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.