A Logical Magician lm-1

by Robert Weinberg

  “Instead of battling tangible hazards, men now confront—other men. Civilization has grown too complex. Problems are no longer simple, and thus, neither are the solutions. People are murdered because of their religious beliefs, because of the color of their skin, because of the way they talk—the way they look—the way they think. It’s madness. The dark is rising, Cassandra, and this time it can’t be defeated by things like fire or iron. Civilization faces dangers unlike those of the past. Physical objects are no longer the answer. Instead, these threats can only be stopped by clear thinking. By logical, rational ideas.

  “That’s where I come in. Merlin selected me to fight for humanity against this ancient menace because I’m a mathematician, a logical thinker, a believer in an orderly universe. Von Bern and his legions are creatures of chaos and unreason. I refuse to accept the irrationality they represent. And, as a lifelong fantasy and science fiction fan, I realize what’s necessary to fight back.

  “Computer floppy discs and adding machines are only a small part of the solution. They represent logical, rational thinking applied to modern technology. Each of them brings order to anarchy. In essence, they are the new icons of good over evil. They are symbolic of man’s conquest of irrationality and chaos. They are the new weapons of order in a disordered world.”

  “I’m not sure I follow your thinking very well, Jack,” said Cassandra. “But you sound pretty convinced yourself. Which is good enough for me. Especially since the tunnel is widening a bit. There’s light ahead. Unless I’m mistaken, we’re about to see how well your theories deal with Dietrich von Bern and his Sword of Chaos. Not to mention a horde of Border Redcaps and a pack of Gabble Ratchets. It should prove illuminating.”

  “Light always triumphs over darkness,” said Jack, readying the black tube he held under one arm. It was the one weapon he was saving for their direst emergency. “And this particular light will defeat the blackest night.”

  39

  They emerged from the passageway into a huge underground railway yard easily a hundred yards across and fifty yards wide. Constructed entirely of concrete and steel, nearly a hundred pillars held up the roof thirty feet above their heads. A score of old wood and steel tracks crisscrossed the floor, leading to twenty different tunnels that dotted the walls. But Jack spent little time examining his surroundings.

  His attention was completely fixed on the thirteen huge wicker cages that hung from heavy ropes from the ceiling. Each basket held seven women, most of them screaming at the top of their lungs. The sound of their voices, echoing through the immense cavern, was deafening. The reason for their distress was frightfully clear. Below each cage, groups of Border Redcaps were stacking large piles of wood for bonfires. Jack and Cassandra had arrived barely in the nick of time.

  “Company, Jack,” warned the Amazon, dragging his thoughts away from the prisoners.

  He had been searching the baskets, without success, for some sign of Megan or Merlin. Neither the girl nor her father was in any of the cages. Nor was he able to find, scanning his surroundings, Dietrich von Bern. Jack felt positive that when he located Megan, he would discover the Wild Huntsman as well.

  A wall of Border Redcaps advanced slowly on their position. Nearly fifty of von Bern’s henchmen crowded in a solid line that formed a semicircle around the spot where Jack and Cassandra waited. Many of them carried handguns; a few even held rifles. Mixed among the fiends were the five remaining Gabble Ratchets. Thirty feet away and closing, neither the gang members nor the Corpse Hounds appeared in any hurry to lead the final charge.

  “They must have heard what happened to their friends,” said Cassandra, filling her hands with floppy discs. “That’s the only thing holding them at bay. None of them is willing to make the first move. As soon as one builds up the necessary courage, they’ll roll over us like a tidal wave. Or blow us away with automatic weapon fire.”

  “Maybe a little music will change matters,” said Jack, calmly. He pulled out a CD from his backpack, slipped it into the boom box, and pushed Play. Turning the volume control to the max, he placed the machine at his feet, facing the oncoming horde. “Listen.”

  All motion stopped. Every eye fastened on the boom box, whirring happily to itself. Jack’s reputation as humanity’s champion had obviously grown by leaps and bounds during the past ten minutes. The Gabble Ratchets snarled, the Border Redcaps raised their knives and chains. And the CD player bellowed rock and roll.

  The music hit the waiting crowd with the force of a tornado. Dropping their weapons, the Border Redcaps shrieked in sudden, unexpected agony. Clutching their hands to their ears, they broke formation and scattered through the railway yard. Many of them ran for the tunnels leading into the darkness. Their screams remained long after they disappeared.

  The Corpse Hounds fared little better. The Gabble Ratchets collapsed to the ground and rolled back and forth, baying at an unseen moon. Recognizing a perfect opportunity when he saw it, Jack quickly ran over to the monstrous beasts and dropped a functioning pocket calculator on each of them. They vanished in satisfying bursts of white flame.

  “What is that song?” yelled Cassandra, catching up to Jack. “And why is it devastating von Bern’s allies?”

  “Electronic music,” said Jack. “Generated by a computer, naturally. My encounter with the banshee gave me the idea of returning the favor. It’s not bad stuff, though I prefer Emerson, Lake and Palmer when it comes to synthesizer.”

  He gestured at the boom box. “Carry it with you. Sooner or later, some of the Redcaps will plug up their ears. But until then, the music should provide us some protection. Let’s cut down those wicker baskets. Until those women are safe, the Huntsman is still a menace.”

  As if replying to Jack’s concerns, Dietrich von Bern’s voice, magnified by a portable amplifier, boomed through the immense cavern. “Cover your ears, you fools. The music can’t hurt you if you can’t hear it. Remember, there are only two of them. Surround them. Use your guns. Stop them. Prepare the fires. And release the Great Beast!”

  “Release the Great Beast?” repeated Jack. “I don’t like the sound of that. Come on.”

  A half-dozen Border Redcaps, wads of cloth dangling from their ears, their baseball hats holding the material in place, waited for them beneath the nearest cage. Grabbing a handful of floppy discs from his pockets, Jack sent them sailing at the fiends. Years of goofing off in computer lab finally paid off, as he flipped disc after disc with uncanny accuracy.

  Aware of their peril, three of the Redcaps managed to duck out of the way of the plastic rectangles. The others shifted position, but not enough. One touch of the hard plastic was enough to send them to limbo. By the time Cassandra arrived, the number of their enemies had been cut in half.

  Faced with a trio of foes, Cassandra completely forgot the discs she was carrying. Instead, releasing the CD player, she lunged at the first Redcap with her staff, catching the killer hard in the chest. Bones cracked, and the fiend tumbled to the concrete floor. He showed no further interest in the fight.

  Twirling her walking stick like a baton, the Amazon slammed the second Redcap sideways across the face. Like the first, he crumpled to the ground, unmoving.

  The third gang member pulled an automatic from inside his shirt. He never had time to aim and fire. Cassandra’s staff smacked the gun from his hand, then sent him joining his companions on the floor with a smash to the forehead.

  Hurriedly, Jack deposited a floppy disc on the chest of each of the fallen Redcaps. With satisfying bursts of light, all three vanished.

  “Sorry,” said Cassandra, tearing at the pile of wood located beneath the cage dangling high over their heads. “I got carried away.”

  “No problem,” said Jack. He pointed upward. Seven anxious faces peered down at him. Seven terrified women, hoping for rescue, screamed words of encouragement. “How do we get them down?”

  “Von Bern must have a block and tackle somewhere,” said Cassandra. “That cage is tied to a girder
in the roof. Releasing them will take hours. And we don’t have the time.”

  She gestured with her stick at an object at the center of the pile of timbers. Jack cursed in dismay. Von Bern’s henchmen had placed a can of gasoline and a timer between the logs. Set for six o’clock, the mechanism was already counting down the minutes. Jack checked his watch. They had less than an hour to disarm thirteen bombs scattered throughout the huge cavern.

  “Smash it,” he said to Cassandra, pointing at the timer. “We’ll free the women after we deal with von Bern.”

  A roar so loud that it set the wicker basket above them swaying cut off the Amazon’s reply. Guessing why her eyes had widened in shock wasn’t difficult, though. Turning about, Jack Collins faced the Great Beast.

  40

  It waddled towards them from the other end of the railway yard, its intense bellowing shaking the walls. Seventy feet long, the Great Beast stood twelve feet high at the shoulder, balanced on four short, stumpy legs, and was ten feet wide. Fifteen feet of its length consisted of a gigantic mouth filled with teeth the size of bar stools. Its milky white eyes were the size of pizza tins. Assorted spikes decorated its back and sides. Dark brown, with splotchy spots of green, the monster bore an uncanny resemblance to a gigantic alligator.

  It wasn’t hard to guess its true identity. At least, not for Jack. After reading hundreds of fantasy novels from Adams to Zelazny, he was an expert on mythical creations. The monster could only be Leviathan, the monstrous sea creature mentioned in the Book of Job. Though the Bible described the creature as a serpent, according to earlier Babylonian and Canaanite myths, the creature was actually a giant sea dragon. Or, in more prosaic terms, an alligator the size of a steam locomotive.

  Watching the Great Beast approach, Jack experienced a curious sort of déjа vu. His mind flashed back to dozens of 1950’s science fiction B-movies, filled with giant ants, flies, wasps, and grasshoppers. But now the menace was a monstrous alligator demon, and instead of watching the film, he was living it. He only hoped that his plan was the equal of those dreamt up by Kenneth Tobey, Steve McQueen, or Peter Graves.

  For all its immense size Leviathan moved surprisingly fast. The beast ignored minor obstacles in its path like Border Redcaps, stomping over any of von Bern’s henchmen too slow or too stupid to get out of its way. Though it kept its gaze fixed on Jack and Cassandra, the monster allowed itself a few quick snacks as it approached, swallowing several gang members foolish enough to dart in front of its huge mouth. Chewing and swallow its prey didn’t slow it down a step.

  Jack estimated the Great Beast would reach them in only a few minutes. While he had a general concept of how he planned to stop the monster, he was still short on specifics. He would have to improvise on the run.

  “What should we do?” yelled Cassandra. Even though she was screaming at the top of her lungs, it was hard to hear what she was saying, between Leviathan’s bellowing and the horrified cries of the imprisoned women. The Border Redcaps, for all their faults, perished quietly.

  “Split up,” shouted Jack. “Leviathan’s after me. Keep out of its way and knock over the rest of the bonfires. Von Bern’s troops are pretty well scattered and they shouldn’t prove much opposition. In the meantime, I’ll handle the Great Beast.”

  “On your own?” cried Cassandra, looking concerned. “That thing’s awfully big. Jack. And it looks pretty hungry. Floppy discs and pocket calculators won’t stop a Great Beast. I hope you brought something special to handle it.”

  Jack pulled off his backpack and emptied the contents onto the concrete floor. “You take all the discs and calculators,” he shouted to the Amazon. His hands latched onto a thin box the size of a small attaché case. “This baby is going to give Leviathan indigestion.”

  Then there was no more time for talk. Grabbing the hard plastic case, Jack sprinted for the tunnel from which they had first emerged into the underground railway yard. As he predicted, Leviathan ignored Cassandra and pounded after him. The Great Beast evidenced no signs of great intelligence, but obviously it possessed more brains than the dinosaurs it resembled. Jack was its quarry, and wherever he went, the monster followed.

  Running full speed from the creature, Jack vowed to take up jogging if he survived this latest round of supernatural battles. Being a hero, at least in his case, seemed to involve a tremendous amount of running from various menaces. That thought annoyed him, though he had no plans to stop moving in this instance in protest. In most of the novels he read, the hero rarely ran. Usually, the protagonist walked towards his enemies, not ran in terror from them. That was the dividing line, he decided, between fact and fiction.

  As he ran, Jack fumbled with the lock holding his briefcase closed. Unfortunately, the clasps required more attention than he could spare. Risking a quick glance over his shoulder, he noted that Leviathan was less than fifty feet away and closing fast. The tunnel entrance was about half that distance ahead. Performing some quick estimates and algebraic calculations in his head, Jack concluded he would reach the passage mouth two seconds ahead of the Great Beast. Considering a margin of error of plus or minus three seconds, Jack redoubled his efforts, forcing his aching muscles to try harder.

  He hurtled into the opening with two-tenths of a second to spare. The Great Beast’s head crashed into the concrete passage with rock-shattering force. The entire corridor shook from the impact, and thin spiderwebs of cracks darted hundreds of feet into the darkness. But, try as it might, the creature’s head was too large to fit into the tunnel. Jack collapsed in a heap ten yards into the passage, praising an orderly universe that dictated underground tunnels in Chicago were no more than six feet wide by nine feet high.

  The corridor’s measurements provided the Great Beast with no pleasure, as it tried again and again to widen the passage by pounding the cement opening with its head. Fortunately, the founders of the underground railway system had built it to last. Except for the hairline cracks in the walls, the tunnel was otherwise unaffected by Leviathan’s attention. Jack wondered, however, if high above on the streets of Chicago, residents were experiencing a mild earthquake.

  Steadying himself on the concrete, he managed to pop open the lock on his case. Opening the top, he examined the insides of the portable laptop computer with extreme pleasure.

  If floppy discs and miniature calculators served as minor modem icons in the eternal battle between order and chaos, then a 486DX, 33 megahertz computer, albeit a portable one with backlit screen, had to be the equivalent of St. George’s lance or St. Patrick’s staff. And, knowing the type of monster he was going to face. Jack had loaded the computer memory with something special.

  Ignoring the beast huffing and puffing only a few steps distant, Jack powered up the laptop. Getting a C prompt in DOS, he pulled up the Bible search program he had installed on the hard drive earlier in the day. After entering “Exodus” for the book name, he specified Chapter 20, Verse 3.

  “Thou Shall Have No Other Gods Before Me,” Jack read aloud. According to Simon’s explanation, that was the commandment that had doomed the ancient gods to the outer darkness. What worked once, Jack reasoned, applying the most basic tenet of logical thought, should work a second time.

  Rising to his feet, he waited patiently for Leviathan to open its mouth and bellow in rage. The monster obliged less than a minute later.

  “For I am a jealous God,” declared Jack, and he flung the portable computer as far as he could into the Great Beast’s throat. When the machine finally made contact, Leviathan screamed. It continued to scream for an eternity.

  Picking himself off the tunnel floor some minutes later, Jack decided that there were certain sounds so painful that mere words could not adequately describe them. He had always felt that human fingernails drawn slowly across a blackboard led that list. Not any more. Leviathan’s shriek of fury/agony/pain/distress dropped that noise to twentieth position. The beast’s cry of dissolution filled all the other spots.

  Both Great Beast and laptop
computer were gone. Jack regretted losing the machine. It was a lot nicer model than any he had ever owned. In retrospect, he decided, it was a small price for vanquishing one of mankind’s oldest foes.

  Emerging from the tunnel, Jack spotted Cassandra a hundred feet away, ripping to pieces another of von Bern’s bonfire devices. There were no Border Redcaps in sight. Jack suspected the death cry of the Great Beast had taken the fight out of the remaining gang members. For all of their nastiness, the villains remained true to their basic character and were, at heart, cowards.

  Not so Dietrich von Bern. The Wild Huntsman’s proud voice rang through the underground rail station.

  “You’ve defeated my underlings, Collins. And triumphed over the Great Beast as well. But not me! I still hold your woman and her father captive. They are my prisoners. Come, release them if you dare. Fight me for them. I, Dietrich von Bern, Lord of the Wild Hunt, am waiting for you!”

  Sighing heavily, Jack shook his head in despair. A hero’s job was never done. He was tired and sore and weary of combating the forces of darkness. But Megan and Merlin needed rescuing. And he was the only one capable of defeating the Huntsman.

  Lifting his secret weapon. Jack checked the wiring for the fiftieth time. Everything was in order. Feet throbbing, back aching, he set out on his final quest. Softly, he began humming “You Light Up My Life.”

  41

  He found them at the middle of the underground railway yard. Years ago, it must have been the center of operations for the entire complex, but now it was merely a raised cement platform, fifteen feet on a side, six feet off the floor. Von Bern stood there, gripping the Sword of Chaos with both hands. Off to one side, trussed up with ropes like a prime roast, was Merlin the Magician. A few paces behind the Huntsman stood Charon. Trapped between his unmoving arms, struggling without the least sign of success, was Megan.