The Zanthodon MEGAPACK ™: The Complete 5-Book Series Read Free

fall over his bald brow, knocking his glasses askew.
    “Your unexpected assistance, sir, was timely and most welcome,” he said breathlessly. “Those two ruffians—!”
    I drew him to a seat behind a tiny table set against a wall of flaking plaster adorned with posters advertising such varied amusements as a Parisian chanteuse , who really hailed from Constantinople, a Chinese magician who was actually an exBrooklyn cardsharp of pure Gypsy descent, and a brand of liquor fermented from overripe prunes and fit, from my experience, only for removing old paint from cheap furniture.
    “Relax—catch your breath, pop,” I counseled. At my elbow the Nubian waiter materialized like a genie from the Arabian Nights : “Dry mahtini, sah ?”
    “Yep, Tabiz, the usual,” I said. “What’s your poison, old timer?”
    The white tuft of goat-beard jutted skyward stiffly and I received a frosty glare. “Potter is the name, my good man—Professor Potter.”
    “Okay, Doc, have it your way,” I grinned. “But what’ll you have?”
    He sniffed sharply. “As a rule, I do not indulge…still and all, I suppose…under the circumstances…just to restore the tissues…for medicinal purposes only, you understand!…under the advice of my physician…a drop or two of spiritous beverage can do no harm, surely?”
    “Surely,” I nodded.
    “Straight gin,” he snapped at the waiter. “Gordon’s, if you stock it; Boodle’s will do.”
    It turned out to be Old Mr. Boston, but gin (I have found) is gin.
    * * * *
    We talked over our drinks. For the past two months I had been out “east of Suez” as Sax Rohmer or Talbot Mundy would put it, in the desert country in Sinai, performing some rather delicate shipping flights in an old Sikorsky chopper supplied me by a Greek importer.
    Let’s not mince words: I’d been smuggling out antiquities for a fellow named Pappadappoulas who daren’t risk trying to get the stuff out through customs. Nothing much, just broken pottery and a couple of chewed-up Syro-Roman busts; anyway, the Greek either defaulted or got busted and I found myself with about seventy dollars American in my jeans and the proud owner of a beatup Sikorsky, which was probably also hot. As I carelessly filled the Professor in on my recent business venture, he interrupted me with excitement written all over his whiskery visage:
    “A helicopter , you say, my boy? Great Galileo!—how utterly fortuitous! Does it…ah…is the vehicle in sky worthy condition?” he inquired breathlessly, a feverish glint in his watery optics.
    I shrugged. “A drop of oil here and there and the other place, and a full tank of the best octane, that’s all it needs. We needed the chopper, you understand, ’cause we had to fly low. Mr. Sadat’s customs men use radar now, and the border country fringes some on Israeli-held territory. Antiaircraft batteries, you know…and trigger fingers get mighty itchy in that part of the world…”
    Something like prophetic bliss shone in his misty eyes. An adam’s apple the size of a golfball wobbled up and down in his stringy throat, measuring the intensity of his emotion just as the mercury does in a thermometer.
    “When you saved me from those scalawags, my boy,” he said huskily, “I thought…” And he rattled off a line or two of Swahili. Well, it was pure Swahili as far as I was concerned; it turned out to be Greek.
    Then he cleared his throat apologetically: “Hem! Forgive me, lad…Simonides the Athenian…‘One welcomes the arrival of a friend in need, even if he be a stranger at the time.’”
    “You don’t have to—”
    He silenced me with a magnificent gesture. “Not at all! The poet echoed my feelings of the moment; but now that I learn you possess a helicopter, I feel, rather (with Ephialtes), ‘Be serene: the Gods will provide you with the thing you need, in the hour appointed—’”
    He leaned forward suddenly, as if to transfix me with that white spike of stiff