"No. If he says it's hidden, it's hidden. But it would be a little
silly to go off without finding his fortune, wouldn't it?"
"Looking for buried treasure wasn't in the contract," Rene pointed out.
"You'll have to make it worth my while."
"Another five thousand," I said.
"Make it ten. Payable if I find it."
"Suppose _I_ find it?"
"Don't be ridiculous. You'd be a fool to take two steps on this planet
without me."
He was right, of course. And if we left, I wouldn't get anything. I
thought of Mother living by the bells at a Comfort Park. "All right," I
said.
"What form was his fortune in?" Rene asked. "Money? Bonds? Polarian
droplets? It would help to know what I'm looking for."
"I have no idea," I confessed. "Ordinarily it would take a computer
to figure out Uncle Isadore's financial affairs. But he'd have been
perfectly capable of selling out everything and taking his entire
fortune along with him for some new project."
Rene had skillfully unscrewed the instrument panel and he lifted it
off and began poking inside and removing mysterious bits of machinery.
"That makes it harder. You don't know whether he sold out or not?"
"I have no idea. He might have all his money piled in the locker of
the Whist Club of Sirius beta. In that case, we look for a key. Or he
might have a block of Eretrevium buried somewhere. Your guess is as
good as mine."
"If he's dug up the ground," Rene said, "I'll recognize the spot. But
that'll mean walking over every inch of ground for a day's journey
around. Or more, if he did any overnight traveling."
"Not Uncle Izzy," I said. "He wouldn't be at all likely to spend a
freezing night out on Alvarla, even for a good joke."
"Radar equipment's in perfect shape," Rene said, shifting his
activities to another segment of the ship's equipment. "I wonder why
he didn't leave it on so we could locate him easier. Not that we had
any trouble. Or why he didn't continue broadcasting for help until he
died.... Mind if I take some of the equipment?"
"You haven't been exactly generous with me."
"I intend to subtract its value from the cost of supplies and mileage
on my ship. I never said I was generous, but, by God, I'm honest."
* * * * *
Rene slid out the compartment of lunch packages, dumped them on the
floor.
"All unopened," he was saying disgustedly. Then he picked up a heavy,
square object with sharp corners, open on three sides. "What the hell
is this?"
"A book," I informed him.
Rene opened it "Hey! A real, antique book! Must be worth at least a
thousand! Look at the _size_ of that print! You can read it with the
naked eye, like an instrument panel! Well, here's a little piece of
your fortune."
He tossed it to me and went on examining the lunch packages. He didn't
trust me to help him because _I_ wouldn't be able to tell if they'd
been opened and something inserted.
I hung the book by the covers and let the pages flip open. Nothing fell
out. I sighed. I'd have to go through the whole damn thing.
"I'm going back to your ship and read in comfort," I told Rene.
"You're no help here anyway," he said, putting the lunch packages in
a large plastic bag he'd found somewhere. "No use letting these go to
waste."
I didn't tell him I had the clue to Uncle Isadore's fortune in my hand.
He didn't know Uncle Isadore, so he wouldn't have believed me.
Nothing is more uncomfortable than reading an antique book. There is
no way to lie back and flash it on a screen or run the tape over your
reading glasses while you lie prone and relax. You have to _hold_ it.
If you try to hold it lying down, your arms get tired. If you put it
down on a table to read, your neck gets tired from bending over. And
the pages keep flipping and make you lose your place.
Still, I read it all the way through. It wasn't too bad. Not like Edgar
Guest, of course, who was the only ancient author I liked in General
Studies. But I found there was a sort of Grilch Hop beat to it that
reminded me of the Footlooses I used to go to in Middle School. I
grinned. It was funny to think of now.
I found no clues in the book. The only thing to do was read it again,
more carefully.
* * * * *
I noticed there was one poem with a _real_ Grilch Hop beat. I thought
suddenly of Sally, my regular partner at the Footlooses. She was very
blonde and she affected a green crestwave in her hair, pulled over her
forehead with a diamond clip. She was a beauty, all right. But she was
a little silly. And she had that tendency to overdress.
No, I sighed, she wouldn't have done for a studs and neck clasp man.
But I couldn't help wondering where she was now and what she was like
now. Did she remember me, and did she think about me when she heard
that song we used to dance to, because it was about a girl named Sally?
Once I knew a girl named Sally
Met her at a Footloose rally
I began humming the Grilch Hop tune to the ancient poem in Uncle Algy's
book. It was fantastic how closely it fitted, though, of course, the
words in the poem were plain silly.
But imagine finding a poem with a perfect Grilch Hop beat before
anybody even knew what a grilch was! Before Venus was even discovered.
Jump on both feet. Hop three times on the left foot. Jump. Hop three
times on the right foot. The rhythm was correct, right down to the
breakaway and four-step at the end of each run.
It was while I was singing this poem to a Grilch Hop tune that I
noticed the clue. The poem was named "The Dodo." And the rhyming was
very smooth until I came to the lines:
"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven,
Thou," I said, "art like a Raven
Ghastly, grim, and ancient Dodo,
Wandering from the Nightly shore;
Tell me what thy lordly name is
On the Night's Plutonian shore."
Quoth the Dodo, "Isadore."
Now the author had gone to a lot of trouble in the previous verse not
to break the Grilch Hop rhyme scheme. He made "thereat is" rhyme with
"lattice" and "that is." Why did he follow "shaven" and "raven" with
"Dodo"?
Furthermore, it had not struck me the first time I read the poem
quickly that there was anything odd about a bird being named "Isadore."
People who keep pet grilches frequently name them after famous Reed
players and Isadore is a common name.
On the other hand, it _was_ my Uncle's name. And the word "Dodo" didn't
rhyme as it should.
I got out a magnifying glass to examine the ancient print. Sure enough,
it had been tampered with. The print looked so odd to me, anyway, I
hadn't noticed the part that had been changed. But it was obvious under
the glass that "Dodo" had been substituted for a word of almost equal
length. The same with "Isadore."
I went over the whole poem now, carefully, to see which words had been
changed. There weren't many. "White" in a couple of places. "Dodo" and
"Isadore" wherever they occurred. An "o" in the line "Perfume from an
unseen cens_o_r." "S" in the line "'Wretch,' I cried, 'Isadore hath
_s_ent thee....'"
* * * * *
Sitting back, I thought about what I had read. It made no sense at all.
Was I to look for a white bird, "grim, ungainly, ghastly"? And what if
I found him? Why was he like a raven? What was this perfume from an
unseen censor? I could picture the ghost of Uncle Isadore, knowing
his financial imagination, as the "unseen censor" because he always
criticized me. Was I to look for perfume? Did he have a fortune in
perfume stowed somewhere? It seemed to me it would take an awful lot of
even the most expensive perfume to comprise a fortune.
I decided to start with the bird. I went outside Rene's ship and looked
around. No birds.
"Rene!" I called. He was still looking through Uncle Izzy's ship. "Have
you seen an ungainly white bird around?"
"What!" he snapped, sticking an indignant face out of the door.
"I guess you haven't. Can your woodsy lore tell if there _are_ birds on
this planet?"
"Obviously," Rene said. "I don't know why you can't find your own
spoor. I noticed the droppings immediately."
"Where are the birds?"
"How the hell would I know?" But he couldn't contain his special
knowledge. "They're probably night birds," he said.
"Oh, yes." It checked. "Wandering from the Night's Plutonian shore."