Tomy and the Planet of Lies by Erich von Däniken Read Free Book Online

assistant to show them twenty pairs of shoes and in the end don’t buy any. I need about twenty minutes to buy a car, and I haven’t been to a shoe store for years. And now? It was getting close to midday. All that was left was the melt water from the cooler. Somewhere in the car, I found a roll of aluminum foil. We unwrapped it and laid it on the ground in a big cross as a signal to passing airplanes.
    From my time as a boy scout, I could remember most of the letters of the Morse code. Dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot was the code for SOS (…– – –…). We laid out clothes in the Morse code signal next to our foil cross. (Later, quite a few people asked me why I didn’t just use a cell phone to call for help. Man! In the Baluchistan desert cell phones simply don’t work. Anyway, this was back in 1987; in those days, not so many people had cell phones. In the desert, they still don’t.)
    Where was Tomy? Marc voiced his concern, and it began to gnaw on my nerves, maybe something had happened to Tomy that was beyond his power to influence. Had he landed in God-knows-what dimension? I tried to stave off the claws of doubt and began reciting for Marc a poem about friendship written by Schiller that I had learnt back in my schooldays. Why it occurred to me at precisely that moment, I’ve never quite understood—even years later:
    The tyrant Dionys to seek, Stern Moerus with his poniard crept; the watchful guard upon him swept; the grim king marked his changeless cheek: “What wouldst thou with thy poniard? Speak!” “The city from the tyrant free!” “The death-cross shall thy guerdon be.”
    And so on to the end where the tyrant becomes his true friend and says: “Tis mine your suppliant now to be, Ah, let the band of love—be three!”
    Tomy was to be our third person, I hammered into Marc. At least our improvised air conditioning was working. I fished a clean handkerchief out of the confusion behind us and dunked it into the tepid water in the cool box. As greedy as young camels, we sucked the disgusting brew down and also moistened Tomy’s brows. Wasn’t it possible to extract water from the air? I had read somewhere that some Indian prime minister had drank his own urine, but neither Marc nor I needed to go—we were pretty dehydrated as it was. What could we do to get water? Dig? We didn’t have the tools for that and we were probably in the wrong place anyway. Should we hang our aluminum foil from the cable of the winch to collect dew from the from the early morning air? We would have had to twist the foil into funnels and put some sort of container underneath every one.
    We had four plates and cups in our onboard canteen. Before we could test whether it was possible to extract the steel cable without having any power for the winch, we heard the sound of a distant motor. We held our breath. Was it friend or foe? Quickly we pulled our pants on—I stashed the pistol in my pants pocket after checking that the first bullet was in the chamber. The noise came ever closer, but because of the massive dune in front of us we could see nothing. It was clear that it was some heavy vehicle from the tone of the motor. Thus, it was that each of us stood by our doors, quivering with anticipation. We didn’t even notice that Tomy had come back to life.
    Behind the dune, the sand swirled up into a large dust cloud. The growling of the engine got ever louder and then suddenly a yellow-brown speckled truck appeared with eight massive wheels and its headlights on. Who would be so crazy as to drive around in the desert with their headlights on? The monstrous military truck drove straight at us and we started worrying that the massive vehicle was about to ram us, but twenty meters before it reached the Range Rover, which now looked like a run-down Bedouin tent with its improvised roof, the driver pulled the leviathan to one side. The