by Jerry
“Look, look,” Loira said breathlessly.
The top floors of the Universal Building were a huge torch, jetting white hot flames into the morning skies. And all around them, people were coming out of their drugged state and looking around in bewilderment.
THEY SAT in the Cafe Duval where they had first met. Someone had lowered the glass panels from the metal canopy, cutting off the chill morning air. Through the transparent walls, they could see the blackened warped spire of the Universal Building, still smouldering. In the first gray light of the morning, it looked leprous and diseased.
“You’ve changed,” Loira said. “Changed a lot from the frightened man of yesterday who couldn’t face the end of his life.”
“A lot has happened. There’s a great deal I want to ask you—”
“There isn’t much time,” she said. “Soon their ship will find my machine and—”
“Can’t we do something to stop that?”
“No,” she said. “Anyway, I’m not really in this world of yours. Less so, perhaps, with each passing minute.”
“But—”
“Let me finish. In my world, there are only a few of us, a few humans left. The aliens are quite humane in their own way. They’re not monsters, any more than Dykeman was. Just as, centuries ago, we were quite humane to the Amerindians after we robbed them of their land. Only . . .” Her face became cold and her eyes showed pain.
“Only we left them some dignity. We didn’t make useless pets of them.
“There were three of us: myself, Vic and one other whom you’ve never met. We stole one of their machines, a machine the aliens won’t invent for, another two centuries. Then we came back here. The one you didn’t know managed over the last two years to find one of their bases in Africa, to secrete himself aboard one of their ships. He was the one responsible for the wrecks last night.”
“And he died,” Huber said softly.
“No, I don’t think so. We can’t really be killed since we’re not truly here, not materially. But there’s no room in our history for that crash. He probably ceased to exist at that point—just as Vic did tonight after driving away the third $hip with his helicopter.”
“But,” he protested, “that means you’ve destroyed yourself.”
“Perhaps. I don’t know. But in my world, in my past, there was a man named Kenneth Huber. He was one of the first to develop Touzinsky’s Syndrome.”
Her hand brushed the case beside her, fingers finding yielding surfaces. The box began to emit low warning buzzes at regular intervals.
“They’re getting close,” she said. “I don’t have much time. About my Kenneth Huber—he was killed in a hunt.
“No, wait, that was another world.” She was speaking rapidly now, waving aside his protests. “But that was a crucial point. Huber was one of the few in this world who could understand the alien drive if he had a chance to see one. We knew one of their groups would be active near the city on the night Huber’s test group finished its week. If we could avoid his death, contact him, engineer him into a situation where he could see the drive—”
“But you’ve solved nothing, except preventing my death,” Huber protested.
“That’s not true. The one thing this world needs is a challenge. You have two now. The challenge of space flight, and the knowledge that, if you don’t use it, you lose your own world as well as the rest of the planets by default.”
“But the disease . . . That means the end of immortality.”
“No,” she said, “Dykeman was wrong. There’s nothing bad intrinsically about immortality, provided the race is exposed to new stimuli. You have the facilities to find the answer in time to the syndrome. We know that. Why, even you don’t have to accept the five-year death sentence Dykeman imposed on you. Perhaps in your time—”
“So it comes back to me. And what I do?”
“Yes. You know about Dykeman’s people. You have the secret of their planetary drive. Once you’re off the planet, they’ll have to give up their goal of walking in quietly and taking over with no trouble at all.”
“And the pilot?” he said. “Who’ll leave this safe comfortable world to risk his life for something so immeasurably in the future?”
“Immeasurably? With the serum and a cure for the syndrome, you, yourself, might live to my day. There’ll be many who’ll be willing to risk their fives. But there has to be a first one.”
“And?”
“Well, that too is your decision. You’re one of the few who isn’t afraid of dying. The hunt clubs will give you others.”
FOR A MOMENT he sat, feeling the quick surge of blood in his temples. The vision of endless distances, new worlds. He felt a sudden hunger he had not realized was there. His hand found hers for a moment and he said, “Have you ever been outside?”
She nodded. “You’ve never seen such stars,” she said. The signals from the case at her side began to increase in frequency. “Please go now,” she said.
“When were you born?” he asked.
“A century from now.”
“But what happens to your world—if I decide to fight, I mean?”
“It ceases to exist.”
“And you?”
“Perhaps. I don’t know. It isn’t important.”
“That’s the hardest part of all.”
“You must decide. Perhaps we’ll meet someday. Perhaps I may remember all this as a dream.”
He turned and started to leave.
“The years pass quickly,” he heard her say, “and you have much to do.”
The signals of the case blended into a monotonous roar behind him.
“Hurry . . . hurry, if you can, Ken . . . somehow, some way, I’ll be waiting . . .”
He paused, wanting a final look at her, a last word.
When he turned, the table was empty.
He walked into the street, his body possessed with something strong and throbbing. He looked up as flight after flight of helicopters etched themselves against the morning skies.
The test group was leaving the city. Before another twenty-five years, before they came again . . .?
Then he noticed the sidewalk before the cafe.
On the walk he saw scores of the May flies, their graceful bodies crushed by the thoughtless feet of passersby. For a moment he felt a distant poignant regret for the mindless things whose juices stained the concrete.
But the heat of the summer’s night was lost in the fresh breezes from the river and the morning was wonderfully cool.
The air, was like wine.
No, he thought, wine—good wine—is old.
Like cider. New . . . fresh . . . sweet.
ST. DRAGON AND THE GEORGE
Gordon R. Dickson
A TRIFLE DIFFIDENTLY, JIM ECKERT rapped with his claw on the blue-painted door.
Silence.
He knocked again. There was the sound of a hasty step inside the small, oddly peak-roofed house and the door was snatched open. A thin-faced old man with a tall pointed cap and a long, rather dingy-looking white beard peered out, irritably.
“Sorry, not my day for dragons!” he snapped. “Come back next Tuesday.” He slammed the door.
It was too much. It was the final straw. Jim Eckert sat down on his haunches with a dazed thump. The little forest clearing with its impossible little pool tinkling away like Chinese glass wind chimes in the background, its well-kept greensward with the white gravel path leading to the door before him, and the riotous flower beds of asters, tulips, zinnias, roses and lilies-of-the-valley all equally impossibly in bloom at the same time about the white finger-post labeled s. carolinus and pointing at the house—it all whirled about him. It was more than flesh and blood could bear. At any minute now he would go completely insane and imagine he was a peanut or a cocker spaniel. Grottwold Hanson had wrecked them all. Dr. Howells would have to get another teaching assistant for his English Department. Angie . . .
Angie!
Jim pounded on the door
again. It was snatched open.
“Dragon!” cried S. Carolinus, furiously. “How would you like to be a beetle?”
“But I’m not a dragon,” said Jim, desperately.
The magician stared at him for a long minute, then threw up his beard with both hands in a gesture of despair, caught some of it in his teeth as it fell down and began to chew on it fiercely.
“Now where,” he demanded, “did a dragon acquire the brains to develop the imagination to entertain the illusion that he is not a dragon? Answer me, O Ye Powers!”
“The information is psychically, though not physiologically correct,” replied a deep bass voice out of thin air beside them and some five feet off the ground. Jim, who had taken the question to be rhetorical, started convulsively.
“Is that so?” S. Carolinus peered at Jim with new interest. “Hmm.” He spat out a hair or two. “Come in, Anomaly—or whatever you call yourself.”
Jim squeezed in through the door and found himself in a large single room. It was a clutter of mismatched furniture and odd bits of alchemical equipment.
“Hmm,” said S. Carolinus, closing the door and walking once around Jim, thoughtfully. “If you aren’t a dragon, what are you?”
“Well, my real name’s Jim Eckert,” said Jim. “But I seem to be in the body of a dragon named Gorbash.”
“And this disturbs you. So you’ve come to me. How nice,” said the magician, bitterly. He winced, massaged his stomach and closed his eyes. “Do you know anything that’s good for a perpetual stomach-ache? Of course not. Go on.”
“Well, I want to get back to my real body. And take Angie with me. She’s my fiancée and I can send her back but I can’t send myself back at the same time. You see this Grottwold Hanson—well, maybe I better start from the beginning.”
“Brilliant suggestion, Gorbash,” said Carolinus. “Or whatever your name is,” he added.
“Well,” said Jim. Carolinus winced. Jim hurried on. “I teach at a place called Riveroak College in the United States—you’ve never heard of it—”
“Go on, go on,” said Carolinus.
“That is, I’m a teaching assistant. Dr. Howells, who heads the English Department, promised me an instructorship over a year ago. But he’s never come through with it; and Angie—Angie Gilman, my fiancée—”
“You mentioned her.”
“Yes—well, we were having a little fight. That is, we were arguing about my going to ask Howells whether he was going to give me the instructor’s rating for next year or not. I didn’t think I should; and she didn’t think we could get married—well, anyway, in came Grottwold Hanson.”
“In where came who?”
“Into the Campus Bar and Grille. We were having a drink there. Hanson used to go with Angie. He’s a graduate student in psychology. A long, thin geek that’s just as crazy as he looks. He’s always getting wound up in some new odd-ball organization or other—”
“Dictionary!” interrupted Carolinus, suddenly. He opened his eyes as an enormous volume appeared suddenly poised in the air before him. He massaged his stomach. “Ouch,” he said. The pages of the volume began to flip rapidly back and forth before his eyes. “Don’t mind me,” he said to Jim. “Go on.”
“—This time it was the Bridey Murphy craze. Hypnotism. Well—”
“Not so fast,” said Carolinus. “Bridey Murphy . . . Hypnotism . . . yes . . .”
“Oh, he talked about the ego wandering, planes of reality, on and on like that. He offered to hypnotize one of us and show us how it worked. Angie was mad at me, so she said yes. I went off to the bar. I was mad. When I turned around, Angie was gone. Disappeared.”
“Vanished?” said Carolinus.
“Vanished. I blew my top at Hanson. She must have wandered, he said, not merely the ego, but all of her. Bring her back, I said. I can’t, he said. It seemed she wanted to go back to the time of St. George and the Dragon. When men were men and would speak up to their bosses about promotions. Hanson’d have to send someone else back to rehypnotize her and send her back home. Like an idiot I said I’d go. Ha! I might’ve known he’d goof. He couldn’t do anything right if he was paid for it. I landed in the body of this dragon.”
“And the maiden?”
“Oh, she landed here, too. Centuries off the mark. A place where there actually were such things as dragons—fantastic.”
“Why?” said Carolinus.
“Well, I mean—anyway,” said Jim, hurriedly. “The point is, they’d already got her—the dragons, I mean. A big brute named Anark had found her wandering around and put her in a cage. They were having a meeting in a cave about deciding what to do with her. Anark wanted to stake her out for a decoy, so they could capture a lot of the local people—only the dragons called people georges—”
“They’re quite stupid, you know,” said Carolinus, severely, looking up from the dictionary. “There’s only room for one name in their head at a time. After the Saint made such an impression on them his name stuck.”
“Anyway, they were all yelling at once. They’ve got tremendous voices.”
“Yes, you have,” said Carolinus, pointedly.
“Oh, sorry,” said Jim. He lowered his voice. “I tried to argue that we ought to hold Angie for ransom—” He broke off suddenly. “Say,” he said. “I never thought of that. Was I talking dragon, then? What am I talking now? Dragons don’t talk English, do they?”
“Why not?” demanded Carolinus, grumpily. “If they’re British dragons?”
“But I’m not a dragon—I mean—”
“But you are here!” snapped Carolinus. “You and this maiden of yours. Since all the rest of you was translated here, don’t you suppose your ability to speak understandably was translated, too? Continue.”
“There’s not much more,” said Jim gloomily. “I was losing the argument and then this very big, old dragon spoke up on my side. Hold Angie for ransom, he said. And they listened to him. It seems he swings a lot of weight among them. He’s a great-uncle of me—of this Gorbash who’s body I’m in—and I’m his only surviving relative. They penned Angie up in a cave and he sent me off to the Tinkling Water here, to find you and have you open negotiations for ransom. Actually, on the side he told me to tell you to make the terms easy on the georges—I mean humans; he wants the dragons to work toward good relations with them. He’s afraid the dragons are in danger of being wiped out. I had a chance to double back and talk to Angie alone. We thought you might be able to send us both back.”
He stopped rather out of breath, and looked hopefully at Carolinus. The magician was chewing thoughtfully on his beard.
“Smrgol,” he muttered. “Now there’s an exception to the rule. Very bright for a dragon. Also experienced. Hmm.”
“Can you help us?” demanded Jim. “Look, I can show you—”
Carolinus sighed, closed his eyes, winced and opened them again.
“Let me see if I’ve got it straight,” he said. “You had a dispute with this maiden to whom you’re betrothed. To spite you, she turned to this third-rate practitioner, who mistakenly exorcized her from the United States (whenever in the cosmos that is) to here, further compounding his error by sending you back in spirit only to inhabit the body of Gorbash. The maiden is in the hands of the dragons and you have been sent to me by your great-uncle Smrgol.”
“That’s sort of it,” said Jim dubiously, “only—”
“You wouldn’t,” said Carolinus, “care to change your story to something simpler and more reasonable—like being a prince changed into a dragon by some wicked fairy stepmother? Oh, my poor stomach! No?” He sighed. “All right, that’ll be five hundred pounds of gold, or five pounds of rubies, in advance.”
“B-but—” Jim goggled at him. “But I don’t have any gold—or rubies.”
“What? What kind of a dragon are you?” cried Carolinus, glaring at him. “Where’s your hoard?”
“I suppose this Gorbash has one,” stammered Jim, unhappily. “But I don’t know anyt
hing about it.”
“Another charity patient,” muttered Carolinus, furiously. He shook his fist at empty space. “What’s wrong with the auditing department? Well?”
“Sorry,” said the invisible bass voice.
“That’s the third in two weeks. See it doesn’t happen again for another ten days.” He turned to Jim. “No means of payment?”
“No. Wait—” said Jim. “This stomach-ache of yours. It might be an ulcer. Does it go away between meals?”
“As a matter of fact, it does. Ulcer?”
“High-strung people working under nervous tension get them back where I come from.”
“People?” inquired Carolinus suspiciously. “Or dragons?”
“There aren’t any dragons where I come from.”
“All right, all right, I believe you,” said Carolinus, testily. “You don’t have to stretch the truth like that. How do you exorcise them?”
“Milk,” said Jim. “A glass every hour for a month or two.”
“Milk,” said Carolinus. He held out his hand to the open air and received a small tankard of it. He drank it off, making a face. After a moment, the face relaxed into a smile.
“By the Powers!” he said. “By the Powers!” He turned to Jim, beaming. “Congratulations, Gorbash, I’m beginning to believe you about that college business after all. The bovine nature of the milk quite smothers the ulcer-demon. Consider me paid.”
“Oh, fine. I’ll go get Angie and you can hypnotize—”
“What?” cried Carolinus. “Teach your grandmother to suck eggs. Hypnotize! Ha! And what about the First Law of Magic, eh?”
“The what?” said Jim.
“The First Law—the First Law—didn’t they teach you anything in that college? Forgotten it already, I see. Oh, this younger generation! The First Law: for every use of the Art and Science, there is required a corresponding price. Why do I live by my fees instead of by conjurations? Why does a magic potion have a bad taste? Why did this Hanson-amateur of yours get you all into so much trouble?”