The boat’s crew scrambled to the deck. The boat itself was made fast overside. There was much muttered talk. Then men came astern to where Tony smoked in blissful excitement. They circled him deliberately. He snapped his cigarette lighter. Its glow showed him the villainous bearded faces of the bakhil’s crew. Hairy chests and ragged garments. Knives gleaming and ready.
And the lighter’s flame showed them Tony, puffing joyously on a cigarette, with one hand holding the lighter with its flickering flame, and the other holding a cocked revolver.
There was a pause without words.
Then a launch’s internal combustion engine caught somewhere. It began to run with a sort of purring roar. A harbor launch. A police launch, probably, ready to investigate the howls of fury on the harbor’s dark waters. If Tony were murdered here and now, his body might have to be slid overboard still unrobbed, and even that would be dangerous. More, he might kill somebody first.
The sound of the police-launch motor moved across the harbor. A voice grunted urgently on the bakhil ’s deck, and the group before Tony melted. Men swarmed to ropes and spars. The great lateen sail rose creaking against the sky, and forward, men hauled feverishly at a crude windlass to lift the bakhil ’s anchor. Then slowly, slowly, slowly, in what were hardly catspaws of wind off the land, the bakhil gathered way.
It moved creakingly but very smoothly over the water. When the police launch was at its nearest, Tony tossed his cigarette overboard and blandly watched it go by. He was contentedly confident that all went well.
But his conscience wailed, as the police launch departed. Now he would be killed, and there would be nobody in all the world who would ever admit to the least idea of his fate. He could be traced—perhaps!—to Suakim, though even that was unlikely. But from Suakim on he would seem to have evaporated. With dawn, the bakhil would be remote from all witnesses to happenings on its deck. Tony would be murdered and robbed, and his few remaining possessions divided among these cutthroats who had surely no intention of taking him to any agreed-on destination! And what good had he done, or even tried to do? Even if he unthinkably escaped murder, now, he had not even pretended to make inquiries in Suakim on the probable products of Barkut, of the market it might offer for imports, or even of the possible profit in import-export trade! He had thrown away his life, and more—here Tony’s conscience grew acrimonious—he had not made one single move that a brisk young executive would have made first of all!
Chapter 3
The bakhil cleared the harbor. The wind freshened, and she bent to the breeze and her forefoot cut into the swells. Tony smoked contentedly. He reflected that something like this untraceability was necessary for a journey to Barkut and other places not on topographic surveys. If the area about a gateway were ever searched for a person who had gone through it, that very search would change it, so that somehow it would cease to be identical in the two worlds, and so would cease to be a gateway. In ancient days, when news traveled slowly and searches for missing persons were unthought of, there must have been many gateways indeed. That would account for the wild fables which none believed, nowadays, but which were probably history in some world or other. There was probably a brisk trade between places where magic lamps were functional devices, and prosaic places like the world of Tony’s youth. Now gateways were probably rare and trade almost nonexistent. But not quite. He had the proof of that!
So Tony grinned happily to himself in the starlight at the bakhil ’s stern. He let his imagination run riot in pictures of white-walled cities under a brazen sky, and camel caravans in slow motion over fabled sands, and—to be honest about it—he meditated with some interest upon the possibility of lustrous-eyed slave girls whose sense of duty to their master might make them very interesting companions—if one happened to be their master.