"I knew Father couldn't have done it," Alis murmured.
They went down a flight of stairs off the main hall to a basement room. It was luxuriously furnished, as every room in the mansion must have been. There was a rug over inlaid linoleum and a blazing fireplace. A huge round mahogany table stood in the center of the room.
Hector Civek sat in one of the half-dozen leather armchairs drawn up to the table. In another sat a furry, genial-looking blue-gray kangaroo.
Only it wasn't really a kangaroo, Don realized. It was more human than animal in several ways. Its bearing, for instance, had dignity, and its round eyes had intelligence. A thick tail at least three feet long stuck through a space under the backrest of the armchair. As Doc Bendy had said, the tail was magnificent.
Civek nodded and smiled, apparently willing to forget his flare-up at Alis. "I'll introduce you," Civek said. "I mean we'll introduce you. Oh, the hell with the royal 'we,' as long I'm among friends. This is Gizl, and what I'm trying to say is that he doesn't speak English. Doesn't talk at all, as far as I can tell. But he understands the language and he can read and write it. That's why all this."
He indicated the letter and number squares on the table. They were from sets of games—Scrabble, Anagrams, I-Qubes, Lotto and poker dice.
"My granddaughter met Gizl, you'll recall," Doc Bendy said. "Either this one or one like him. We don't know yet whether Gizl is a personal name or a generic one."
"Let's find out," Don said. He sat down at the table and began to form squares into a question.
"Wait a minute." Doc Bendy broke up Don's sequence. "The amenities first. Spell out 'Greetings,' or some such things. Manners, boy."
"Sorry." Don started over. He spelled Greetings, then Alis Garet, then Don Cort, and pointed from the squares to Alis and himself. "I assume you've already introduced yourself?" he asked Bendy.