"Hey, Doc!" I called, "something's burning."
He stopped and turned around. There was a queer look in his eyes,
almost like he wasn't all there--dopey.
"Yes," he said, not seeming surprised at all. Then he pointed ahead.
"Smoke--I saw it some time back."
He started on again. The whole thing wasn't natural. For almost a week
we had seen no living human being. And now, smoke--a wood fire, as I
could tell by the scent--seemed to mean that we were getting near where
someone lived. And yet, Doc hadn't thought it worth mentioning!
Well, I followed him on for a hundred yards. Then we turned a bend in
the creek. The jangal opened up, and there, under the spread of a huge
plane-tree, was the fire.
It was a small fire. Over it, roasting to a turn, were three dangling
fowls; and near by stood a strange human figure--a man.
He beckoned to us. And as we approached he stood with folded arms,
facing us.
"I am Rog Tanlu," he said in stiff but absolutely correct English. "I
called you, and you came."
Doc Champ, ahead of me, straightened with a start. It was almost as
though he had just realized the queerness of all this.
"Good Lord!" I heard him gasp softly.
Then we both stood there, staring at that chap who called himself Rog
Tanlu. He was dressed in a glove-fitting garment that appeared to be
made of fawn-colored silk--which was odd enough. But the man himself
looked still stranger. He was no Iranian--no Kurd, Kashgais nor
Bakhtiaris. I could have sworn to that.
He was very light skinned--lighter than any Persian--with a kind of
pallor, although not an unhealthy look, as though he'd spent all his
life indoors.
"Do not be alarmed," he said, smiling at us, and with a friendly look
in his light blue eyes. "I can well understand your surprise at finding
me here. But I shall explain everything. Meanwhile, I have prepared
food, thinking you might be hungry. Will you join me?"
He started dishing out those broiled fowls--black partridges, or
"durraj," I judged them to be--with the air of a man enjoying his first
outdoor picnic and getting a big kick out of it.
"Here, Dr. Chadwick," he said, handing Doc one of those birds on a big
leaf for a dish. "And here's one for you, Mr. Lavin."
Well, I took that broiled fowl and looked for a place to sit down.
You see my name is Lavin, Curt Lavin, but how he'd found it out was a
puzzler. I looked at Doc Champ. He was staring at this Rog Tanlu as if
seeing a ghost, or a man from Mars.
That kind of knocked me out. I put a lot of dependence on Doc's
knowledge of human tribes and such. But evidently he couldn't tag on
our host any more than I could.
I started to sit down on a flat rock near the fire. And then I saw
something standing on that rock--a thing like a tubular flashlight,
eight inches tall, with a globe of silvered glass at the upper end.
"You are wondering at the way I speak your language," I heard this Rog
Tanlu saying to Doc Champ. "I have been learning it during the last few
days, but as yet am very lacking in fluency."
"You--you've been learning English?" Doc Champ kind of gulped.
Rog Tanlu waved the bird-leg he was nibbling on.
"With the audio-visiscope," he explained.
He reached over and did something to that flashlight thing on the rock
near me. Right away it started talking--like a radio. But I knew it
wasn't a radio. The speaker was someone cussing the King of Kings'
order forbidding veils for Iranian women. And then I saw that what I
had thought was a reflection in that silvered globe was moving. It
wasn't a reflection; it was a robed, turbaned mullah, and he went on
telling someone how unjust it was for a mullah to have to carry a
license.
"Television," I heard Doc Champ mutter.
I'll say it was, with a bang! And yet, not just that either. For you
may depend on it that no station was sending out such stuff.
Rog Tanlu shut the thing off, and the silver of that globe became dead
black. I started eating. There was nothing but coarse salt to go along
with the bird--the kind you can scrape off rocks near those mud-salt
swamps--but the meat tasted okay. The others sat down and we finished
the three birds in no time.
"How'd you bag 'em?" I asked Rog Tanlu, for I hadn't seen anything of a
gun, and black pheasants aren't easy to knock over with a stone.
Rog Tanlu smiled and wiped his hands on that knit-silk outfit he was
wearing. All the time during that meal he'd been smiling, squinting up
at the sky and breathing deep--for all the world as though he'd never
been on an outdoor party before.
"With this," he said, in answer to my question, picking up something
from the rock near where he was sitting--something that looked like
a black fountain-pen--for there didn't seem to be any pockets in his
clothing. Again he squinted up at the sky.
Just then a buzzard came flying along slowlike, pretty high over our
heads. Rog Tanlu pointed that pen affair up at the bird. A thin little
ray of light flashed up--another and another. They wavered around for
a second, getting centered. And suddenly that buzzard started tumbling
out of the sky and crashed into the bushes near us.
Doc Champ and I looked dumbly at each other. And then we stared at Rog
Tanlu. Grinning like a magician who has just pulled a fancy trick, he
held that ray-gun out for us to look at.
"What did you mean when you said you had called us?" asked Doc Champ,
in that quiet way of his.
"I had to get in communication with someone in this Age--someone who
could understand," said Rog Tanlu. "I chose you" (he was, of course,
speaking to Doc Champ) "because of your training and comprehension of
the Past. So I called you with the psycho-coil on the audio-visiscope,
by which means mental suggestions may be conveyed."