his teeth at me. But on the next day, ten or twelve priests came to my rooms with a little box. The head priest opened it and gave it to me. In it were the missing artifacts.
“They weren’t quite what my contract called for, but I was glad to get them. I thanked the head priest for them as nicely as I knew how, and he smiled and suggested that we have a drink. I said, fine, and he poured it out. One of the minor priests was carrying goblets and the wineskin. I put out my hand for the cup and the head priest —did I tell you I’d put a small general nuse installation in my rooms?”
I thought back. “No, you didn’t.”
“Well, I had,” said the nuse man. “I wasn’t going to be bothered with slow, stupid slaves waiting on me. I put out my hand for the cup and the priest went sailing up in the air. He hit on the ceiling with a considerable thump. Then he went around the room, floating just at eye-level, and whacked solidly against each of the four corners. He hit the fourth corner harder and faster than he had the first. I could see that his mouth was open and he looked scared.
“There was a kind of pause while he hovered in the air. Then he went up and hit the ceiling, came down toward the floor, up to the ceiling, down again, up, hovered, and then came down on the floor for the last time with a great crashing whump! He landed so hard I thought I felt the floor shake. I knew he must be hurt.
“I stood there frozen for a moment. I couldn’t imagine what had happened. Then it came to me. The drink in my cup had been poisoned. I suppose Nebu-al-karsig hadn’t had nerve enough to do it himself. And the nuse installation in my room hadn’t let the head priest get away with it.
“A nuse never makes a mistake. ‘The airy servitor. Don’t think, use nuse.’ The more I sell it, the more I’m convinced that it’s wonderful stuff. This time it had saved my life. I couldn’t help wishing for a minute, though, that it had just tipped over the poisoned cup quietly, because banging a priest around like that was sure to be sacrilege.
“The other priests had been as surprised as I was. Now they began to mutter and heft the clubs they were carrying. The nuse might be able to handle all of them at once, but I didn’t wait to find out. I made a dash into the next room and bolted the door.
“I was wearing my chronnox. All I had to do was grab my chest of artifacts and go to some other time. I made a dive under the bed for the chest. And it wasn’t there.”
“Stolen?” I asked helpfully.
The nuse man shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. Not with a nuse installation on guard. I think the nuse had levitated the chest to some safe place for extra security. I concentrated on getting the nuse to bring the chest back, and I did hear noises, levitation noises, as though it were trying to obey me. But it had all it could do to handle the priests in the next room.
“By now there was a considerable commotion in the palace. Doors were opening, people were shouting. I heard soldiers outside in the hall. Thumps and bumps from my sitting room showed that the nuse was still doing what it could with the priests, but several people were throwing themselves as hard as they could against the connecting door. I didn’t know how much longer the bolts would hold.
“I tried concentrating on getting the nuse to abandon the priests and bring me my chest. I’m sure it would have worked in another minute. But then there was a lot of yelling and they began using a ram on the door. One of the panels busted. The hinges were sagging. I had to go.”
The nuse man looked so depressed that I poured him out more tea. Just as I had suspected in the beginning, the nuse—always incalculable, always tricky, the essence of unreliability—the nuse had been at the bottom of his troubles. It always was. I had too much sense to say so, though.
“What was the point you were making about the plano-convex bricks?” I finally asked.
The nuse man looked even more gloomy. I wished I hadn’t mentioned it. He picked a leaf out of his tea with his spoon and frowned savagely at it.
“I went back to Ur,” he said finally. “I wanted to see what had happened about the bricks, and of course I wanted my chest. I picked a time about ten years later.”
“Well?”
“The first thing I noticed was the skyline. Every one of the ziggurats Nebu-al-karsig had put up was gone. I walked up to where one of them had been, and there was nothing but a heap of bricks, and the bricks looked as if people had pounded them with hammers.
“I walked on to the center of town where the royal palace had been. It was gone, too, and what looked like a new royal palace was going up to the north of it. It was plain what had happened. There had been a revolution, Nebu-al-karsig had been overthrown, Ur had a new king. I ought to have gone then. But I was still curious about my chest.
The nuse factory had been just outside the palace walls. It had been razed too—my beautiful installation!— but I could see people working around where it had been. I went over to talk to them.
“When I got up to them, I saw they were making bricks. Making them by hand, in the dumb, inefficient, old- fashioned way. But these weren’t rectangular bricks. The way the ones before my nuse bricks had been. These were rectangular on the sides and bottom, but they had round tops, like loaves of bread.”
“In other words,” I said, “plano-convex bricks.”
“Yes. It was the most impractical idea in the world. Their changing to such a silly shape made me realize how much the brickmakers had hated the nuse bricks. By the way—I know how curious you are—you’ll be interested to learn that walls made with bricks of that kind don’t look especially different from ordinary walls.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’d been wondering about that.”
“I thought you’d be glad to know,” said the nuse man. “Well, I went up close to one of the brickmakers and watched him working. The pace he was going, he’d be lucky if he got ten bricks done in a day. He smoothed his brick and rounded it and patted it. He put more mud on it and stood back to watch the effect. He pushed a wisp of straw into the surface with the air of an artist applying a spot of paint. He just loved that brick.
“I cleared my throat, but he didn’t seem to hear me. I said, ‘Say, I heard they found a chest with gold and jewels in the ruins of the old palace yesterday.’
“ ‘Another one?’ he answered, without looking up. ‘You know, they found one on the south side of the palace about five years ago. Full of treasure. Some people have all the luck. Me, I never find anything.’
“The south side of the palace was where my rooms had been. I made a sort of noise.
“Up to then the worker had been too busy patting his round-topped brick to pay any attention to me. Now he looked up. His eyes got wide. His jaw dropped. He stared at me. ‘Aren’t you—are you—’ he said doubtfully.
“Then he made up his mind. ‘Brothers! Brothers!’ he shouted. ‘It’s the foreign magician, come back to curse us again! Hurry! Kill him! Kill him! Kill the stinking sheep liver! Quick!’
“You wouldn’t have thought that people who were working as slowly as they were could move so quick. As soon as they heard the words ‘foreign magician,’ they went into action, and before he got to the second ‘Kill him!’ the air was black with flying bricks.”
“So that’s how your face—”
“Yes. Of course, not all the bricks were dry. If they had been—but even a wet brick can be painful.”
“And you never got your chest back.”
“No. All I got were the artifacts the priest brought me just before the nuse levitated him. Would you like to see them?”
He sounded as if he wanted to show them to me. I said, “Yes, I’d like to.”
He got out a little box and opened it. Inside was a piece of lapis lazuli that he said was a whetstone, two crude gold rings with roughly cabochon cut blackish stones, and a handsome gold necklace with lapis lazuli beads and gold pendants shaped like some sort of leaf.
“Very pretty,” I said, examining them.
“You should have seen the stuff I had! But this is better than nothing. The home office will be glad to see it. I don’t usually get even this much.”
This was true, and he looked so depressed when he said it that I felt a burst of sympathy for him. I didn’t know what to say.
