“Could I have this?” the boy asked. “I want to study it.”

Urim and Thummim exchanged determined clicks and grunts.

Lloyd nodded at them, and they seemed to nod back.

“I take it they approve,” the professor said. “That’s how I’ll take it, anyway. You may keep the box, young Lloyd, as a souvenir to reward your sagacity and a memento of the amazements you have seen. Learn its secret if you can.”

The boy tucked the talismanic object into his shirt. Then he said goodbye to the professor and his unexpected family, not knowing how much trouble lay ahead for his own.

“What an unusual lad,” the professor said when Lloyd had departed. He was unable to recall what he had intended to lure the boy’s thoughts away from the tiger powder with when he invited him inside the tent.

The Ambassadors clicked and burbled.

CHAPTER 6. A Lust for Learning

LLOYD WAS A LONG TIME TRACKING DOWN HIS FATHER AND mother, because Hephaestus, when he discovered that he had lost the money, began combing the market, hoping against hope that it might just have fallen out of his pocket. Beside himself with anger about the loss, the reformed inventor limped out of the square and into a district of warehouses and then down a brickbat alley where he was waylaid by some toughs and might well have been beaten to a pulp had not one of them had a gimpy foot himself, and so called off the assault out of sympathy.

Meanwhile, Rapture found that haggling for bargains amid the produce merchants was exhausting work (and they sometimes found that talking to her was not so easy, either, even though she put on her whitest accent).