Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.
"You will leave now."
"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They must be preserved. Future generations will thank us."
"Do you mean," the old man asked, aghast, "that you want others to come here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!"
"No." Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.
Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.
The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient street.
When he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed a more practical place now.
The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.