Nicky was sitting in the library too, at a separate table, working at the same exercise. When Scheffler and Morgan looked in on her and Willis, she glanced up and her gaze lingered on Scheffler's. That was important, but he couldn't stay and talk just now. Morgan expected his company on the tour.
Becky was curled on a chair in the dining room, gazing dreamily out the window. It was Saturday, and neither she nor Scheffler had classes. He supposed that on Monday both of them would be back in school, whatever else was going on.
She looked sad, and Scheffler supposed she might be wondering where Pilgrim was. He was reasonably sure that she had offered to accompany the wanderer; but Pilgrim had evidently declined her offer. Graciously, no doubt. Becky had, however, been well rewarded by Pilgrim for services rendered, and so far, at least, Olivia's people had not taken any of her jewelry away.
Olivia herself was in the apartment this morning, along with one or two additional members of her force. Whatever medical attention they had been able to provide for the policewoman in the few hours since her return had done wonders, and she looked almost normal. Fortunately she had been able and willing on arrival to testify that the twentieth-century people brought home by Pilgrim deserved help and not prosecution.
Morgan's note-taking tour was moving along to the galleries when the front doorbell chimed. Scheffler looked at the policeman. "I would suggest you answer it," said Morgan, half-abstractedly, hardly raising his eyes from his notes.
When Scheffler opened the front door he immediately recoiled. The small foyer was crowded with an exotic mob. It was the entire native population of Pilgrim's pocket universe, nine-tenths naked as usual and babbling all at once in exotic speech. But that was not the biggest shock. In front of the mob, in the position of leader or spokesman, and garbed as Scheffler had seen him last, stood Uncle Monty. The old man's face looked more dead than alive, but he was breathing.
As soon as the door opened the throng began to flow into the apartment, marveling loudly at what they saw. The crush pushed Uncle Monty to one side, and he in turn crowded the bewildered Scheffler back into a corner of the entrance hall. The old man came alive a little, looking pale and haggard, baffled, helpless and enraged.
When the whole mob was inside, Scheffler closed the front door again. Then he and his great-uncle stood confronting each other.
"What happened?" Scheffler asked.
"What happened? They found me guilty." The voice was broken and dazed, that of a man sentenced to a firing squad. He kept raising his hand to brush at the front of his bedraggled coat, as if he felt compelled to wipe off something from his fingers.
"I thought you were dead."
"The Devourer had me," Montgomery said tonelessly. "But there was a police ship in the Underworld by then, trying to chase Pilgrim. Coming down the river after us. They sent a squad ashore and pulled me out. If only they'd left me there I would be dead by now. They would have 'rescued' me anyway, the damned do-gooders, but they wanted to put me on trial. They found me guilty."
"Guilty of what exactly?"
The old man appeared to ignore the question. "Twenty-seven of them," he said, in his new uneven voice.
"How's that?"
"They're settling them on me. On me. Here. As if I… the rest of the sentence suspended on condition that I help them… Tom, listen to me, Tom? You've got to help." Monty looked wildly about. "Where's Willis? He's got to help me too!"
"Willis and I don't have to do anything," Scheffler was beginning wrathfully, when Nicky, who had just arrived in the front hall, at the same moment asked her former fiance: "Help you do what?"
"Twenty-seven naked, ridiculous, stupid, ignorant�none of them even know how to use a flush toilet yet." Uncle Monty bowed his head and cradled his face in all his fingers, so that the last two words were muffled.
Then he looked up. "I quote, from the judge: 'Achieve their integration into twentieth-century American society, where their offspring will probably do well.' That is what that goddamned court of Olivia's has ordered me to do. House them. Feed them. Clothe them. Teach them English. All twenty-seven. Teach them to use plumbing. Get them into schools. Get them jobs. I—"
"We will help with such matters as immunizations and paperwork," said Morgan encouragingly in his bass voice. "And actually the dancer Nekhem, who returned here an hour ago, already has a job, I understand. At some amusement facility called Rush Street."
"They're all going to live here? In the apartment?" Then understanding dawned on Scheffler. The tour. Morgan had known about the sentence. But of course they were all going to live here, for the time being anyway. Hence the survey of the space, the counting of the bathrooms.
"We will of course be dropping back," said Olivia, shoving her way gently into the front hall, "from time to time. Just to check up on your compliance with the orders of the court."
Montgomery buried his face in his hands again.
"I've heard," said Scheffler, "about one family in Chicago that includes eleven people who immigrated from mainland China. The head of it is a former missionary with a Chinese wife."
"Heroic," his great-uncle mumbled through his fingers. "Maybe we should ask them how to make it work. Tom. Tom, my boy, you've got to help me. I'm an old man. My heart will give out." Montgomery raised pitiful eyes and held a hand up to his chest.
"Actually, as you know very well, it will not," said Olivia in a cool voice. "Not physically." She turned to Scheffler. "We made sure of his vital organs while he was in custody. We conditioned him against suicide. He will endure for several years at least."
"Tom!" The old man's cry came from the depths.
Scheffler drew a deep breath. "If you want me to work for you—I don't come cheap."
From the corner of his eye he saw how Nicky smiled. "Neither do I," she put in. "But I might be willing, if you think you might need help."
Another hour had passed before the police were gone, and Monty could take Sihathor aside for a moment in the library. There Monty explained to the robber his theory about what must have happened to the original of the abstracted gold.
"It remains, my friend, buried inside the Great Pyramid. Up near the top somewhere. And no one really believes in its existence except those who have good reason to do so. It will take time, of course. But between us we ought to be able to find a way to get that treasure out."
It may be, thought Olivia, listening over her system of concealed microphones, that the stubborn Khufu is going to get the last laugh after all. In the real universe most of his gold, along with his jewel-bedecked mummy, is somewhere where all the clever robbers in the world, or in several worlds, have still been unable after five thousand years to get their hands on it.
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