided.”
“I wish they were available,” Burton said. “I’d get the truth out of them somehow. I believe, however, that they died. That you citizens haven’t seen them goes a long way to prove that. As for X, well…”
He said so-long to Goring and walked to the partly burned dock at which the Bins was tied up. It looked like a monstrous black turtle. Its high rounded hull was the shell, and the long narrow prow was part of the head sticking out. The barrel of the steam machine gun projecting from the extreme front of the prow was the turtle’s tongue; the steam gun poking out from the stern, the turtle’s tail.
Burton had been told by one of its crew that it carried a large batacitor and could hold fifteen people comfortably and twenty with some inconvenience. It could go thirty-five miles per hour against a ten-mile-per-hour current and a ten-mile-per-hour wind. It had an armory of fifteen rifles and fifteen pistols using gunpowder-filled cartridges and ten compressed air rifles and many other weapons.
Joe Miller, his enormous arm in a plaster cast, several of the crew and some survivors of the Not For Hire were standing on the dock. Having had the new captain of the Bills described to him, Burton had no difficulty picking him out. Kimon was a short burly dark man with intense hazel eyes, an ancient
Greek whose life Burton had studied in school and afterward. He’s been a great general, naval commander, and statesman, one of the main builders of the Athenian empire after the Persian wars. He was born in 505 B.C., if Burton remembered correctly.
Kimon was a conservative who had favored alliance with Sparta and so ran counter to the policies of Pericles. His father was the famous Miltiades, the victor of the battle of Marathon, in which the Greeks turned back the hordes of Xerxes. Kimon ^served during the naval battle of Salamis in which the Athenians sank two hundred enemy vessels with a loss of only forty and forever broke the Persian naval power.
In 475 Kimon drove out the pirates of Skyros and then located and brought to Athens the bones of Theseus, the legendary founder of the Attic state and killer of the Minotaur of the labyrinth of Knossos. Kimon was one of the judges who gave Sophocles first prize for tragedy in the competitions held at Dionysia in 468.
In 450 Kimon led an expedition against Cyprus, where he died during the siege of Kitium. His bones were brought back to Athens and buried there.
He certainly looked alive now and very mean, too. Kimon and a number of Clemensites were arguing loudly. Burton, acting as if he were just another Virolander, stood with those listening in.
Apparently, the argument was about which of Clemens’ people would go on up The River and also about seniority. In addition to the eleven crew members of the Bills, ten people from the Not For Hire had survived. Kimon was outranked by three of these, but he was insisting that he was the commander of the launch and anybody who went along on it would be his subordinate. Moreover, he would not allow more than eleven on the voyage, and he thought that the crew of the Bills should be these. But he was willing to take some from the motherboat if some of his crew didn’t want to go on.