“I can’t very well arrest him on John’s boat! No. We’ll just have to watch him, and if we get something to justify our suspicions, then we’ll see what we can do.
“Remember Spruce the agent. When we caught him, he killed himself just by thinking a sort of code and released poison into his system from that little black ball in his brain. It’ll be very tricky if we do act, and we can’t until we’re sure. Personally, I think it’s just a coincidence. Now, Strube-well… there’s someone we don’t have any doubt about. Well, not much perhaps. After all, it’s only a theory that anyone claiming to be post-1983 is an agent. It is possible that we just haven’t met many.”
“Well, I’ll be playing bridge a lot with Podebrad, if I don’t come a duffer. I’ll watch him.”
“Be very careful, Alice. If he is one of Them, he’ll be very observant. In fact, you shouldn’t have asked him about the dates. That may have put him on his guard. You should have found out from someone else.”
“Can’t you ever give me full credit?” she said, and she walked out.
9
LOGHU WAS NO LONGER THE KING’S FAVORITE.
King John had become so smitten with a very pretty redhead with large blue eyes whom he’d seen on the bank that he decided to stay in the area for a while. The boat was anchored by a large dock the locals had built long ago. After two days to make sure that the people here were as friendly as they pretended to be, John permitted shore leave. He didn’t say anything to anybody at first about his sudden attack of irresistible lechery, but his behavior made that obvious.
Loghu didn’t especially care that she had to leave the grand suite after John had talked the woman into going to bed with him. She wasn’t in love with him. Besides, she was more than somewhat interested in one of the locals, a big dark Tokharian. Though he wasn’t of her century, he was of her nation, and they had many things to talk about between lovemaking. However, she was humiliated that she had lasted such a short time with the monarch, and she was heard to mutter that she might just push John overboard some dark night. There had been, there were now, there would be many who would like to remove him from the living.
Burton stood guard duty the first night. The next, he moved into a hut with Alice near the dock. The people here, most of whom were Early Minoan Cretans, were hospitable and fun-loving. They danced and sang around the bonfires in the evening until their allotment of lichen alcohol was gone and then reeled to bed to sleep or couple or “pluralize,” as Burton called it. He was happy to stay here for a few weeks anyway because he’d have a chance to add the language to his now long list. He mastered its basic grammar and vocabulary quickly since it was closely related to Phoenician and Hebrew. There were, however, many words which were non-Semitic, these having been borrowed from the aboriginals of Crete while the conquerors from the Middle East were assimilating them. They all spoke Esperanto, of course, though it deviated somewhat from the artificial tongue invented by Dr. Zamenhof.
John had no trouble getting his new mistress to agree to go to bed with him. But he had a problem. There was no cabin space for Loghu, and he couldn’t throw her off the boat without a good reason. Autocratic though he was, he was able to override her rights. His crew would see to that. Remembering the Magna Carta, he did not buck them, but he was undoubtedly trying to think of a way to get rid of Loghu which would seem justifiable.
On the fourth night of shore leave, while John was in his grand suite with Blue-eyes, and Burton was with Alice in their small but comfortable quarters, a helicopter dropped out of the night sky onto the landing deck of the Rex.
Burton would find out very much later that the raiders came from the airship Parseval and had been ordered to capture King John if they could or to kill him if they couldn’t. All he knew then was that the gunfire of the Rex meant bad trouble. He put on a cloth around his waist and fastened it with the magnetic tabs inside the material. Then, grabbing a rapier and a fully loaded pistol from the table by the bed, he ran outside while Alice was still yelling to him. He could hear men screaming and shouting in the midst of shots and then a great explosion apparently in the engine room. He ran as fast as he could toward the boat. There were lights on in the pilothouse; somebody was at the controls. Then the paddle wheels began to turn. The boat started moving backward, but Burton leaped onto the promenade of the boiler deck just before the lines tied to the pilings pulled them down and the dock collapsed. ,