THE MAGIC LABYRINTH

"However, Monat's presence means that there is more than one species... genus... zoological family... extra-Terrestrials... involved in this."

"I'll take one card," Frigate said. "As I was about to say..."

"Pardon me," London said. "But how could Peter's brother know about Burton?"

"I suppose that the children are educated, probably better than they'd be on Earth. And maybe, just maybe, my brother knew I was his brother. How do we know what incredibly vast and minute knowledge the Ethicals have? Look at the photo of Burton which he found in the kilt of that agent, Agneau. It was taken when Dick was twenty-eight and a subaltern in the East India Army. Doesn't that prove that the Ethicals were on Earth in 1848? Who knows how long they've been walking the streets of Earth taking data? Don't ask me for what purpose."

"Why would James take your name?" Nur said.

"Well, I was a rabid Burton fan. I even wrote a novel about him. Maybe it pleased James' sense of humor. I have one. My whole family is known for... an odd sense of humor. And so it struck him fu

Alice said, "But what about the story that agent, Spruce, told? He said he was from the seventy-second century A.D., and he said something about a chronoscope, something which could look back in time."

"Spruce may have been lying," Burton said.

"Anyway," Frigate said, "I don't believe there could be a chronoscope or such a thing as time-travel in any form. Well, maybe I shouldn't say that. We're all time-traveling. Forward, the only way there is."

"What nobody has said," Nur said, "is that somebody had to resurrect the children. It may or may not have been people from the seventy-second century. More probably, it was Monat's people who did it. Note also that it was Monat who did most of the questioning of Spruce. He may have been, in a sense, coaching Spruce."

"Why?" Alice said.

That was one question nobody could answer unless the Eth-ical's story was true. By now, his recruits thought that he might be as big a liar as his colleagues.

Nur closed that round with the speculation that the agents who'd gotten on the boat early in its voyage had told their post-1983 story and were stuck with it. Agents who'd gotten on later knew mat the story might be suspect, so they'd avoided it. For instance, the huge Gaul named Megalosos—his name meant "Great"—claimed that he'd lived about Caesar's time. His saying so, however, didn't make it so. It seems he found Podebrad congenial, though how anyone could was beyond Nur. He could be an agent, too.

SECTION 4

On the Not For Hire: New Recruits and Clemens' Nightmares

13

DE MARBOT'S EYES PROVED THAT THE RESURRECTION MACHINery did not always work perfectly.

Jean Baptiste Antoine Marcelin, Baron de Marbot, had been born in 1782 with brown eyes. Not until long after Resurrection Day did he find out that they had changed color. That was when a woman called him Blue-eyes.

"Sucre bleu! Is it true?"

He hastened to borrow a mica mirror which had recently been brought in a trading boat—mica was rare—and he saw his face for the first time in ten years. It was a merry face with its roundness, its snub nose, its ever-ready smile, its twinkling eyes. Not at all unhandsome.

But the eyes were a light blue.

"Merde!"

Then he reverted to Esperanto.

"If I ever get within sword range of the abominable abominations who did this to me...!"

He returned fuming to the woman who lived with him, and he repeated his threat.

"But you don't have a sword," she said.

"Must you take me so literally? Never mind. I will get one someday; there must be iron somewhere in this stony planet."

That night he dreamed of a giant bird with rusty feathers and vulture's beak which ate rocks and the droppings of which were steel pellets. But there were no birds at all on this world, and if there had been there would have been no oiseau defer.

Now he had metal weapons, a saber, a cutlass, an epee, a stiletto, a long knife, an axe, a spear, pistols, and a rifle. He was the brigadier general of the marines, and he was very ambitious to be full general. But he loathed politics, and he had neither interest nor ability in the dishonorable game of intrigue. Besides, only by the death of Ely S. Parker could he be general of the marines of the Not For Hire, and that would have saddened him. He loved the jolly Seneca Indian.

Almost all the postpaleolithics aboard were over six feet, some of them huge. The paleolithics had small men among them, but these, with their massive bones and muscles, did not have to be so tall. De Marbot was the pygmy among them, only five feet four inches high, but Sam Clemens liked him and admired his feistiness and courage. Sam also liked to hear stories of de Marbot's campaigns and to have people under him who had once been generals, admirals, and statesmen. "Humility is good for them, builds their character," Sam said. "The Frenchy is a first-rate commander, and it amuses me to see him ordering those big apes around."

De Marbot was certainly experienced and capable. After joining the republican army of France when he was seventeen, he rose rapidly in rank to aide-de-camp to Marshal Augereau, commanding the VII Corps in the war against Prussia and Russia from 1806 to 1807. He fought under La

When he was seventy-two years old, the brave soldier of Napoleon died in bed in Paris.

It was a measure of Clemens' affection for him that he had told him about the Mysterious Stranger, the renegade Ethical. Today the riverboat was docked while Clemens interviewed volunteers for a post aboard. The hideous events after the right-bank stones had failed were two months behind the crew, and The River was now free of the stench and jampack of rotting bodies.

De Marbot, clad in a duraluminum helmet topped by a roach of glue-stiffened fish-leather strips and a duraluminum cuirass, looking like the popular conception of a Trojan warrior, walked up and down the long line of candidates. His job was to preinterview them. In this way, he could sometimes eliminate the unfit and so save his captain time and work. .

Near the middle of the line he saw four men who seemed to know each other well. He stopped by the first, a tall muscular dark man with huge hands. His color and very wavy hair could only mean that he was a quadroon, and he was.