The weather today wasn’t quite as perfect as it had been before. He glanced upward at the cloud cover, which had increased overnight. It was possible that there was a weather front moving in. He would need to keep an eye on that possibility, though he had no idea what he would do if a blizzard were to blow through. It wasn’t like he had a shelter to hide in or adequate transportation to leave the area. Certainly, his flying blanket lacked the speed and the range to take him out of harm’s way. And he couldn’t just fly to the nearest village to seek shelter. No telling what the reaction of its inhabitants might be if he flew in and landed in the middle of their main street. Yeah. Right.
Paul shook his head, muttering in disgust. When he had asked to be given magical powers, he had thought that it would make life much simpler. With magical powers, he had expected never to want for anything again, at least not for any material item such as food or money. With magic, a wizard should be able to just whip up a spell and presto! His need (or want) would be instantly fulfilled.
The reality of having magical powers seemed to be far different from his expectations. Far different.
With a mournful shake of his head, Paul pushed his glasses back up on his nose and got back to the current problem. What should he work on next? Finding food? Or going home?
Hmm. As he scratched the stubble on his chin, he realized that both of these goals involved a common solution. He needed to create a talisman. When he had such a device, he could feed himself and go home! And in either order he so pleased!
Moreover, a talisman would fit in with his long-range goal: to help the needy of Earth. He would have to have a talisman in order to exercise that degree of magical power.
So, he would concentrate on fabricating a talisman.
What had Merlin said? Precious metals, gemstones, igneous rock, and meteorites. All he had was the bedrails—a poor substitute for any of those other materials. Was there nothing else he could use?
He looked at the head and footboards of the bed. Theoretically, the carbon in the wood could be used to create diamonds. The carbon could be extracted by burning the wood, then concentrating it and forcing the necessary covalent bonds. However, limited to the power of the bedrails, the task would require hundreds of hours to perform, and only then if he accessed the power of the diamond as it formed. Possible, but not within the time constraints he had.
What other materials did he have access to?
Some grass, a few flowers, dirt, and rocks. Lots and lots of rocks.
Hmm. Rocks.
If he remembered his basic chemistry correctly, rocks were made up of silicon and oxygen, both of which were very common elements. Therefore, on a pound-for-pound basis, they wouldn’t pack much of a magical punch.
But here in these mountains, the rocks were likely to be available in a variety of sizes.
He waved an arm in the air. “In the name of the Hubble and Kepler telescopes and in the name of the Argus Array, let there appear before me a magnified view of the closest mountainside.”
A circular display appeared at eye level, magnifying the image of one of the mountains. Maybe the first step in making a talisman was to find a nice big rock.
• • • •
Paul energized the blanket and flew east down the glacier to the same small stream as before, which he then followed to the north until it grew in size to that of a diminutive river. In front of him, on the left bank, were entire fields of boulders that had been apparently pushed by glaciers out of the mountains and downward along the slope. Some of them were truly huge, nearly as large as houses.
He continued to angle the blanket downward, closer to the river, threading past the smaller boulders as he searched for the perfect one on which to land the blanket.
As he rounded one really large boulder, the path ahead became more visible. Enough for him to see the flying insects buzzing in the air not far from the water—and dead ahead in his flight path!
“Hard a-port!” he yelled, banking in that direction, ducking his head to one side. But it was too late. A large bug swerved perfectly with him, on the precise course it needed to fly squarely into his face, impacting dead center on the right spectacle of his glasses.
The blow stung him and made his head snap backward. For a moment, he lost control of the blanket, sending it into a spiral. Dazed, blinking, his eyes suddenly watery, his face stinging as if slapped, Paul tried to regain control but failed.
In the next instant, he hit a wall of snow, plunging into its depths, his right arm twisted at an odd angle with a sharp pain. Suddenly, Paul could neither see nor breathe, and a crushing weight descended upon him.
Fear gripped him in a viselike hold.
For several moments, he fought to push the weight of the snow off, to get breathing space, but it was all to no avail! Disoriented, in pain, and scared for his life, he struggled mightily to get free, but he could feel nothing but cold and wetness everywhere he reached.
A small corner of his mind urged him to stop panicking, to stop for a moment and think! It was hard! So very hard, but he forced himself to stop moving and instead found the will to calm down some. Think, Paul, think. I am buried deeply in the snow, and I have no idea what is up or down! How do I get out of this mess!
Nothing came to mind.
Paul’s stomach twisted in knots, and he flung his arms and legs about all the more wildly—
—and he touched a bedrail.
With a surge of relief sweeping through him, Paul reached out and grabbed it firmly.
Concentrating hard, he frantically visualized an explosion in the snow around him, hurling it upward and outward in all directions. In response, a hammer blow struck him, momentarily knocking him senseless. But he forced himself to ignore the pain and cast another spell, to repeat the explosion.
The hammer blow struck him again, this time much harder. On the edge of losing consciousness, Paul fought hard to stay awake.
And then his other questing hand broke the surface of the snow, into the freezing air above.
The explosive spells had worked! Desperately, he pushed the snow away from his face, and gasping strenuously, he sucked in the sweet, cold air, spitting snow from his mouth and wiping away the cold powder from his nose. For several minutes afterward, he lay unmoving, gradually recovering with each ragged breath, the panic slowly ebbing away as he regained his strength.
When he felt strong enough, Paul pushed away enough of the snow around him to allow him to sit up. He had to dig with his poor half-frozen hands, but he eventually managed to excavate himself completely out of the snowbank.
He could see again (sort of) with his left eye. The vision in his right was completely blocked by a gooey blob of smashed insect on the lens of his glasses. He quickly grabbed a few handfuls of snow and rubbed the bug carcass off his glasses, and then he used part of his shirt to wipe off the snow. His right arm twinged with pain at every movement. Apparently, he had strained his shoulder in the crash-landing.
Sliding his glasses back on, Paul looked up, his face blanching to a solid white as he realized where it was he had crashed.
Just a few yards to the west, towering above the snowbank, was a solid wall of granite. If his flight path had taken him just five feet higher, he would have missed the snow entirely and smashed headlong into unyielding stone. To the east, a little down the slope, lay the edge of the field of boulders. If his flight path had been five feet lower....
And to the north, the snowbank quickly petered out to a bed of dirt and gravel. Crashing there would have also not been very healthy.
A near thing. A very near thing, indeed. Gulping with a suddenly dry throat, he gave a prayer of thanks for his fortune of having avoided serious injuries, perhaps even death itself.
Taking a huge breath, he cast a glance down toward the river, noting that several of the flying bugs were still in the air, hovering over the riverbank, close to a few scraggly green plants growing at the water’s edge.
Suppressing a sudden de
sire to scream obscenities at the insects, Paul continued to brush the snow from his clothes.
“An addendum to the manufacturer’s note,” he muttered sarcastically. “Next year’s model of the flying blanket should also include a windshield.”
• • • •
On foot, Paul found the boulder he wanted, a little farther from the water, with a nice smooth section of dirt flanking it. He reassembled his flying blanket in that location.
Turning to face the boulder, Paul was impressed with its size, an easy twenty feet in diameter with a third of it still buried in the ground.
And at more than 100 tons, it was more than large enough to suit his purposes. When he put one hand on its cold, gritty surface, he giddily sensed the nearly 300 megajoules available at his disposal.
Grinning wildly, he snapped the fingers of his other hand and uttered a quick incantation, creating a bubble of warm, dry air around him. He used another spell to suck the moisture from his wet clothes and a third spell to ease the pain in his right arm.
Then he sat at the foot of the boulder, keeping his hand in contact with it. It was now time to experiment with portals, which was essential in his plan to build a talisman.
• • • •
Merlin had told him that a trans-spatial portal connected two areas of space-time directly and that such a portal could be used to transport a material object from one location to the other, without the need for it to travel through the intervening space.
There were ample examples of similar devices in science fiction. The wormholes of Stargate SG-1 and the fold-points in Michael McCollum’s Antares series were but two of such cases in point that came almost effortlessly to mind. Paul had no idea how far back the basic idea went. Perhaps Lewis Carroll was the first to use it in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Maybe it went back further than that.
It didn’t really matter. Paul’s immediate need, now that he had the power to create a portal, was to master the use of them in order to move stuff around. Including the most important item of all—himself.
Raising his free hand, he pointed to a clear area a few yards away. “In the name of Stargate Atlantis puddle jumpers, Star Trek’s “The Guardian of Forever,” and The Time Tunnel, may there be a portal over there.”
A brilliant flash of light caused him to wince in surprise. When he looked back, a strange sight greeted him.
There were two elliptically shaped circles, roughly ten feet apart. Both of them were a light silver color, their edges a very soft white. The one closest to him was the most circular, perhaps the diameter of a grapefruit, tilted thirty degrees from the vertical and positioned a good ten or so feet off the ground. The second circle was far more elliptical and much larger, perhaps fifteen feet long by three feet wide. It lay nearly horizontal, only a few inches off the ground. Presumably, these two circles were the same portal, simply viewed from two different perspectives.
Paul shook his head in disappointment with a wry half-smirk. “‘Oh, yeah. Nothing piques my interest more than repeated failure,’” he said, quoting Jack O’Neill’s sarcastic comment from a Stargate SG-1 episode.
Yeah. Obviously, it was going to take some practice to get it right. Working on a talisman would just have to wait a bit longer.
• • • •
For two hours, he struggled with portals, creating one after another, each one improving on the one before. Well, most of the time, anyway. Casting all the spells involved was hard work. Twice, he stopped to walk down to the water for a drink and to take a short break.
There seemed to be a certain knack to creating portals that worked properly. Grimly, he patted himself on the back for the progress he was making, but he vowed to keep at it until he had mastered the skills involved.
When he was confident that the portal spells were working properly, he worked on separating the endpoints of the portals farther away from each other. This turned out to be easier than he expected. For portals connecting to a location out of line-of-sight, Paul also discovered that he needed to be somewhat familiar with that location to accurately visualize what the terrain looked like. That was a little difficult to do, especially for locations he had never been to or previously seen, but he worked it out. Fairly soon, he was opening small portals to remote locations such as New Delhi, Tokyo, the Black Sea, a South African beach, Machu Picchu, San Francisco Bay, and Anchorage, Alaska.
“Okay, enough practice!” he chuckled with an evil smirk. “I could use a snack.”
His first impulse had been to create a portal that would take him home, straight to his kitchen, where he could fix himself a proper meal. But truth be told, he was still a little leery of the portals after all the ones he’d created earlier that had been less than perfect. To trust his life to one yet? Maybe later, when he had more experience. Besides, there wasn’t all that much food at home. He’d been so busy worrying about the genie and his job that he hadn’t shopped for groceries in over a week.
No, it made sense to bring the food here. That way, if his portal spell didn’t work quite right, all he would lose was a little food.
Paul created an image of the inside of a famous restaurant, the best place for steaks that he knew of: Morton’s The Steakhouse in Beverly Hills. With care, he used a display to let him see the target area, and then he created a portal that was two feet in diameter, linking the kitchen of the restaurant to a portal in front of him. He was on the verge of reaching through to grab a loaded dinner plate from a countertop when he stopped.
That would be stealing, and Paul just wasn’t going to allow himself to do that. His new powers could be used to harm others, and he could easily see where he might try to rationalize theft and other crimes as “necessary for the good of the many.” In other words, where the end justified the means.
No, sir. Right then and there, Paul made a firm resolution: he would not steal.
Firmly clinching his jaw, he closed the portal. There were ways to feed himself without theft.
He used a magical display to find and then create a portal for two wild Kei apples in South Africa from a valley over 1,000 kilometers east of Cape Town. He then searched in India, found and pulled through a wild banana and two wild mangos from Kerala. These he munched on quickly, appeasing his hunger, at least for the moment.
Feeling much more sanguine about his situation, Paul contemplated his next move. The house-sized boulder still gave him the option of returning to the States, even home to California. But the more he considered that idea, the less he liked it. He needed a talisman, and he was more likely to find the materials for one here in the Karakoram Mountains than he was in Southern California. It made sense to search the terrain here first, before going home. Because without a talisman, once he went home, it was unlikely that he could ever come back to his current location. Not that he was that fond of it here, but if he could find even one of the materials he needed in this place, it was worth the day or so delay involved. Yes, it was a logical decision. Stay another day or so and see what could be found here. Then he would go home.
Merlin had explained that the rarer the element, the higher its magical quotient. The abundance of any particular element in the universe more or less followed the periodic table, with exceptions, of course. Thus, hydrogen, the lightest and most abundant of the elements, held the lowest magical quotient, and the radioactive elements heavier than uranium held the highest.
Gathering together the rarest materials of the four special categories might take man-years to accomplish, especially since he lacked the tools and the magical experience to do the job properly. But in reality, he didn’t need to make the most powerful talisman possible. At least not yet. What he needed was something that could be created from rare, but more “common materials,” a small enough talisman to be portable, yet with enough magical power to allow him to travel short distances. Sort of a step up from the flying blanket, but not quite a full-scale talisman. Truth be told, he didn’t need a talisman powerful enough t
o take him straight to California. It would be easier to fabricate something that allowed shorter jumps, say 500 miles or more at a time. He needed to go through the math, play with the numbers, and see what the possibilities were and what made sense.
So he snapped his fingers, muttered a few words, and created a large screen in midair, and with effort, he managed to tie it to the Internet. When he got the link working, he pitched in and performed research on rare metals, meteorites, gemstones, and volcanic rocks.
According to the web, the rarest non-radioactive elements were lutetium, tantalum, and thulium—and due to their scarcity, all would possess significant magical quotients. Unfortunately, as he had surmised, they would be very difficult to prospect for and he would have to process thousands of tons of raw ore in order to obtain any sizeable quantity of any of those metals. There were other rare metals that fell in the same boat: iridium, rhodium and palladium. Scratch all of them off the list, at least for now.
Gold, on the other hand, was both rare and could be found in the earth in higher concentrations, as much as 1,000 parts per million. If he could find a pocket of such close to the surface, he anticipated that he could extract it.
Paul grimly clapped and rubbed his hands together. He held no illusions about this task. Even with using portals to mine underneath the Earth’s surface, this was not going to be easy, especially due to his lack of wizardly experience. He would start with the gold first.
• • • •
His tired body felt as if it was on fire, and he was barely able to keep his eyes open. Paul gently massaged one arm as he silently contemplated the acquisitions piled in front of him. He had the gold (still in raw ore-form, unfortunately), a sizeable meteorite, several small emeralds, and a nicely sized chunk of obsidian.
And it had taken him the majority of the day to acquire them, too.
Finding the materials had been challenging enough. The items in front of him truly were rare, the obsidian being the easiest to locate. But the real challenge had been extracting it. In the case of the gold, he had been forced to mine that precious metal from a location more than 200 feet below ground and over 300 miles away!
Genie and Engineer 1: The Engineer Wizard Page 9