But now that he had started running, it seemed the best idea not to stop. On he fled, and on, clambering over boulders, careening into ditches.
Then, at last, he found himself in a crown of brush atop a little knoll, a good half-mile or better from the palace. Panting, unable to go further, Burke flung himself down in the blackest of the shadows and lay there, staring back at the strange, stark majesty that was Knossos.
The flames of the fire he'd started in the Labyrinth still were spreading. Sparks swirled in the wind, carried high by blaze-stoked updrafts; then dispersed, floating farther and farther from the central core of heat, till at last they fell again, to ignite new buildings.
Tearing his attention from the distant holocaust, Burke peered at his watch once more.
Twelve ten.
So the zero hour had come and gone, with nothing happening save the continued spread of the fire.
Burke felt a little sick. Had all his efforts, his anguish, gone for nothing? Was he to live out his life in Bronze Age Crete to no purpose save to prove correct that part of Pendlebury's theory that said that Knossos, dying, had been swept by fire?
Burke cursed beneath his breath. He still couldn't, wouldn't, believe it. It left too many loopholes. After all, what about the business of the radiation traces he'd detected; the blighted circle that showed on the scanner screen? Why, for so many hundred years, had Cretans shunned the site of their ancient glory?
Then, too there were his own personal experiences of the past few hours to think of. Pasiphae's monstrous imbecile son; the octopodal alien telepath—what roles did they play?
Not to mention the great, shimmering, blue-white ship hidden deep within the earth.