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

languages, and half a dozen other isms and -ologies. Quite a guy!
    But I had amused him by being impressed at his scholarly attainments. He chuckled, rather pleased that he had managed to impress me. Which he certainly had—
    “‘ Un sot toujours un plus sot qui l’admire ,’” he murmured half to himself.
    “Come again? That’s French, I know, but…?”
    “A fool can always find a bigger fool to admire him,” he quipped, sardonically.
    “Oh, yeah? Who says?”
    “Boileau-Despréaux,” he replied smugly.
    I ground my teeth, cudgeling my memory for a scrap of La Rochefoucauld I half remembered from college:
    “Says you,” I snorted. “ ‘Il n’y pas des sots si incommodes que ceux qui ont de l’esprit ’!”
    He looked surprised: rather as if a pet chimpanzee had begun a critique of Einstein’s math.
    “‘There are no fools so troublesome as those who have some wit,’” he translated. “My boy, you delight me! A splendid put-down, and quite apropos. But I wonder if you recall Goethe’s pointed remark…‘ Wir sind gewohnt dass die Menschen verhöhnen was sie nicht verstehen ’?”
    “Only thing I ever read by Goethe was Faust ,” I had to admit. His eyes twinkled:
    “But it is from Faust , my dear boy! ‘We are used to see that man despises what he never comprehends.’ There, I trust that puts you in your place?”
    It certainly did.
    With all those “p’s” in his name, I suppose he just naturally had to be a… polymath .
    * * * *
    The Ahaggar region which was our goal was many hundreds of miles to the west of Port Said; the entire breadth of the African continent stretched between where we were and where we wanted to be.
    Well, one thing was sure: I couldn’t fly Babe (my affectionate pet-name for the helicopter I had inherited, sort of, from my former partner in crime) all the way there. There’s rather a noticeable lack of filling stations in the North Sahara.
    We decided to ship the Sikorsky to Morocco by a rusty old tub of a tramp steamer. The nice thing about this was that it wouldn’t cost me—or him, rather—one single pistole . This was because the fat, fiercely mustached Turk who owned the steamer owed me a favor or three. And that was because once upon a time we had both been smuggling guns and ammo into one of those little pepper-pot Middle East wars. My side won; his side lost their shirts—and mostly because the ammo he sold them didn’t fit the guns he had also peddled to them.
    To this day, that particular government would like very much to get their mitts on a fat guy named Kemal Bey. And the favor I could do him was to keep my yap shut, while the favor he could do me was to carry Babe, the Professor and me down the Mediterranean coast to Morocco. This would not be all that hard to do, since, although Kemal’s rusty old tub was hardly much bigger than one of those tugboats they have back in New York Harbor, the chopper could be dismantled and stripped down with a little time, a mite of effort, and a good variety of wrenches.
    Kemal Bey groaned and griped and called upon his gods, but relented in the end, and did as I asked. It would take us some weeks to sail down the coast of North Africa, through the Straits and down the west coast past Casablanca to the little seaport town of Agadir, which was smack-dab on the thirtieth parallel, almost.
    From that point on, traveling inland, the only thing to do was fly in the chopper, which meant we had to pack along plenty of high octane. This could be procured on the black market in Cairo easily enough, and could be shipped in Kemal’s cramped hold. Once we came ashore in Morocco, though, we would have to fly with the gas aboard, which was a mite dangerous.
    During our days and nights at sea, I did a lot of thinking about the Prof’s scheme. And the more I thought about it, the wackier it seemed. Oh, he was smart enough, but like your typical stereotype of the absent-minded professor, nose buried in books and all, he had