The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

by Harry Turtledove

  Those two guys on that rug had been waiting for me in particular. I’d noticed them sitting a few feet off the ground in the parking lot while the church slowly flew by on Anglewood Boulevard. If they’d wanted to head up The Second, they’d had all the time they needed to do it. They’d just waited.

  But why? Again, I didn’t have much trouble coming up with an answer: it had to have something to do with the case of the toxic spell dump. I did my best to remember what the two punks had looked like. All I could come up with was swarthy and dark-haired. They might have been Persians or Aztedans. They might have been hired muscle, too: Israelites, Druzes, Indians from the Confederation or from India, even Hanese or Japanese. I hadn’t got a real good look at then, and an awful lot of people in Angels City match up to the description swarthy and dark-haired.

  I came to that dispirited conclusion about the time I set my carpet down in its parking space back at my block of flats.

  Somebody was going downstairs from his carpet as I was coming up from mine. He gave me an odd look as we passed on the stairs, but I didn’t think anything of it past wondering what was haunting him that afternoon.

  Then I turned the knob to my own flat. Judy sat curled up on the couch in the front room, reading a book on the Gamda Bird I’d picked up a few days before and hadn’t got around to putting on a shelf yet What started out as her smile of welcome turned into something else when her mouth sagged open in surprise. “Good God, David, what happened to you?”

  A lot had happened to me, but I asked foolishly, “What do you mean, what happened?”

  She sprang to her feet, grabbed me by the arm, and dragged me to the bathroom mirror as if I wasn’t to be trusted to do anything that required rational thought on my own. “Look at yourself!” she commanded I mentally apologized to the fellow who’d stared at me while I was coming up to my flat I looked like someone who’d been French-kissed by a vampire: streaks of blood ran from the comers of my mouth and had dripped down onto my shirt. Before I wore it again, I’d have to go visit Carlotta or somebody else with a vampster. All my clothes were disheveled, as if I’d been through a carpet crash in them.

  Funny how that works, I thought vaguely.

  “What happened?” Judy said again.

  So I told her, in as much detail as I remembered: pieces seemed blank, while others that happened only moments later were there in incredible perfection—I could have described exactly how every tiny dod of dirt wiggled and wavered as the earth elemental pushed its was through them after it rolled off my carpet. I started to, until Judy’s face told me that wasn’t something she needed to hear.

  “You could have been killed,” she said when I was through.

  “That was the general idea,” I said. “If I hadn’t been wearing my safety belt, or even if I’d been going faster when they dropped the elemental on me—” I didn’t care to think about that, much less talk about it I turned on the cold water, splashed it onto my face. That, and then burying my head in a towel to dry off, gave me an excuse not to talk for a couple of minutes.

  Then I tried to unbutton my shirt That was when I discovered how bad my hands were shaking: I had a dreadful time making my fingers hold onto the smooth little buttons. After watching me struggle with the first two, Judy took over. As in everything she did, she was quick and deft and capable.

  The feel of her fingers fluttering against my chest inflamed me as if she’d turned into a succubus. I’ve heard that living through a battle makes you homy. I didn’t know about that, not firsthand; I hadn’t been in a fight, let alone a battle, since I got out of primary school. But by the time Judy got to the last button, I couldn’t wait any more. I grabbed her and kissed her—not quite as consumingly as I’d had in mind, because my tongue was still sore.

  “Well,” she said when she came up for air. Before she could say anything else, I kissed her again. “Well,” she repeated a minute or so later, and (his time she managed to go on: “It’s a good thing I drank the cup of roots when I got here instead of waiting till after dinner.”

  It turned out to be a very good thing: for the next half hour or so, I forgot all about what had happened on The Second. The only problem with making love to put aside your problems is that they’re still there when it’s over. Sitting up on the bed afterwards, I said, “You’d better be careful, too, honey. You’ve gotten yourself involved in this case. If they come after me—whoever they are—they’re liable to come after you, too.”

  “That’s non—” But it wasn’t nonsense, and Judy must have known it, because she didn’t finish the sentence. She sat up beside me. Her nod made her jiggle most pleasantly, but her voice was serious as she replied, “What have we gotten ourselves into here?”

  I thought about Charlie Kelly and Henry Legion. “I don’t know,” I said grimly, “but I’m going to find out.”

  Dinner at the Hanese place was good. In fact, dinner was probably wonderful, but we were both too distracted to enjoy it as much as we should have—and, not meaning to be crude, my rear end hurt. And when we flew to the restaurant and then back again, I kept looking over my shoulder, wondering who was behind us… and why. I almost jumped out of my skin when a carpet zipped by closer than it should have, but it was just a couple of teenage lads with more machismo than brains.

  When we got back to my flat—safe, sound, and overfed—Judy said, “I want you to do something for me.” Like some people you may know, Judy has a Serious Voice. She was using it now.

  “What is it?’I asked.

  She said, “Before we went out, you said I should be careful from now on. Well, you should, too. I want you to start doing what they do in the thrillers: leave for work a few minutes early one day, then a few minutes late the next. Don’t get onto the freeway at The Second every morning, or off it there every night. The same for Wilshire at the other end of your commute. Don’t make yourself an easier target, I mean.”

  I started to laugh, to tell her that was all silly stuff. But it didn’t seem silly, not after those guys had tried to do me in.

  “Okay,” I said, and found myself nodding. “You do the same.”

  “I will,” she promised.

  I wondered if we ought to stop seeing each other for a while. If she’d said she wanted to do that, I wouldn’t have let out a peep. But I didn’t suggest it myself. Maybe that was selfish of me. In fact, I’m sure it was, a little. But the main reason I didn’t was that I was pretty sure she was in too deep to turn invisible so easily.

  “Do you want to stay the night, or do you think you’d be safer going home now?” I asked her.

  “I’d intended to stay,” she said. “I stuck a change of clothes in your closet” She did some very visible thinking. “If they’re interested in me—whoever they are—they have to know where I live. They could be waiting for me there as well as here. I’ll stay.” She made a face. “Oh, I don’t like this! Having to think about everything before you do it—is it safe? is it risky? I don’t like it at all.”

  “Me neither,” I said. “But I’m glad you’re staying. I wasn’t what you’d call keen on being here by myself. I think I’d probabfy wake up every time a cat screeched or a dog barked.” Was that selfish? Well, yes, probably. It was also very true.

  I did something else then: I went into the hall closet took out my blasting rod, and put it under the bed where I could get at it in a huny. Judy watched without saying a word, but nodded soberly when I was done.

  Judy and I woke up once in the middle of the night with a horrible start when the sylphs in somebody’s carpet started screaming because the anti-theft gear was violated—or maybe because they thought it was, or maybe for no reason in particular. You never can tell with spirits of the air. Their nocturnal screams are a sound you hear fairly often in Angels City or any other good-sized town, generally when you least want to. At last whoever owned the carpet went down there and made them shut up, or maybe the thief flew away on it. Anyway, quiet returned.

  “Jesus,” Judy said.r />
  “Or Somebody,” I agreed. We both settled down and tried to go back to sleep. It took me a long time, and by the way Judy was breathing, she had as much trouble as I did. What had happened to me left both of us jumpy.

  The horological demon in the alarm dock I’d bought at the swap meet caterwauled to get us up a little past six. The noise it made was so awful, I figured the Siamese exported its land so they wouldn’t have to listen to ’em. But at least it had the courtesy not to laugh as Judy and I woke up and untangled—we’d drifted together after we finally drifted back off, and were sort of sleeping all over each other.

  Shower, shave (for me), dress, breakfast, coffee. We’d spent title night at each other’s flats often enough that we had a routine for it. What wasn’t routine was the way I walked Judy out to her carpet, looked around to make sure nobody was lurking nearby, and watched till she was out of sight Then I went back to the garage, gave my own carpet a careful once—over before I got onto it, and finally headed for work.

  I got there unscathed, shut the door to my office, and got on the phone. The first person I called was Legate Kawaguchi. He heard me out, then asked, “This occurred where? On The Second past Anglewood, you said?”

  “That’s right.”

  “This location, unfortunately, is not within the jurisdiction of the Angels City Constabulary Department, Inspector Fisher. I suggest you contact the Hawthorne constables and report it to them.”

  So I did, feeling foolish. People always say “Angeles City” or “A.C.,” but the metropolitan area has lots of other municipalities, some large like Long Beach, others minuscule, but all of them jealously hanging onto as much autonomy as they can. The Hawthorne constables took my report and promised they’d look into it, but I didn’t have any great faith in the promise. Unlike Kawaguchi, they had no feel for the kind of case in which I’d gotten myself involved. The decurion at the other end of the line asked if my flying could have angered the two men who dropped the earth elemental on my carpet He wanted to keep things inside a simple framework.

  When I finally got off the line there, I called Charlie KeDy in D.St.C. I listened to the imp at the far end squawk. It sounded very far away. I know you’re going to tell me that’s nonsense: thanks to the ether, no two points are more distant than any other two. I don’t care; I’m teDing you what I heard.

  “Charles Kelly, Environmental Perfection Agency.” Took him long enough to answer his bloody telephone, I thought “Good morning, Charlie,” I said; it was still morning back in D.StC., with half an hour to spare. “This is David Fisher, out in Angels City. A couple of men tried to kill me last night Charlie. As far as I can tell, the only reason anybody would want to do that is the toxic spell dump case I’m working on—your toxic spell dump case. Don’t you think it’s about time you gave me the gospel truth, Charlie?”

  “David, I—” There was a long, long silence on the other end, then a tiny sound, and then more silence. Even though it was reproduced through two phone imps, I recognized the sound: it was a handset going gently back into its cradle.

  Charlie had hung up on me.

  I didn’t believe—no, I didn’t want to believe—what that meant. Maybe, I told myself, Charlie’d had somebody important walk in and he’d get back to me later. Back in D.St.C., there were lots of important people, and even more who thought they were. I fooled with the parchment on my desk for fifteen minutes, then called back.

  The phone squawked even longer than it had before.

  Finally I got an answer “Environmental Perfection Agency, Melody Trudeau speaking.” It was a woman’s voice, all right not the gravelly tones that made Charlie identifiable in spite of phone imps.

  “Mistress Trudeau, this is David Fisher, from the Angels City EPA office. I’m looking for Charlie Kelly. I was on the phone with him a little while ago, and we got cut off.” That was more than giving him the benefit of the doubt but I still thought I might as well.

  Then Melody Trudeau said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Fisher, but Mr. Kelly left for the day about fifteen minutes ago. Would you like me to take down a message for him?”

  The kind of message I wanted to give him, I couldn’t send over the phone. I said, “No, that’s all right; thank you for asking,” and hung up.

  After that I just stared at the phone for about five minutes. I needed that long for what had happened to soak in.

  As far as I could tell, Charlie Kelly had told me he didn’t give a damn whether I lived or died. I know the Confederation has been only remotely feudal since not long after we broke away from England, but I still thought supervisors owed subordinates something in the way of loyalty, especially when they were the ones who’d got their subordinates into the mess in the first place. Go ahead, call me naive.

  I started to go up front and dump my troubles on Bea, but stopped about two steps away from my door. What was I supposed to tell her? “I’m sorry, boss, but I may not be in tomorrow because someone will have murdered me”? That didn’t do the job, and what point complaining to her about Charlie Kelly? She couldn’t do anything she was junior to Charlie, too. She’d think he was contemptible, sure, but I already thought he was contemptible.

  I stood there, halfway between my desk and the door, getting madder by the second. Then I turned around and stomped back to my chair. If Charlie wouldn’t listen to me, Henry Legion would.

  Seems logical, right?. Getting hold of the CI spook wasn’t as easy as I thought it was going to be. Central Intelligence wasn’t in the D.StC. telephone directory, apparently on the assumption that if you couldn’t figure out how to reach them, you really didn’t need to talk to them.

  After I’d scratched my head for a minute or two, I called Saul Klein. He works for the Confederal Bureau of Investigation; his offices are a couple of floors above mine. I’d gotten to know him on the elevator and in the cafeteria. He’s a good enough fellow. When he answered the phone, I said,

  “Saul? How are you? This is Dave Fisher down in the EPA.

  Can I pick your brain for a minute?”

  “Sure, Dave,” he answered. “What’s up?”

  “You know those little musical sprites they import from Alemania?”

  The mmisingers? Sure. What about ’em?”

  “I’ve heard some people express concern that they don’t just learn new songs while they’re here—that they might be picking up other things which could be useful for Alemanic intelligence.” As far as I knew, there was nothing to that.

  Minisingers aren’t spooks; you just take ’em to your Heeler and turn ’em loose. A lot of taverns have them for background music, things like that. But my madness had method to it. Ingenuous as all get out, I asked, “Would that be CBI business, Saul?”

  “Intelligence by foreign Powers? No, we don’t touch that, Dave. You need to talk to Central Intelligence back at the capital,” he said.

  “Thanks. Do you happen to have their number?”

  “Sure. I’ve got it right here,” he said, and gave it to me. I wrote it down, thanked him again, and made my phone call.

  Sometimes the indirect approach is best Once I was actually talking with a real live human being (or so I presumed—you never can tell with CI), things went better. I got connected to Henry Legion faster than I’d ever been transferred before.

  “Good day, Inspector Fisher,” the CI spook said. His phone voice sounded more like his real voice than any natural person’s. I wondered if that was because he, like the phone imps, was a creature of the Other Side, so they could pick up the essence of his voice as well as what he said.

  While I was wondering, he went on, “I thought I might hear from you again, but not so soon as this. What is the occasion of the call?”

  “Somebody tried to Idll me last night,” I answered bluntly.

  “The only reason I can think of for anybody wanting to do that is the toxic spell dump case. I want to get to the bottom of that, and you’re the only channel I have now.”

  No denying Henry Legion was sh
arp; he pounced on that last word like a lycanthrope leaping onto a roast of beef.

  “Now?” he said. “You previously had another source of information who has become inaccessible to you?”

  “Inaccessible is just the word.” I know I sounded bitter;

  I’d thought Charlie Kelly was a friend—oh, not a close friend, but somebody who wouldn’t let me down if things got tough. He’d shown me what that notion was worth, though.

  Well, my loyalty to him stopped at the point where it was liable to get me killed. I told the spook, “You asked how I got wind of the danger of a Third Sorcerous War?”

  “Yes?” Across three thousand miles, I could visualize his ectoplasmic ears springing to attention.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Before I tell you, I want your promise that you’ll let me know what’s going on. Everybody keeps saying that the more I know, the more dangerous it’ll be for me. I can’t think of anything a lot more dangerous than getting killed.”

  “I can,” Henry Legion said. Maybe he really could; maybe he was just trying to scare me. But I was past being scared of—or by—phantoms, and didn’t answer. After a couple of silent seconds, the spook took another tack: “Why should you believe any promise I make? I am of the Other Side, and have no soul to stake on an oath.”

  “Promise on your pride in your own wits and I’ll believe you,” I told him.

  Another telephone pause. When it was done, Legion said,

  “You’re not the least clever mortal with whom I have dealt Let it be as you say. By my pride in my wits, Inspector Fisher, I shall tell you what I know in exchange for your information—on condition that the secret go no farther than you.”

  “Uh,” I said. I couldn’t think of a condition better calculated to make Judy want to wring my neck. “My fiancee is also involved in this case, and has been just about from the start. She knows about the threat of the Third Sorcerous War. I can’t promise not to tell her, but she doesn’t blab.”

  Henry Legion let out a long sigh. “Sexuality,” he said, as if he were cursing. “Very well, Inspector Fisher, I agree to your proposed amendment, provided she agrees to tell no one.