Olympus: It's Not Just a Game

Chapter 17

The peasant unlocked Nancy's manacles, twisted her arms cruelly behind her back, and pushed her to the front of the platform. The crowd roared with approval. Her heart pounded furiously as she stared into the glittering eyes of the mob. "God, help me," she whispered desperately.

"Throw her down!" a peasant shouted, and the mob roared agreement. Nancy's captor shoved with all his might, hurling her out over the heads of the rabble. But the moment he let go her arms, Nancy reached up and grabbed the chin strap of her cyberhelmet. Hairy paws clutched at her body as she ripped the helmet off her head; but then Olympus vanished away. She found herself gasping wildly in the dim, red-lit cybercubicle in the video arcade. Out of her helmet's earphones came the tinny sounds of the crowd exploding with rage at her disappearance.

It was a shock to go from the chaos of the crowd to the silence of the cybercubicle. She opened the door and peered out. The arcade was still there, with late-night customers clustered round various video games. A monitor on another cybercubicle across the way showed Mr. Avery still chained to the slave platform. He was speaking. She stepped over to hear him better. "Are you angry?" he shouted to the crowd.

"No!" they roared back.

"Are you disappointed?" he continued.

"No!" they shrieked. Something whizzed past Mr. Avery's ear. It might have been a loaf of bread, or it might have been a stone. Peasants began prying up cobblestones. Things looked grim.

"Are you going to kill us?" Mr. Avery called out.

"No!" they yelled.

Then he asked something that puzzled Nancy. "Are you telling the truth?"

"Yes!" they all shouted. There was a split second of almost total silence, followed by a deafening, "No!" A second later, they all shouted "yes" again. They started out in unison, but the more intelligent liars among them quickly outpaced the dim-witted ones. It only took the cleverer Cretans half a second to realize that their last answer wasn't right, while the really slow ones puzzled over a "yes" for a good three or four seconds before changing it to a "no." As a result, the mob broke up into a cacophony of "Yes" and "No." It only made things worse when they began to realize that their neighbors were disagreeing with them. Soon the whole marketplace was a quarrelling mass of contradicting voices.

Nancy spotted the ring of keys still lying on the slave platform, just out of his reach. "I've got to save them!" she exclaimed. She ran back to the empty cubicle and slipped back into her suit. She emerged into a mob of arguing, shouting peasants. "I'd better blend in," she muttered to herself, and started shrieking "yes!" and "no!" at the top of her lungs as she threaded her way toward the slave platform. No one even seemed to notice her. She scrambled up the rough planks of the platform, grabbed the keys, and began unlocking the others.

"Nancy!" her father cried.

"Dad, you were brilliant!" she gushed.

"And you're pretty gutsy, lady," he answered. "Let's go!"

Several of the peasants finally noticed what was going on. "They're not running away!" one shouted.

"They're safely chained up!" another yelled.

Noah was the last to be loosed. "Dad," he said, rubbing his wrists gratefully, "there's a boat over there."

It was a small sailing boat, a fishing vessel of some sort. Mr. Avery grinned. "Good eye, son," he said. "Let's grab it."