Demon Box Read online

  "Seven years I saved for this, damn you! Leave me alone!"

  The dapper camel-panderer, backing away for fear of perpetrating a coronary, gets tangled in his animal's rope and falls into a heap of fresh camel manure. He stares at the stain on his fresh white gellabia with such dejection I think he might cry himself.

  I wonder if they have a similar hospital in Cairo to take care of pyramid pressure casualties...

  October 24, Thursday late. Just wobbled down from a bizarre bar scene where I finally made contact with my resident pyramid colleagues, the cosmic ray scientists. All of them (except for the Egyptian students) proved to be very learned and equally drunk. The new Mena Lounge is a terrible bar, pretentious and expensive. I stalked in wearing my British walking shorts and pith helmet (a dusty day at the digs) and splurged on one of their overpriced gin-and-tonics-for tradition's sake - just as a real Englishman complete with muttonchops and ascot came reeling over from one of the tables behind the plastic arabesque. "Be-ah, please," he enunciated. "And some pea-nuts." In a voice so high-handed it's no mystery why the British were kicked out of all their colonies.

  The dour Egyptian behind the bar bit his tongue and obeyed. I told the Englishman he hadn't better use that tone on a bartender in Oregon.

  "Unlikely one would bloody ever be in Oregon," he said, finally focusing on me. "But see our outfit. Monty's Dynasty, what? That Rommel campaign? By God's wound one has to agree with the professor - this great grimy crude pot of a place does serve up specimens from every period."

  He'd been pointed out to me previously as one of the ray experts here with the new spark chamber specially constructed for another try at probing the pyramid. I told him I'd also come to this great pot of possibilities in search of hidden chambers.

  "This is what I thought one was supposed to wear."

  "Great pot of nonsense, you want my inebriated expert's opinion. On the other hand, if you demand sober-er-er experts, come..."

  He picked up his beer and peanuts, then hooked my arm to tow me back to his table, introducing me as the renowned fellow pyra-midiot, Sir Hidden Chambers-Pott. "On with our pith helmet, Sir Hidden; give these loutish clods an eyeful of the real archaeological elan!"

  They were five in all: the Real Englishman, a burly black-bearded American about my age, a suave old German wearing tinted glasses and a white linen suit, and two apprentice experts from the University of Cairo. The loutish clods barely noticed me, for all my elan. They went right back to their interrupted conversation concerning the deeply significant sociopolitical, teleological, and religious ramifications of the upcoming heavyweight title fight in Zaire.

  "I don't care if Ali takes up Tibetan Yoga and learns to levitate," the American proclaimed. "Foreman is still going to waste him. Kayo-pow! Guar-an-teed."

  He had a virile delivery and build, burly arms and neck squeezed into a T-shirt. A stencil across the chest declared him a member of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Computer Spacewar Team, their motto: Never Say Hyper!

  "Sure, Ali was great, a goddamned saint of a fighter. But what made him great wasn't his faith. It was number one his speed - which has slowed considerably - and number two his needle. If anything esoteric gave him special powers it was his goddamn needle, right?"

  "Just so," said the Real Englishman. "His bloody needling blacky's mouth -"

  "But he tries to pull his needle on this man - 'Yo' gonna fall in nine, you honky-lovin shine!' - it simply is not going to work. Not on Big George. This ain't no Uncle Liston! This ain't no paranoid cub scout Floyd Patterson! This is a bona fide bright-eyed one-track-minded Jeezus freak and could give less a shit about what the black crowd thinks of him."

  He was speaking toward the two students, but I had the impression that it was really for the benefit of the older man.

  "So if Ali can't psyche him then what's it come back to? Physical ability. Speed, size, and strength. And Foreman is faster bigger younger. I don't care what country he's fighting in."

  "Just so," agreed the Englishman. "Modern tactics over heathen superstition. Guaranteed kayo."

  This stirred the German professor to rebuttal. "So?" He chuckled softly and shook his head at the Englishman. "Just so like your modern British tactics kayoed the heathen Nasser?"

  "Not fair!" the Englishman flared back, stung. "But for that bloody Eisenhower we would have -"

  "I must again remind you young gentlemen: this battle will be taking place in the middle of the African continent at three in the morning under the full Scorpio moon."

  The American told the old man he'd been reading too much Joseph Conrad. "Maybe a few years ago Ali could've put the whammy on Foreman, but this is 1974. Things've changed, as old Ali's gonna find out. Just because the guy he's fighting is black ain't no guarantee anymore the African whammy's gonna work on him."

  "Neither is being Christian a guarantee of the certain kayo," the professor reminded them, smiling. "As we in Germany found out."

  "Been a mystery to me ever since, now you bring it up," the Real Englishman said, pouting over his peanuts. "Damned unlike him, meddling in over here."

  "Unlike Ali? Not really, not if you followed Ali's career. Ali's style -"

  "Not Ali, you Yankee dimwit," the Englishman snapped. "Eisenhower!"

  This provoked such a fit of mirth that the American tipped over his drink, laughing. Then, scooting back to avoid the spill, he fell out of his chair. The students helped him back up and set him in his chair, still laughing. This time he drew the German's sting; the moment the tinted glasses fixed him the giggle hushed. The German took off his coat and folded it in his lap deliberately. A tense quiet fell over our table - over the entire room, in fact. The drinkers at the other table sipped in thoughtful silence while the Moslems moved their lips, thanking Allah for forbidding them the evil of alcohol.

  True, all three scientists were soused to their Ph.D.s, but that didn't explain the tension. After a minute I asked how the cosmic ray probe was coming. "Very satisfactory," the American told me. "On Chephren and Mykerinos, damned satisfactory!" He took a drink of my gin-and-tonic and hulked again over the table, attempting to rally from the old German's strange sting. He admitted they'd found nothing earthshaking in these two, but for the Great Pyramid they had great expectations.

  "Going to scan from the outside, this time, goddammit! Set the receiver up inside the Queen's Chamber. The holiday crowds should have dwindled enough to install it by tomorrow afternoon, the next day for certain!"

  The Real Englishman disagreed. "Device worth upwards a million pounds sterling? Want some camel driver micturating in it? These people are wild! Unpredictable!"

  I asked them what they hoped to find, their best hope? The American said what he wanted was a chamber of filthy hieroglyphs. The German said he also hoped to find a chamber, but one containing that dream of every Egyptologist: an unrobbed coffin. The students said the same. The Englishman, regaining some of his puff, said that what he hoped to find was an end to all this bloody tommyrot and twaddle, once and for all.

  "Likely all we'll grub out of that sanctified hill of beans will be a couple of carved geegaws worth about three and six on the geegaw market. But at least that'll be an end to it."

  "So why risk it?" I had to ask. "A device worth a million pounds sterling? What justifies such an investment?"

  "Careful." The German laid his kindly smile on me like the tip of a whip. "This is not the kind of question to ask in the field."

  "True enough," the American agreed. "That's the kind of question that'll be asked a-plenty back at the home office. For what it's costing to send me over here Stanford could build a pyramid."

  "Exactly! What's the home office's best hope? Why do -" I didn't finish. The German's linen jacket had slid from his lap, disclosing the explanation for the table's mysterious vibes: he was holding not only the American's beefy paw in one of his long-nailed hands, he was also holding the hand of the Egyptian student seated next to him in the other. All eyes averted dipl
omatically from the little hand show, to drinks, peanuts, etc. The Englishman chose to turn his attention to me and my question.

  "You mean what's it worth, don't you, duck? What's in the pot? Right-o, then; let's put our pyramid stakes on the table." He swept a space clear of shells.

  "First, let me list some of the Known Negotiable Assets: It's a multidimensional bureau of standards, omnilingual and universal, constructed to both incorporate and communicate such absolutes as the bloody inch (a convenient ten million of which equals our polar axis) plus our bloody damned circumference, our weight, the bloody length not only of our solar year and our sidereal year but also our catch-up or leap year... not to mention the bloody distance of our swing around our sun, or the error in our spin that produces the wobble at our polar point that gives us the 26,920-year Procession of the bloody Equinoxes. This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius, you see.

  "Digging deeper in our stone safe we find deposited such blue-chip securities as the rudiments of plane geometry, solid geometry, the beginnings of trigonometry, and - probably more valuable than all these mundane directions and distances and weights put together - the three mightiest mathematical tricks of them all: first being of course pi, that constant though apparently inconclusive key to the circle. Second, phi, the Golden Rectangle transmission box of our aesthetics enabling us to shift harmoniously and endlessly without stripping gears so long as 2 is to 3 as 3 is to 5 as 5 is to 8 as 8 is to 13. Get it? And, third, the Pythagorean theorem, which is really just an astute amalgam of the first two shortcuts and about as attributable to Pythagoras as soul is to Eric Clapton."

  "Bravo," the German applauded, but the Englishman's blood was up and he was not to be distracted.

  "In Accounts Probable, the dividends look equally inviting. Based on the admission that so far we have been able to comprehend and appreciate the pyramid's info in terms of and thus only up to our own, then how much must be contained in this bloody five-sided box that we cannot yet see? Wouldn't a folk who knew enough about the sun to utilize its rays and reflections - even its periodic sunspots and their effects - be likely to have a suggestion or so for us about solar power? Hut! Call the Minister of Energy! And mightn't an astronomy so accurate as to aim a stone tunnel in pure parallel with our axis at a starless space in space, or point a radius from the center of the earth through the summit of this stone pointer at the star in Pleiades-that is indicated by drawings gleaned from centuries as the center star about which the other six of the constellation are orbiting and perhaps our sun as well! -- have some helpful hints for NASA? Call them, I say - hut hut - the Home Office, the UN, the Pentagon. What's a few billion in research to the Pentagon if they can get their hands on a ray so precise as to cut granite to watchwork accuracy yet so powerful as to sink a whole bloody continent from the face of the waters to the mud and mire of mythology?"

  "It's as viable as research on the fusion bomb," the American encouraged.

  "But let us speak frankly, mates. The aforementioned is all just collateral, just bloody pignoration compiled to get us bonded by the bureaucrats. The real treasure, as all Pyramidiots passionately know in their secretmost chamber of hearts, whether they mention it in their prospectus or not, lies in Accounts Receivable."

  The vision of this priceless prize brought him unsteadily to his feet. He stood weaving a moment, his chin trembling, then spread his arms as though he addressed all creation.

  "Something is owed us. The debt is clearly implied by the scar of its erasure. We've been shortchanged and the books have been brazenly juggled. It's obvious to even the densest bleeding auditor: they are trying to cover up our fall! A whole long column has been rubbed out and written over and the embezzlement assiduously concealed by fraudulent bookkeepers from Herodotus to Arnold Toynbee! But for all their artfulness the debt still shows, a bloody eighteen-and-a-half-minute buzzing gap marking the removal of something important - no, of something imperative! - to this court's search for our dues. How much has been pilfered from us, mates? How much of our minds, our souls? How is it that the same species responsible for that great temple out there is now administering this bloody bushwah tourist trap featuring flat beer and unpredictable hoodlums strolling the grounds outside my window wearing dark glasses and revolvers?"

  He had found his focus again. His voice rang through the lobby like Olivier in a Shakespearean tirade.

  "I demand an explanation! As a human being I am owed an accurate accounting, by the heavens, owed an honest audit!"

  It was a cry for the benefit of all the shortchanged everywhere, spoken out of a caldron of social outrage and cosmic inspiration and flat beer. He did not let his eyes drop back to us. He turned on his heel and strode from the lobby in his stateliest stagger. There was actual clapping.

  When the reviews of the Englishman's speech subsided I hoped to find out more about their ray results, but the mention of the Mena House's new gun-toting tenants had led instead to the topic of Arafat. Not a man much loved, I gathered; even the Moslem students had bad things to say about the Palestinian guerrilla leader. The German was scathing.

  "Storm trooper at heart, a filthy terrorist with a limousine." He took off his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose. "I was at the Munich games when they murdered those fine young Israeli athletes. Wrestlers, as I remember. Filthy! I will confess to you all: If given the opportunity I would sprinkle ground glass in his Turkish coffee when they wheel the cart past in the hall."

  The American said he would use LSD instead. "It'd be a gasser watching Yasir on a bummer. Clean up his Karma, too, heh heh. If we just knew where to get a hit..."

  I excused myself and bought a beer and carried it back here to my cabana. I suppose I could have given them my Murine bottle; I'm sure not using it. But I'm against dosing. We just don't have the right to launder other people's Karmas, no matter how filthy. Besides, those desert gunsels? Who knows what they might do with the jams kicked out. Watching them prowl around with their revolver butts showing, I too find myself thankful their prophet forbade them booze: they're wild enough sober. As the Englishman said, unpredictable.

  October 27, Sunday. It's all looking less and less resultful to Jacky. This morning we found a fence had been put up around the Sphinx.

  "Little like closing the barn door," Jacky observed, "after the Turks have already shot off the Sphinx's nose."

  Ignoring the mixed metaphor, the big cat-thing kept on glowering, over our heads past the squalor of Nazlet el-Samman, toward the Nile.

  This afternoon things look a bit better to Jack. He's struck up an acquaintance with Kefoozalum, even had room service bring them two rum Cokes.

  "She's not a Moslem, she's a Copt. The Copts are a sect of Egyptian Christians, tolerated because of their tiny size and their seniority. In fact they claim to be the first Christians, the people who cared for Joseph, Mary, and the Kid while they were in Egypt escaping Herod. Some even say they are the last remnants of the Essenes, thus actually preceding Christ as Christians by dint of second sight and signs and visions supposedly indigenous to their faith."

  "That could explain her stare," I mused; the traditional Moslem woman is never supposed to look into any man's eyes but her father's, brother's, or husband's. "So frank and forward."

  "Could be," Jacky said. "She buses into Cairo every Sunday morning to attend church, the very church, she told me, that housed the holy family twenty centuries ago. A place most miraculous. Just a few years ago, she said, a workman saw a woman on the roof. He went inside and got the Coptic minister, who came out and ordered her down. Then he noticed a light emitting from her: 'Holy Mary Mother of God,' he exclaims, 'it's the Virgin!' Or something to that effect.

  "Anyway, the whole congregation came out and saw her, and next Sunday saw her again. The next Sunday the churchyard was packed - Moslems, Christians, agnostics - everybody saw her! It went on for two months. Thousands witnessed her weekly appearance."

  Jacky smiled and raised his brows.

  "The c
rowds finally got so big the Egyptian government put a wall around the place and charged twenty-five piastres at the turnstile. The apparition immediately stopped appearing."

  "Far out," I say. "I wouldn't have stood for it either. Not when they're getting fifty piastres a head to look at those empty bull coffins."

  October 28, Monday. Jacky finally lands a room in Cairo. I go in with him and check at the KLM office. I can get a plane out this coming Thursday morning, or Monday night November 4. I tell the coiffed Dutchess to book me on the Thursday morn flight.

  Now that he's been accepted back into metropolitan civilization, Jacky wants to stay another week. "Why not take a room with me in Cairo? Wait and catch the November fourth flight? See some belly boogie? That way you could spend Halloween night at the tombs."

  I tell him I'd rather spend the eve with the kids in Oregon, passing out popcorn balls to mummies in rubber masks. He shrugs. "Whatever. But do you think Thursday gives you enough time to find - to finish your pieces?"

  I appreciated his mid-sentence alteration. I would have been forced to concede it was highly unlikely that I will be able to "find it" by Thursday, or by Monday for that matter. The closer I've looked the less I've seen. The pyramid disappears within itself as you approach it. The longer you look the more your theories become dwarfed by the blunt actuality of the puzzle.

  I walk the ruins around the Giza plateau largely unaccosted now. I have learned a trick of bending down to pick up a rock as soon as I detect an approaching hustle. I then examine it through the little sighting lens on my engineer's compass, and the hustlers back off respectfully. "Shh. Observe. The Yankee doctor has found a clue. Observe the manner he thoughtfully scratch his great bald puzzle piece."

  Little do they know. I'm just drifting. Peter O'Toole crossing the desert on his camel, watching his shadow ripple hypnotically over the sand. Omar Sharif rides up from behind and swats him with his camel crop. What?