The E. Hoffmann Price Fantasy & Science Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  It was nearly sunrise when he crossed the big bridge which spanned the Nile. A three hundred pound Egyptian almost knocked him into the gutter. “Where you think you’re going?” Rowan demanded. “Wake up!”

  The man looked blank. He looked as if he had seen nothing, heard nothing.

  Rowan halted. He glanced about. Something was odd. And then he caught it: despite the brilliance of the sun, he cast no shadow, though everything else did.

  “Funny,” he muttered. “They actually did take it. Clever fellows, those Egyptians, but dull as you find them.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Advance

  When Rowan reached army headquarters, he tightened up. Two sentries guarded the door. He had discarded his uniform, and he expected difficulties at the entrance; natives did not have the run of things. But no one stopped him.

  He barged into the adjutant’s office, finally. No one had noticed him. That took some of his high purpose, it deflated him, but he stalked up to the desk and saluted. “Sir, I am reporting for duty, after absence without leave—”

  He had the days all calculated, but he did not name them. The adjutant was signing papers, and at the same time, talking to a staff sergeant. Rowan repeated the salute, raised his voice, and got a fresh start. But no one answered.

  The adjutant’s shadow reached across the desk. So did the sergeant’s. But Rowan cast no shadow.

  He began to get the truth: he was invisible. He could see the invisible, but the visible could not see him. Except perhaps Senusert, who had Egyptian tricks. And he began to wonder if the old Copt was visible to normal persons.

  The let-down stunned and weakened him. A captain rushed in, went to his box for orders; but the adjutant checked him. “It won’t be in writing, Carson! I’ll tell you—come here.”

  Rowan heard it all. A convoy was going to the front. Troops and tanks and artillery were going to reinforce the concentration which had brought Rommel to a halt; men and material which had arrived in Egypt, and so secretly that talkative Cairo had not suspected.

  He spent several hours testing his invisibility and inaudibility. He tried to deny the fact. It was impossible to any known science. But at last he realized, and with growing terror, that he had fallen in with a science hidden and unknown for centuries; that Senusert’s rituals had removed some essence whose absence left the body incapable of casting a shadow.

  Otherwise, Rowan told himself, he was normal. He deliberately barged into several pedestrians and heard them gasp from the impact. Some, believing they had stumbled, cursed the paving. Others blamed some visible passerby, and once a near riot blossomed out.

  “I can see Senusert, he can see me. But others apparently can’t see us. I can feel it when I butt into people, and so can they.” He doubled up his fist, considered it thoughtfully. “Chances are Senusert could feel this.”

  He shrank from the idea of ingratitude, and particularly from the thought of giving an old man a brisk third degree; but something had to be done.

  Walking out to find Senusert would take too long. By the time Rowan made his decision, darkness had fallen, and army trucks, British and American, were slipping out of Cairo, to assemble far out in the desert. Their departure was so unobtrusive that no spy could have suspected that this was a good time to radio Rommel, but Rowan had heard, and he knew what was cooking.

  So he hopped over the tail gate of a truck.

  No one noticed him. With everyone jamming everyone else, and in the darkness, there could not be any sense of discrepancy.

  The soldier talk was good to hear. He had never before appreciated the straightforwardness, the saltiness of it. Nor were all soldiers loutish fellows. Private Higgins, after all, had had that sensitive touch, enabling him to penetrate the veil which divides seen and unseen. And Rowan, uneasy from the weight of new thoughts, saw how he had made too much of a trifle, perhaps even made a virtue of a weakness. When the truck came to the palm cluster and the mud huts which were Rowan’s landmark for the swing out into the empty desert and the nearby tombs, he recalled that he might for some days have to wait for Senusert, and meanwhile, listen to tomb-talk.

  “Maatkara—if she could only think of something else—she’d not be bad—”

  But he did not climb down over the tail gate as the truck pulled up for a deep rut. Before he gave Senusert the third degree, regained his shadow, and surrendered to the provost marshal, he wanted a look at the big things which would happen at the front: jammed shoulder to shoulder with the soldiers, he caught their grim enthusiasm, their confidence. As an officer and a super-educated man, he had never before been so close to soldiers. Disliking his duties, he had commanded his company by remote control, always seeing himself as an engineer shamefully wasted. But now he began to wonder whether, instead of being too valuable to waste on line of duty, he had actually been not quite good enough for his assignment…

  Whether the gods of chance or the gods of Egypt, he did not know, but somehow, he had picked a truck whose destination was very near the tomb-dotted waste held by his former company. His one-time men were again in the lines, and under an officer who liked his work. Rowan, stalking about, unseen and unheard, sensed that these men had changed. Where before they had been willing, now they were eager.

  Then he saw Maatkara, lovelier than she had ever been before. Her skin gleamed silvery white, and her long legs twinkled through the filmy skirt which swirled in the breeze. She clung to him, and said, “So you’ve found a way to help us?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Let’s go away,” she urged. “All these soldiers—this time, they’ll win—you don’t have to help—you may get hurt—”

  He broke her grasp, thrust her away, though it was difficult not to draw her back. “I’m going with them,” he said.

  And when the show opened, he went.

  Tanks lumbered forward, leading the way, just as the sun rose behind them. The troops trotted along, well spread out, following the lumbering monsters. Turret guns blazed. Machine guns drummed and rattled, kicking up sand. The tanks shifted, blasting to dust the Nazi strong points in the crags which cropped up out of the hot sand.

  Smoke veiled the sun: gun smoke, and the smoke of blazing tanks and crashed planes. The wind whipped up clouds of hot sand. Mine fields had blocked the advance; snipers and machine gunners had picked off the sappers whose duty it had been to discover and detonate the cunningly concealed mines which the enemy had set in anticipation of counterattack.

  What was happening on the right or left, Rowan did not know. But he was certain that his company had been stalled when artillery and mines had blasted the protecting tanks to junk. The new captain was down. The walkie-talkie set was riddled. Though runners raced through the hell of sand and smoke to regain contact with the battalions to the right and left, it was not certain if any got through to ask for more tanks.

  Another attack stalled among half-buried tombs. The 105 millimeter German howitzers had the range, and they pounded the line with shrapnel, and with high explosive. Looking back, Rowan saw the dark masses of reserve tanks on the way. They would be delayed and shelled to junk while men went out to search the field and clear it.

  A courier came up on a motorcycle. “Who the hell’s in command?”

  Nobody knew. The last officer was down. Rowan took the captain’s blouse, but no one noticed him. If they did not get going quickly; the outfit would be wiped out. Rowan yelled, “Let’s go!” He snatched a bag of grenades and set out, but no one followed him. For a moment, he had forgotten they could neither see nor hear him.

  Maatkara was beside him again. “Oh, you can’t go alone,” she gasped, as she stretched her stride and attempted to catch his arm. “No one’s following.”

  Without breaking his stride, he straight armed her, knocked her tumbling, in the hot sand. His vision had strangely sharpened, or perhaps it was his wits. Maybe he d
id not actually see what was concealed beneath the sand; he may only have judged, from the positions of the stalled tanks, what the mine pattern was. But while sappers might have done as well, they could not have done their job as quickly.

  He halted in the bullet-swept emptiness, and deliberately placed a grenade. He had barely leaped back to what he considered a safe distance when a blast blotted out the sun. Recovering, he raced to where the next hidden mine must be.

  Again, the grenade explosion touched off the peril which waited to blast whatever man or tank disturbed the sand.

  Behind him, men were yelling. The tanks he had seen from afar were now rumbling so that all the other noises were blotted out. Another mine went up and another—Dizzied by repeated concussions, winded by his exertion, Rowan was slow in regaining his feet. A wave of men enveloped him: what remained of his old company was advancing.

  “To hell with the tanks!” they howled, “The mines are blowing up from the heat! Make it hotter!”

  Rowan stretched his legs. Unhampered by equipment, he gained on them. They were through the mine field. Instead of tanks clearing the way and leading the men, it was the other way about.

  Rowan was still wondering why troops had followed an invisible man when a hammer impact knocked him down. He knew that he would never report to Cairo, visibly or otherwise. He was not bullet proof, after all. He’d just been lucky, lasting long enough to place every grenade without having been picked off.

  The yelling troops hurdled him without a look. They had business ahead, and wounded men were no novelty to them. He began to wonder if this had all been planned by Senusert—and whether he would ever again see Maatkara…

  Then the stretcher bearers came along, almost on the heels of the assault; men armed only with courage, and facing as much danger as the combat troops.

  One of them said, “Hell’s fire, another captain; they’re getting knocked off like flies!”

  Rowan heard this, and tried to explain, but could not. He tried desperately, choking and struggling as they lifted him. Then he heard one of the squad say, “I’ll be—! That crazy school teacher got out in front. Who’d ever thought that guy was a soldier!”

  By now, Rowan sensed that death was cracking Senusert’s magic, and that he had regained his shadow, that he must be visible again; that he had outwitted Egyptian magic. Rowan heard nothing else. He did not know that one of the squad added, “Move on, get him later, can’t do him any good.”

  Neither did Rowan know that Rommel kept running; that, hours after the first wave of the attack, Major Crane was saying, “General, here’s our deserter. The men of his old company insist he blew a road through the toughest mine field on the front. Poor devil was crazy. Glad we didn’t catch him.”

  The general stared for a moment. “Jaw still hurt, Crane? Hmm…you can’t try a dead man, but you can damn well decorate one.” He sighed. “Hope the lad is having lots of fun with those Egyptian ladies he was muttering about.”

  THE HANDS OF JANOS

  Originally published in Speed Mystery, March 1944.

  Janos the magician stood before the mirrors of his dingy workshop. He was lean and round-headed. Though his nose was beaked, he had eyes which slanted perceptibly. Normally, Istavan Janos carried himself with the poise, the latent power of a cat: but tonight, the sag of his shoulders made his long-tailed coat bunch and pucker. Doubt was in his dark eyes, and worry deepened the lines which seamed his swarthy face.

  For a moment he looked at his hands: slender, yet very strong, and more alive than any man’s need be. Each had its own life and mind; each with its infinity of muscles acting of its own intelligence. First the will of Janos, the relentless will and the persistence, had driven them, compelled them, tried them to exhaustion until in self defense they had developed local brains to take control of nerve and muscle so that they ended by doing, in their own way, what the will of Janos directed.

  He might have been a general, watching a well planned attack on a broad front: for once he gave an order, they moved and they executed it. And now, before his mirrors, he watched anxiously to see whether from age they had begun to fail.

  He palmed coins. He palmed cards. One by one, pigeons materialized at his finger tips, circled the room, and returned to vanish at their point of origin. And not even Janos, who had taught his hands these things, could detect any fumbling.

  “But they must be slipping,” he told himself, night after weary night. “They must be bungling.”

  The soldiers at the U.S.O. were very polite about it. They merely yawned. Civilians were otherwise. They jeered and booed.

  “Stick around till the next act and make her gee-string disappear…try pulling a strip-tease outa your sleeve…”

  And there always were other helpful suggestions. Bit by bit, it had dawned on Janos that the management kept him for just one reason: the customers enjoyed ribbing him. That, however, would soon wear off.

  But now Janos knew the truth: those hands were not fumbling. The world was merely tired of magicians. The world’s mind was filled with the performance of wizards who opened a bomb bay and made a city disappear in a cloud of smoke. The mango trick, the rope trick—neat, but what of it?

  Men six weeks on a life raft snatched seagulls out of the air, and nothing up their sleeves; a man behind a machine gun reducing a jam, feeding in a fresh belt, and then with deft trigger finger converting two hundred Japs into two hundred ugly heaps of raw meat. With magic in 1943 style, the Orpheum tricks fell flat.

  For a man to fumble is bad; for a man to be perfect and out of date, that’s fatal. So Janos dismissed his hands, and stepped back from the mirrors. Might just as well quit dyeing his hair and his mustaches and that spiked Mephisto beard.

  When the strip-tease queen put on too many pounds and sagged in too many places, someone would call her black market beef, and that would be that, yet they’d get a new model, and the crowd would cheer. That was something which, unlike magic, never went out of style.

  “Heck,” said the lieutenant who had come out of a power dive after dropping a big egg right down the smokestack of a cruiser, “nothing to it. I do it with wires and mirrors.”

  Pretty much like Janos, only more spectacular and with a result which had a point. People had left in them so little sense of wonder that even a real magician would fall flat.

  They’d shake their heads if Janos performed his one great feat, the real stuff, without wires and mirrors.

  For Janos could do that. He belonged to the ancient guild. Each member, once in his life, could call on the patron spirit of magicians, and once, once only, work a wonder requiring neither illusion nor sleight of hand nor deception. Yet that one time must not be wasted, and so, for all those years Janos, remembering the Master’s promise, had trusted to his own resources.

  Tonight, he now knew, was the night. His own extreme need told him that. Moreover, he felt the Master’s presence. There was an electric tension in the air of the dingy room. He was not at all sure that he would see the Master. At his initiation, half a century previous, there had been only a voice from behind a smoke veil, and the momentary illusion of eyes.

  “There is no penalty, Istavan Janos. There is no cost. Jugglers keep alive the sense of wonder, and with each in his lifetime working one true piece of magic, you are links in a chain, reaching from the day when all the magicians who ruled Atlantis were destroyed for their crimes, and carrying toward the day when magic will again come to its own.”

  Thus the voice of the Master…

  Janos sat down among the apparatus and gadgets which, since their use required assistants, had become dusty from idleness. How pay helpers when illusion, needled in between one study of anatomy and the next, merely made people impatient?

  He could not work. Those hands had wills of their own. Give them a broom, and they’d make it disappear. No telling what they’d do with a monkey torch.
He had tried war work until the disappearance of tools had put a stop to his employment, and in a hurry. He’d die of starvation or old age before he could browbeat those devilish hands into assembling machine guns.

  Nor was this illogical. Once more, he pictured a general ordering a division into action, each man trained to go forward, not back; and then he tried to imagine what would happen if, in mid-battle, winning all along the line, these men were ordered to retreat.

  They’d flatly disobey, or they’d turn against the traitor to all their instincts.

  And thus with the cunning hands of Janos.

  So he needed the true magic. The thaumaturgy which the Master granted would have to meet the need, but how?

  Magic cannot work against human nature: so it wouldn’t be a matter of changing the tastes of bored audiences. That simple-seeming solution was out, and so also was that of rebuilding the hands of Janos, for in their way, they were human intelligences.

  “They’re not wrong,” Janos told himself, as he eyed the rebels. “I’m not wrong. The times are wrong. So use the Ancient Magic to set me back in the stream of time. Queen Victoria and Napoleon Third, they commanded performances, and the crowd followed.”

  Nothing to it. Shape the pentacle, recite the mantram, and go back—But how far?

  If back to his youth, he’d end, finally, once more in this evil day. And if too far back into time—back into another incarnation—it might be worse. Sorcerers and necromancers and even jugglers ended at the stake. The memory of a man’s former lives was washed out by death. Details vanished, and nothing remained but the essence of whatever wisdom he had acquired, a permanent possession to take from life to life.

  So he hesitated now, where once he might have demanded his gift on a moment’s impulse.

  He drew the blue chalked pentacle and at its vertices inscribed the symbols, but his doubts grew, faster and faster. He did not set out the black candles, nor the censers he had kept all these years, unused.

  One choice, and no amendments. Whatever he asked, he would be compelled to accept. Janos sat there, frowning. After all, a man didn’t starve today, whereas in other ages, such things happened often enough.