He gaped at the three beasts as they slowly closed the gap between them. He was seconds away from death, and he could think of nothing to save himself!
Paul clutched his talisman with a death grip in his right hand. Think, Paul, think! And he cast a small spell on his own brain, frantically trying to concentrate, to come up with an idea, any idea that might save him from imminent death. He couldn’t fight these creatures! They possessed more magical power than he did. And he couldn’t run from them, either!
The old science-fiction movie that he had recently watched somehow came rushing unbidden to the forefront of his thoughts. Seizing the memory, he desperately cast a spell on himself, cocooning a bubble of space-time around his body.
And he fell into the Earth.
• • • •
Physicists the world over understood that matter, for the most part, consisted of mainly empty space, lightly populated with subatomic particles. Paul’s spell allowed the atoms of his body and clothing to fall between the atoms and molecules of the mountaintop. The trick had been to make the spell link his atoms together, lest they get “lost” in the surrounding rocks.
He was in freefall, heading toward the center of the earth and accelerating. For a couple of seconds, he allowed this to happen, and then he mentally conjured up a spell to bring himself to a halt. There was no air to breathe, no light to see by, and nothing to hear. He couldn’t stay here for very long. Yet he felt an overwhelming sense of relief and gratitude wash over him that the spell had worked. At least here, the evil monsters weren’t threatening to blast him into teeny-tiny particles.
Thank you, Robert Lansing, 4-D Man.
Paul struggled to his “feet” and hastily began to “run.”
The mountaintop retreat had sheer cliffs on all sides. Paul realized that it wouldn’t take long for him to reach that cliff wall from the inside of the mountain and to burst out into the open air again. At least, it had better not take him too long to extract himself!
And when that happened, he needed to be instantly ready with a spell for a new portal, lest those monsters catch up to him again. He concentrated hard, gathering the right words together.
His lungs were burning from the lack of air, but he exerted more effort on running faster.
Then suddenly, Paul was out in the open air again, nothing underneath him but empty space and the rocks a very long way below him. He gasped wildly for breath, flailing while he fell, then he reached forward, casting a spell for a portal. It snapped into existence just below him, and he fell through the center of it—
—and onto the grass of the soccer field in Laleh Park in Tehran, Iran. Paul struggled to his feet—difficult to do one-handed—and ran for the goal line, still tightly gripping the talisman in his right hand. Ahead, past a line of trees, was the Carpet Museum of Iran. With a quick spell, Paul levitated over the road and up to the roof of the building. Collapsing to his knees, he turned and looked back over the field.
It was dark in Tehran, but the street lamps cast enough light to let him see most of the soccer field. He threw a small spell on his vision, for light amplification as well as 2X magnification.
There was no doubt in Paul’s mind that he had caught his attackers by surprise. They had not anticipated that he would escape downward into the Earth. But who and what in the devil were they? How had they found him? And why in the name of Abraham Lincoln did they want to kill him?
And was he truly free from them now? What if he wasn’t?! It seemed preposterous that those monsters could follow him to this location, hundreds of miles from that isolated mountaintop. And yet…what if they could? Okay, so maybe it was just his paranoia talking. Under the circumstances, considering that he was still trembling in fear, was it really so outlandish a concept?! They had nearly killed him back there! So it was possible that his life might still literally be on the line, even now, even here. After all, what he didn’t know about magic could fill entire libraries. Maybe, just maybe, he should play it on the safe side and prepare another portal spell, one for a expeditious exit from Tehran, if only as a precautionary measure.
He promptly got busy with the words, this time finding it a bit easier than before. If he lived long enough, the casting of portal spells might get to be second nature to him. He frowned. For some reason, he found that idea to be less than reassuring.
When he thought that he was ready and could cast the spell quickly enough, he took a few seconds to breathe deeply several times, all in an attempt to calm his racing heart rate and trembling body. And for a moment, it seemed to be working.
And then all his thoughts screeched to a grinding halt, the sudden lump in his throat making breathing impossible, while his eyes bulged wide.
Another portal had appeared on the grassy soccer field below him.
Apparently, the ogres had been able to follow him after all.
Two of the monsters fanned out, scouting the immediate area. The third held up some device in its hand, panning it back and forth. Suddenly, the creature swung it in Paul’s direction, angling it up toward the roof. And it looked up at Paul and grinned.
Paul’s blood froze. Apparently, they had some sort of device that could track him. How the devil was he going to escape that?
Without hesitation, he muttered the appropriate words, formed a portal behind him, and rolled through it.
• • • •
Such began Paul’s frantic flight. He fled from a moonlit beach on the Israel coast to a darkened forested mountainside in northern Italy to a foggy trash laden alley in Lisbon, Portugal to a sunset burnished tiled roof of a hotel in the Azores before doubling back to the east to the gritty sands of an Algerian desert.
There he collapsed on all fours, gasping like a chain smoker after a hundred yard dash. Portal hopping was too new to him and, as such, was arduous work; each leap taking a heavy toll on both his mental and physical stamina. All he was doing was buying himself some time, but he was exhausting himself in the process.
Between the exertion and the panic, he just couldn’t make himself think, his mind a virtual blank.
He needed help!
Merlin! But of course! Why had he not thought of the old wizard before now?
“Merlin?! Help me! Please!” he croaked between gasps, squeezing his eyes tightly shut in pain.
“Tut, tut, young man,” came the now familiar voice behind Paul, in a disapproving tone. “If only you knew how to defend yourself with a certain magical sword.”
“Those monsters…wheeze…tried to…wheeze…kill me! Wheeze…need your help!” Paul wearily tried to stand but instead just crumpled to the cooling desert sand where he barely managed to assume a sitting position instead.
“There’s not much time,” observed Merlin dispassionately. “They’ll be here in a few minutes. I recommend that you leave and quickly.”
Paul groaned and shook his head in disagreement. “But that’s…no good! If they…can follow me…here…then they…can follow…me anywhere…on Earth I go!”
His own words surprised him and Paul blinked several times before abruptly barking in laughter.
Anywhere on Earth?
What Paul needed was a place that he could escape to where he could survive but the monsters chasing him could not. And there was such a place.
Paul forced himself to stop for a moment while concentrating hard on developing his idea into a full-blown plan. It was tough. The terror he felt was constantly getting in the way.
“No, no, that won’t work…,” he wheezed quietly. “Ah, but that could…yes, not a bad idea, that. But if I could…Hmm, if only I had a rocket-pack like in the Disney film The Rocketeer.”
He looked up sharply at Merlin. “Can wizards fly? I need to…move fast. Can I fly? Fast?”
Merlin tugged a little on his beard while gazing towards the setting sun on the western horizon. “Normally, for the purpose of flying, a wizard creates a vehicle of some sort, like your flying blanket. But yes, there is no reason why you could
n’t fly like a bird, if you wish. Faster than a hawk, if you want.”
“Or Ironman, I hope,” Paul muttered to himself.
Taking a bright yellow mechanical pencil from his pocket, Paul leaned over and stuck it vertically into the sand, the end with the eraser on it pointing straight up. Then, with a wry grin, he sluggishly climbed to his feet, talisman in hand, and took a few deep breaths, both to calm himself and to give him strength. Turning westward, he stumbled across the sand, toward the western twilight. Taking an enormous deep breath, he mumbled, “Up, up, and away!” as he lunged into the air, arms stretched forth.
And was gratefully surprised when he hung in mid-air and didn’t crash back to the ground.
Assuming the standard superheroes’ airborne position, Paul started flying.
Tapping more energy from the talisman accelerated his speed until he hit eighty miles per hour. Flying more than a mile away from the pencil in the sand, he finally slowed to a stop and hit the sand feet first. Spinning on one heel, Paul turned back around, facing eastward. The panic which had threatened to overwhelm him earlier was receding somewhat. But he still felt the desperate need for urgency. There couldn’t be much time left now before the Oni showed up.
Raising his right hand, Paul hurriedly intoned a new spell, “In the name of Joseph Priestley and Aquaman, let the air around me be purged of nitrogen and let the oxygen gather to me. Let my lungs drink of that oxygen, enough that it saturates my tissues.”
With several deep breaths, the oxygen helped rejuvenate a few tired muscles.
After another deep breath and with a determined look in his eyes, Paul began running straight east, back toward his pencil and the portal that had brought him to this forsaken desert. Once again, he lifted nimbly into the air in flight picking up speed, pushing himself at better than three gee’s of acceleration. The sand dunes beneath him flew by swiftly as he closed the distance between himself and the pencil. With yet another spell, Paul gathered additional oxygen and filtered out the nitrogen, all to aid his breathing and to prepare himself for what was about to happen next.
Eighty mph. Ninety mph. One hundred mph. The tiny form of the upright pencil rapidly approached. Briefly closing his eyes, Paul grunted in the effort to cast yet another spell, this one a new portal, which opened directly in front of him, just short of the pencil in the sand.
The other side of this new portal was located 456.78 miles out in deep space, directly above his head and far, far outside the outer edge of the earth’s atmosphere.
An instant blast of explosive decompression sucked the surrounding air around Paul from Earth through the portal. Sand too was hurled through the hole in bucket lots, swirling in the Coriolis Effect as it whipped by in hurricane gale force winds.
And then Paul streaked through the portal, the cyclone knocking him about, twisting and spinning him violently in corkscrew fashion.
But then he was through, sailing wildly through empty space, holding tightly to his talisman and the oxygen bubble he had formed.
• • • •
A typical human could last fifteen to twenty seconds in the vacuum of space without a spacesuit before falling unconscious. Thirty seconds and the blood and all the water in the body would begin to boil and all the body tissues would bulge outward from the internal pressure. In less than a minute, death would occur.
With the oxygen in his tissues and in the bubble around him, Paul was optimistically hoping for more time than that. Exerting even more magical effort, and with his jaw clinched shut, he continued to accelerate eastward as rapidly as possible through the darkness of space, heading further into the night, the huge crescent of Earth shining up at him from below.
Ten seconds, twenty seconds. His grip on the bubble was failing, the oxygen escaping through the gaps, his muscles weakening from the strain. Thirty seconds went by like eons. His lungs were hurting, a deep stabbing pain from the lack of oxygen, the need to breathe! Paul estimated that he had now traveled nearly three miles through the emptiness of space. It was not nearly as far as he thought he needed to go, not in order to be totally safe, but he could feel the pressure building in his tissues, the pain in his eyes, and see his vision rapidly tunneling. If he waited any longer, he would fall unconscious and quickly die.
No! It would just have to be enough! He could wait no longer, travel not one foot further.
Summoning all the magical power he had left, Paul quickly created another portal, this one leading back to Earth’s surface, back to the Algerian Desert.
This time, the explosive decompression worked against him, and it took all of his inertia and all of his rapidly vanishing magical power for him to thread the hole and safely reemerge on Earth. But Paul had misjudged the portal’s location, and to his surprise, he dropped six feet to the ground, hitting the sand with a stunning impact that knocked the breath out of him and sent his glasses flying. Over his head, the portal slammed shut.
The strain of the leap through space had been too much, the crash-landing too violent. Paul lost the fight to stay conscious as he lay sprawled out in the sand, his talisman lying a couple of feet away.
• • • •
Groggily, he awoke a few minutes later, feeling terribly weak and disoriented. Suddenly realizing that he no longer had his glasses or his talisman, he frantically scrambled around on hand and knees, doing his best to find them.
As he searched, the engineering/analytical corner of his mind mocked him. If he had his glasses, he could easily find the talisman. If he had the talisman, he could cast a spell on his eyesight to allow him to find his glasses. But without either one, he was forced to search using his normal and rather poor nearsighted vision.
He found the glasses first, and he blew most of the sand off the lenses before putting them back on. 20/20 eyesight restored, Paul resumed the hunt for the talisman.
Out of the corner of one eye, to the west, he saw a flash of light, and fearing the worst, he again dropped prone, doing his best not to move—not even to breathe too loudly! Suddenly aware that the sand in his clothes was itching him fiercely, he resisted the urge to scratch. He dared not move at all.
Scanning the horizon, Paul could see nothing at first. Then he realized that there was a small hump of sand only a few feet away, blocking part of his view. Edging his head up a little higher, he was able to see the horizon better.
He could see his pursuers too. They were less than a hundred yards away, highlighted against the twilight on the western horizon, emerging from a portal that was very close to where his yellow pencil stuck up out of the sand. Again, following the same pattern as before, two of the beasts fanned out, studying the horizon toward the west. Paul eased himself back down, staying out of sight, and waited. The third creature would be scanning for him with that device it had. If Paul understood the sequence of events correctly, the beast wasn’t really scanning for him, but for the evidence of his magic. Otherwise, these monsters could not have followed him all the way from the mountain retreat.
Cautiously, Paul eased his head up again.
One of the creatures was pulling the pencil from the sand and studying it. But then it tossed the yellow object to the ground and gestured to the others. They stepped away from Paul, heading toward the fading glow on the western horizon. They had obviously detected the trail of the portal that Paul had created to take himself into Earth’s orbit. One of the beasts raised and waved an arm in front of the group.
With a loud bang, for the third time that day, explosive decompression rang out across the desert, sand and typhoon winds flying across the dunes, jerking the three helpless figures off their feet and hurling them though the portal in the blink of an eye. Barely a second later, the portal clamped shut behind them. With a loud echoing bang, the sand and the windstorm died instantly.
Time slowed to a crawl, and the seconds dragged by, Paul holding his breath in dread. Would the monsters escape? Just how powerful were they? They had been launched through their portal into space, the sam
e as he had been, but they had been hurled in the opposite direction, toward the west. They would have to overcome their speed in that direction, the one thrust upon them by the decompression wave when they entered the portal, and then they would have to cross three miles in empty space back to the east before they could follow Paul’s return portal to Earth. Could they do that? Did they have that much magical power? Or perhaps they would simply give up the chase and return to Earth? Even if they tried to do that, did they have the ability to punch through a decompression barrier in another portal back to Earth? Paul’s heart beat loudly in his chest, his hands clammy and cold.
Suddenly, another portal appeared, a hundred yards farther west, and for the fourth time that evening, explosive decompression sucked wind and sand in a screaming, howling rage though a portal into space. Then it just as abruptly ended, the portal now snapped closed. As the sand in the air cleared, Paul’s eyes anxiously swept back and forth, looking for any sign that the beasts had successfully returned.
But there was nothing to see. The devilish monsters weren’t there. There was nothing visible except sand. Even the yellow mechanical pencil was gone.
TEN
Northern Africa
Western Sahara Desert
Fifty miles east of the Atlantic Coastline
December
Wednesday, 6:18 p.m. WT
For several minutes, Paul lay prone on the sand, his heart thundering in his chest. His very close brush with death, with being violently murdered by those ugly monsters, tore at the foundation of his sanity and threatened to send him screaming in mindless terror. The entire sequence of the chase repeated itself over and over again in his mind as he tried to grapple with the reality of it—and indeed the implications involved.
Genie and Engineer 1: The Engineer Wizard Page 11