Chapter XII (2)

    Argo slipped her feet over the gunwale and with paper bag in hand, dropped to the deck. She bobbed up next to his shoulder, grinned, and said, "Hey, come on back with me. I want to show you something."
    "Sure." He followed her.
    Suddenly she looked serious. "Your arm is worrying you. Why?"
    Geo shrugged. "You don't feel like a whole person. I guess you're not really a whole person."
    "Don't be silly," said Argo. "Besides, maybe Snake will let you have one of his. How are the medical facilities in Leptar?"
    "I don't think they're up to anything like that."
    "We did grafting of limbs back in Aptor," Argo said. "A most interesting way we got around the antibody problem, too. You see—"
    "But that was back in Aptor," Geo said. "This is the real world we're going into now."
    "Maybe I can get a doctor from the temple to come over," she shrugged. "And then, maybe I won't be able to."
    "It's a pleasant thought," Geo said.
    When they reached the back of the ship, Argo took out a contraption from the paper bag. "I salvaged this in my tunic. Hope I dried it off well enough last night."
    "It's your motor," Geo said.
    "Um-hm," said Argo. She put it on a low set of lockers by the cabin's back wall.
    "How are you going to work it?" he asked. "It's got to have that stuff, electricity."
    "There is more than one way to shoe a centipede," Argo assured him. She reached behind the locker and pulled up a strange gizmo of glass and wire. "I got the lens from Sis," she explained. "She's awfully nice, really. She says I can have my own laboratory all to myself. And I said she could have all the politics, which I think was wise of me, considering. Don't you?" She bent over the contraption. "Now, this lens here focuses the sunlight—isn't it a beautiful day—on these thermocouples. I got the extra metal from the ship's smith. He's sweet. Hey, we're going to have to compare poems from now on. I mean I'm sure you're going to write a whole handful about all of this. I certainly am. Anyway, you connect it up here."
    She fastened two wires to two other wires, adjusted the lens, and the tips of the thermocouple glowed red. The armature tugged once around its pivot, and then tugged around once more. Geo glanced up and saw Snake and Iimmi standing above them, looking over the rail on the cabin's roof. They grinned at each other, and then Geo looked back at the motor. It whipped around steadily, gaining speed until it whirred into an invisible copper haze. "Look at that thing go," breathed Argo. "Will you just look at that thing go!"
    QUEST AMID FUTURITY'S RUINS
    What was the strange impetus that drove a group of four widely different humans to embark on a fear-filled journey across a forbidden sea to a legendary land?
    This was Earth still, but the Earth of a future terribly changed after a planet-searing disaster, a planet of weird cults, mutated beasts, and people who were not always entirely human. As for the four who made up that questing party, they included a woman who was either a goddess, a witch, or both, a four-armed boy whose humanity was open to question, and two more men with equally "wild" talents.
    The story of their voyage, of the power-wielding "jewels" they sought, of the atomic and post-atomic terrors they encountered, is a remarkable science-fiction Odyssey of the days to come.
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