I stood up, finding my limbs weak, trembling and painful. First, I glanced at my watch. Five hours terran time since we left the ship. At fifty miles per hour, we'd have gone two hundred and fifty miles.
If we'd gone due north, as the bird started out, we must be in the snow zone. And I was warm!
I switched my flash around. All I could see were birds. There seemed to be hundreds of them. I couldn't tell which one was my bearer.
"Where is the perfume?" I bawled.
All I got was squawks. Some of the birds were, in fact, standing on one foot and tucking their heads away.
It was growing lighter. The birds were going to bed.
Feverishly, I pulled out Uncle Izzy's old volume of poetry.
Brushing from my mind a vision of Mr. Picks in a state of shock and another picture of Uncle Isadore snickering triumphantly, I stood on that desert land enchanted—on that home by horror haunted, and solemnly read "The Dodo" to a colony of wingless birds.
My dodo identified himself at the proper place, but I kept on, waiting for something to show me my inheritance.
"Then methought the air grew denser," I read.