The Egyptian Cat Mystery

by John Blaine

  The boys had decided to keep Hassan as a guide and driver during their entire stay. The dragoman’s services were not expensive, and besides, both of them felt they had found a friend. The way Hassan had pitched in at the bazaar, with no questions asked and their interests obviously atheart, had been a fine example of professional loyalty coupled with a quick mind and fast reflexes.

  After breakfast the boys went to the wardrobe and took out the coats they had brought.

  Rick’s was brand new, a Christmas present from his father. It was a short, hip-length

  woolen coat that could double as a hunting jacket. In addition to the big outer pockets, it had inner game pockets lined with aleatherlike plastic. It was warm, but light. He was thoroughly pleased with it.

  Scotty slipped into his own short coat, much like Rick’s except for the game pockets.

  Then the ex-Marine motioned to the Egyptian cat, unwrapped and sitting in elegant repose on the writing desk. “What about Felix?” he asked.

  Rick went over and picked up the cat. “We’d better take it along, I guess. It might get lonesome. Or we might run over Ali Moustafa on the way to the project.” He slid the cat into an inner pocket. It fit with room to spare.

  Scotty asked Hassan, with mock seriousness, “You know Sahara Wells?”

  Hassan answered with equal seriousness. “Know Sahara Wells well.”

  The ride was an interesting one, up theNile to a bridge different from the one they had crossed en route from the airport, along roads with a palm-shaded center strip, past mosques, stores, and airy, modern apartment houses. There was less traffic than in downtownCairo , and Hassan went faster.

  Scotty muttered, “Fewer close calls today.”

  Rick winced as the car almost scraped a woman with a basket of fruit balanced on her head.“Fewer, but closer.”

  The costumes on the street were mixed. There were many people, including women, in Western dress, but there were also many women in cloaks, and men in the traditional Arab bornoss, the enveloping robe called a burnoose in English. For the first time, the boys saw several men in blue gowns, and Rick asked Hassan what they were.

  “Fellahin,” Hassan replied. “How you say?Farmers.From country. Mantell me that is where your word ‘fella’ come from.”

  Rick looked with new interest. He had heard of the fellahin, the farmer-peasants ofEgypt

  . Many of them lived and worked as their ancestors had centuries ago, plowing with wooden plows, living in mud-and-wattle houses. They represented the past ofEgypt , as installations like the atomic energy plant at En-Shass, orInchass as it was sometimes called, represented the future.

  There were soldiers along the route, too, dressed in British-style brown uniforms. Some carried Sten guns, vicious little submachine guns originally of English manufacture.

  “Why the soldiers?”Scotty asked.

  “Camp near,” Hassan replied.

  And then, abruptly, the boys lost interest in people, because looming ahead, like something from a travel movie, was a pyramid I

  Hassan rounded a corner and another pyramid came into view. They were enormous, Rick thought. He hadn’t expected anything so huge. “Are we atGiza already?” he asked.

  “ThisGiza ,” Hassan agreed. He pronounced it more like Gizeh.

  “I always thought the pyramids were out in the desert,” Scotty objected.

  “Is true,” Hassan said. “You will see.”

  They did, within minutes. The terrain changed from the green, fertile,NileValley to the bleakSahara as though cut by a giant knife. For the first time, Rick understood the phrase “Egypt, gift of theNile .” Where the yearlyNile overflow brought fertile silt and moisture, there was lush green land. Where the overflow stopped, the desert began. No intermediate ground lay between.Egypt consisted of theNileValley and the desert, with nothing in between.

  The road crossed the dividing line and they were in theSaharaDesert . Hassan drove between houses of faded red clay and tan stucco, unlike the modern apartments a few hundred yards back. It was as though they had driven into a different country. Children, goats, chickens, and Arab adults scattered before the car. It was a typical desert-country scene, and right at the edge of modernCairo !

  Hassan turned a sharp corner andGiza lay before them, up a gradual, rising slope.

  In the immediate foreground was the Sphinx. Rick’s first impression was that it was disappointingly small, as the great pyramids behind it were truly enormous. He could see all threeGiza pyramids now.

  Then he realized that his impressions had been gained entirely from pictures-and to an extent, the pictures had been false. The Sphinx, always shown in the foreground of pictures or taken from a low angle, loomed large in the camera lenses, with the pyramids looking relatively small in the distant background.

  Human vision set the image straight, abruptly. The Sphinx was small, but only in

  comparison to the pyramids. Actually, it was a monument of heroic proportions.

  “Please stop,” Rick called, and Hassan did, with skidding wheels. The boys got out and stood gazing, in mixed awe and delight. This was theEgypt of antiquity, Rick thought.

  These were the monuments of a civilization already ancient when the Old Testament was new, monuments engineered with astounding precision when Rick’s Anglo-Saxon

  forebears were still building crude shelters of mud and reeds.

  Scotty’s nudge aroused Rick from his reverie, and he turned for a close-up of his first live camel, not counting circuses or zoos. The camel was such a vision of homely awkwardness that Rick had to laugh.

  The cameleer led the beast to where a party of tourists, obviously American, waited.

  The boys watched as the animal came to a halt. The driver bowed to the party. Then, taking a thin stick, he tapped the camel on bony knees that were wrapped in worn burlap. Instantly the camel let out a heartrending groan. Its ungainly legs folded like a poorly designed beach chair, and moaning in pure anguish, it knelt.

  A lady tourist, giggling self-consciously, climbed up on the blanket-covered saddle. The camel let out a louder groan, one filled with such phony pain and despair that the boys burst out laughing. A tap of the driver’s stick and the camel lurched to its feet, hind legs first like a cow. The lady tourist squealed mightily, the camel wailed in protest, the other tourists cheered, and the boys doubled with laughter.

  Rick asked, still chuckling, “Hassan, do camels always complain like that?”

  “Is true.They nasty and plenty noisy.They hate work. Driver makes them carry tourists and they holler plenty.”

  The camel quieted down to a low-voiced grumble. He was letting the world know that the arrangement was not pleasing and that he didn’t intend to suffer in silence. Cameras began to snap, recording for the folks back home the undignified ride of the lady tourist on the ungainly camel before the ancient, majestic pyramids and the changeless, unsmiling Sphinx.

  The three got back into the little car and Hassan took a road that curved gradually around a hill, past a hotel that he identified as the Mena House, and up to the largest pyramid, once the tomb ofKhufu and still the greatest monument inall the world.

  On a line into the desert were the slightly smaller pyramids ofKefren andMankara .

  These, with the Sphinx, were among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

  Later, Rick promised Scotty, they would exploreGiza and its wonders inch by inch. But now they were due at Sahara Wells. Hassan sped around theKhufu pyramid and pointed.

  There, on the horizon, was a strange contrast to the monuments of the Pharaohs. The steel-and-aluminum shape of the great,steerable dish antenna, designed for modern astronomy, was silhouetted against the sky.

  Rick was excited. He enjoyed new sights and experiences more than most people, and here, within sight of each other, were unique objects of almost equal interest, but entirely different.

  The way led past a single large building surrounded by shabby tents, and a sign in English and Arabic tha
t proclaimed that this was Sahara Wells. Then the blacktop road curved out into the desert to the great radio telescope.

  Hassan drove into a parking lot before the main project building in the shadow of the antenna and Dr. Hakim Farid came out to greet the boys.

  “Welcome to Sahara Wells,” he said cordially. “How do you like our baby?”

  Rick looked up at the huge dish. “It’s a good mate for the pyramids,” he said.

  “Pretty impressive,” Scotty added.

  “We hope its performance will be impressive, too, once we get this bug ironed out.

  Come on in. Winston and Kerama are hard at work.”

  The boys followed him into the building, while Hassan squatted in the sun next to his car. The door opened directly into the main control room, a bewildering confusion of panels, instruments, and controls. There were several scientists and technicians clustered around Winston and Kerama. The group was studying Sanborn tracings, continuous graphs showing the lines traced by the incoming signals.

  Farid introduced the boys to the staff,then took them on a quick tour. He showed them the controls for the great dish. They were fully automatic. The operator needed only to set the co-ordinates for the part of the sky to be examined,then clock mechanisms of remarkable precision would keep the telescope on target until the target sank below the horizon.

  The boys examined banks of amplifiers that would turn faint signals into usable ones.

  The latest techniques had been used to ensure maximum performance.

  Outside, Farid showed them the self-contained diesel-electric power plant. They stood

  directly under the massive concrete mount for the great dish and marveled at its size.

  The main bearings on which it moved were bigger around than Scotty was tall, yet the whole affair was so delicately balanced that a tiny electric motor could control it with fantastic precision.

  Still under construction were offices and barracks. The latter would allow the scientists to stay there for days at a time when working on particular projects.

  The offices were nearly done, and plasterers were at work, but the forms for the barracks floor were just being completed. The pouring of concrete would start on the following day.

  Rick looked at the pyramids on the horizon and contrasted this scene of construction with the one that had produced the great tombs. Then, it was only men-thousands of them. Today, it was a handful of skilled workers plus machinery.

  “Now,” Farid said, “let’s get back to the control room. Kerama is going to review the situation for the staff. Some of them are new on the job.”

  As Farid and the boys rejoined the others, Dr. Kerama was pointing to a series of peaks on the Sanborn tracings. “You will note that these peaks occur at intervals, with the spacing apparently random. The main sequence of noise out of which the peaks rise is the 21-centimeter hydrogen line. Notice also that the peaks have nearly identical amplitudes. Obviously, the source is neutral hydrogen, which is to say hydrogen in its normal form, not ionized as we find it in plasma in a star’s atmosphere. Our problem is simply to locate the source of the peaks. Somewhere in the circuit there seems to be an effect that serves to modulate the incoming signal. Our antenna will be useless unless we eliminate this interference so that the signal can be pure once again.”

  Rick had seen Sanborn tracings before. The system was a standard method of recording.

  His first experience with it had been in making permanent records oftelemetered signals from rockets.

  A technician asked, “Sir, do these peaks occur no matter how the antenna is pointing?”

  Kerama shook his head. “No. If you will examine the peaks in terms of time and the co-ordinates, you will see that they began at a particular point during a sweep of the sky.

  Our first thought was that we had picked up some source emitting pulsed signals, but the source is apparently moving. This is why we concluded the difficulty was in our system, since no sky source moves with such angular velocity.”

  The Egyptian scientist began giving assignments. Rick and Scotty were given a test kit

  and put to work checking a part of the circuit one wire at a time. It was slow, difficult work, requiring great care.

  It was warm in the control room. Rick hung up his coat, pausing to touch the Egyptian cat in his pocket. He hadn’t thought of the little beast for some time. What was he to do with it? From a simple delivery job, as a favor to an acquaintance, the cat had become a problem. Rick couldn’t resist a mystery, but this one hadhim stopped cold for the time being. He didn’t know what to do next. The only solution that had occurred to him was to send a cable to Bartouki, to ask for further instructions.

  He shrugged and put the problem aside, and went back to helping Scotty.

  It was late before Kerama called a halt. The boys rode back to the hotel with Hassan, grateful for the relief of concentrating on thousands of tiny wires. They told the dragoman to go on home,then went into the dining room for dinner before retiring for the night. Winston, who never seemed to tire when working, had stayed with Kerama and Farid to continue discussions of possible sources of trouble.

  After dinner Rick picked up their key at the hotel desk and they rode the tiny elevator to their floor. They opened up and went in. Rick locked the door while Scotty snapped on the lights.

  Scotty let out a sudden yell! Rick whirled and gasped. The room was a shambles. Every drawer was open and their contents were dumped out on the floor. Their suitcases had been left open. The bedclothes were in a heap in the middle of the room, and the mattresses were on the floor.

  Rick glanced at the key in his hand and realized that it was a very ordinary type; master keys that would allow a thief access could be bought in any hardware store. He followed Scotty to the closet and saw that their clothes had been searched and dropped carelessly.

  Nothing was left on the hangers.

  The room had been searched inch by inch, and by someone in a hurry.

  Rick’s hand went to the Egyptian cat in his pocket.

  “They wanted the cat,” he said slowly. “I can’t see that anything is missing. But why is the cat so important?”

  He drew it out of his pocket and stared at it. Then his eyes met Scotty’s. His pal shrugged. Neither of them had even the slightest clue.

  CHAPTER VI

  The Cat Has Kittens

  The sun blazed down on Sahara Wells. In the distance the pyramids looked hazy, and beyond themCairo was a thin line of green and brown along theNile . It was fairly warm in the sun, but a cool wind blew across the desert and coats were comfortable.

  Rick and Scotty sat on a box under the antenna while Hassan squatted and watched them. For the moment there was nothing for them to do. The scientists were occupied with calculations, and neither boy could make a contribution to high mathematics of the kind used in radio astronomy.

  Rick was glad of the break. His mind hadn’t been on the job, anyway-it had been on the Egyptian cat. For perhaps the hundredth time he asked, “Why is the cat valuable? Why would anyone want it enough to stage that scene at El Mouski and then ransack our room?”

  Scotty had no answers, but he had some questions of his own. “What I want to know is,did the hall porter just happen to step out at the right moment for the thief? Or is he in the act somehow?”

  “It really doesn’t make much difference,” Rick pointed out. “He might have been paid to take a walk, but that doesn’t mean he knows anything.”

  “Okay. Try this one. Where is the real All Moustafa?”

  “Good question. Now I’ll ask one. What do we do next?”

  “You could cable Bartouki, or even phone him,” Scotty replied. “You said you had thought about it.”

  Rick hesitated. He tried to put his reluctance into words. “I just don’t think getting in touch with Bartouki is the right thing to do. I don’t know why. Call it a hunch.”

  Scotty had a deep respect for Rick’s hunches. They had a way of turning out to be r
ight.

  He remembered a description of a hunch Rick had once used and repeated it. “A hunch is only a conscious conclusion based on subconscious data you don’t know you have.

  Isn’t that about it?”

  Rick looked at him. “What are you driving at?”

  “What data are buried in yoursubconscious that make you distrust Bartouki?”

  “I didn’t say I mistrusted him.”

  Scotty shrugged. “No, but you must, if you don’t thinkit’s right to call him.”

  Rick had to admit Scotty was probably right. What basis did he have for mistrusting the charming little Egyptian merchant? Certainly Bartouki had been nice to them, so carrying the cat toEgypt had been only common courtesy.

  Experience had shown Rick that very often he could get ideas from reviewing

  conversations. He walked away from Hassan and Scotty and stared at the construction details of the antenna. But he wasn’t really looking. Instead, he was trying to recall the entire scene leading up to his acceptance of the cat.

  Bartouki had explained its importance. He had said it was needed. Now, what had led Barby to offer Rick’s services as a messenger? The merchant had said that he was anxious to get it toEgypt , but that the Christmas mails were crowded.The Christmas mails . . . that didn’t seem like much of a reason for not sending it by air freight.

  Bartouki could have delivered it personally toIdlewild Terminal, to avoid getting it mixed up with the domestic mail. . . .

  “I’ve got it!” he yelled. He hurried over and stood in front of Scotty and

  Hassan.“Listen, who sends mail at Christmas time?”

  Scotty’s brows wrinkled. “Everyone, I guess.”

  “Not everyone.” Rick warmed to his idea. “There are plenty of people who wait until the last few days before Christmas, but where are they? InAmerica ! Anyone overseas who sends a package home tries to get it in the mail early. Wouldn’t you say so?”

  “Maybe they should, but I suspect they don’t. People are always waiting until the last moment.”