Free A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist by Ron Miller Page A

of touch with the Academy for a year, off in the midst of deserts looking for lost cities and whatnot. Haven’t been able to read his reports: they’re boring as hell, as you might imagine. Dry as dust, in fact! Ha! Ha!”
    “Haha, yourself,” replied the princess. “Look at this!” She had pulled a little tissue-wrapped object from the center of its nest of excelsior. It was evidently massive, in spite of its small size, vaguely cubical and scarcely four inches on a side, and she had to use both hands to lift it from the box. She dropped it with a thud to the tabletop and, tearing the tissue away, revealed a dully-gleaming yellow lump.
    “Is it what it looks like?” she asked.
    “It looks like gold.”
    “I think that it is gold. What else is that color and weighs so much?”
    “Nothing that I can think of. What are we supposed to make of this? It’s very nice of Professor Melnikov to send this to me, but it seems a little extravagant for someone I scarcely know.”
    “Perhaps there’s a letter or note.” She dug around in the excelsior and did finally excavate a dirty little envelope bearing the Academy’s seal and Professor Wittenoom’s name inscribed in a spiky, scrawling hand. She handed it to him and he tore it open, pulling from it a small card.
    “What does it say?” she asked, craning her neck to see over his arm.
    “Not much, I’m afraid. I recall Melnikov as being somewhat taciturn, a recollection whose accuracy this note upholds.”
    “Well?”
    “Well what?”
    “What does it say?”
    “Ah! Yes. Hmm. Only this: ‘My dear Wittenoom,’ he begins with characteristic informality, I see, ‘My dear Wittenoom, Thought that you and your gang of halfwits might be able to make something of this. Found in fresh crater not far from where I’m excavating, near Musrumforsaken village of Wa-Wa-something-or-other. Apparently secondary fall accompanying much larger meteorite that fell about hundred miles further east. Didn’t see impact, but heard and saw dust cloud. Have no idea why gold would be dropping out of the sky, but for Musrum’s and my own sake I daren’t let any of the primitives here think that’s what’s happening, as you may or may not be able to imagine. Use it as paperweight or, more likely, fund more of those harebrained crackpots of yours. Sincerely, R. R. Melnikov.’”
    “No wonder it weighs fifty pounds,” commented the princess, “It really is gold.”
    “I’ve never heard of golden meteorites before,” replied the professor, “but then, meteoritics is somewhat out of my field.”
    “People would go out of their minds if they thought that gold was falling out of the sky!”
    “It’d certainly be dangerous. You’ve seen for yourself how massive the element is. That small specimen alone could destroy a house if it struck at the speed of the average aerolith!”
    “You know, a thought has just occured to me.”
    “What might that be, my dear?”
    “You’ve told me that the breakup of the little moon is causing an increase in meteor showers?”
    “Yes?”
    “What if this meteor that fell in Ibraila is one of those meteors? One of the pieces of the little moon?”
    “It may very well be. In fact, it’s most likely.”
    “Well, then, if that’s so, or if it’s even possible, why, wouldn’t that mean that the moon itself is made of gold?”

CHAPTER FIVE
    THE HOURI
    The next time I get the urge to go to Spondula, grumbled Rykkla, I’ll talk myself out of it.
    She had been on a road, a very dusty, rutted, potholed road, as corrugated as a washboard, as pitted as her captors’ faces, for only two days, though she would have argued persuasively that it had been much longer. She would have been wrong, of course, but in fairness an allowance must be made for subjective experience. She was surrounded by a company of ugly, fearsomely-competent-looking soldiers under the command of a supremely ugly man who looked dangerous enough to explode from a sheer