Then I knew where. It was a scene out of American history: The Pony Express, starring Gary Cooper. I told Chester.
“Oyho! Oyho!” the rider yelled as he drew even with us. “Make way! In the name of the Empress! The Overland Mail!” And then he was past.
“It may well be a scene out of history,” Chester remarked, staring at the retreating back, “but I’m afraid it isn’t American history. He could probably tell us a fascinating story if we dragged him off his horse. Ah, well.”
We trudged on.
“Where,” Dorothy asked in what I was coming to recognize as her argumentative voice, “are we going?”
Chester shrugged. “You pick a place.”
There was no reply.
It was about time, I decided, for one of my famous funny stories. “Did I ever tell you,” I inquired at random, “of the time we held an orgy on the Flushing local, and the lutist got a string caught in the....”
“I was there,” Chester reminded me dourly.
“What’s a flushing local?” Sylvia demanded.
“Look,” I said. “Isn’t that something in the road ahead?”
“How are you punctuating that?” Chester asked suspiciously.
“There,” I insisted. “Look. It’s a car.”
When we were close I saw that the object was a car only in so far as form follows function. It had once been a car: a black, four-door gangster model, complete with running boards and spare tire mounted in the fender. It was now a hulk. Tires rotted off, headlights and windows broken, fenders and bumpers rusted through; the car was slowly going back to the earth from which it was mined.
On top of the car hulk a man, wrapped in a white sheet, sat cross-legged and stared serenely off at the horizon. He managed to subtly convey the impression that he’d been there as long as the car.
“Look,” Chester said. “A guru.”
Dorothy looked. “He’s dirty,” she said. “Is that why you call him ugh-aroo?”
“I think he’s a Grand High Exalted Muckamuck in the KKK,” I suggested.
Sylvia, as usual, took direct action. “Hello,” she said, walking over to the side of the wreck. There was no response. “Please, sir, could you tell us where we are?”
The head riding above the pyramid of sheet slowly turned until the beard was facing Sylvia, then stopped. “You,” it declared calmly, “are here.”
“Aha,” I said. “One of those; I knew it.”
“Here,” Chester offered, stepping forward. “Let me.” He stood in front of the car and raised his hand, palm upward. “Greetings. Will you enlighten us?”
Whitesheet stared down at Chester for a long moment. “Impossible,” he declared.
Sylvia displayed patience. “Good sir,” she said, standing on tiptoe and smiling brightly, “will you tell us what we will find further down the road?”
Whitesheet nodded. “Yes.” We waited.
“Perhaps,” I suggested after three or four minutes had passed, “we should....”
“That way,” Whitesheet said, flopping an arm out to his left, “lies madness.”
Sylvia stared along a parallel to the pointing finger and considered the vista. “But,” she noted, “there’s no road.”
“Most who seek manage to find their way. On the other hand,” he raised his other hand, “over there be dragons. Or, at least, dragon.”
He was indicating the direction we were heading. “Oh!” Sylvia exclaimed. “Fierce, up-tight, fire-breathing dragons?”
“One young dragonette, her furnace barely stoked, and her brood of hatchlings.’”
“Thank you,” Sylvia said.
“Dragons?” I asked Chester.
“Unicorns?” he replied.
During all of this Dorothy had been staring at the car-sitter with an expression of earnest curiosity. Finally she could no longer contain it. She rose. “You,” she said, gesturing so that there could be no mistake as to whom she meant. “What are you doing up there?”
His head turned with the steady sweep of a radar beacon until his unblinking gaze was full on Dorothy, then stopped. “I,” he stated in a voice that would brook no disagreement, “am the rightful King of France, with a strong claim on the thrones of Spain, Portugal, England, the Holy Roman—or, if you prefer, Austro-Hungarian— Empire, Italy, Greece, Mexico, the Duchies of Herzegovina, Faulkenberg, Ruritania, Alba, Courland, Bosnia, and others too numerous to mention. I have been done out of my heritage; and am going to sit right here until I get it back. My faithful minions are, even now, preparing the way.”
Chester snorted. “You’ll have to do better than that.”
The radar gaze turned to him. “If I must. I am a student of the Mysteries of the East. After much meditation and study, I had perfected the technique of levitation; and while I was up here, five feet off the ground, somebody stuck an old car under me.”
“That,” Chester agreed, “is better.”
I laughed. “Which are we to believe?”
“All three.”
“Three?”
The radar eyes burned into mine from under bushy brows. “I came out here to do a character bit in a television commercial. The rest of the crew never showed up, and I’m staying till they do. At triple time. I’ve been here nine years now.”
“Three,” I agreed.
“Come on,” Chester said, herding us around the car.
“Goodbye,” the prince/guru/actor called as we walked down the road. “Watch out for dragon.”
It was around the next bend. There was a clearing to the left of the road that was full of round, flat-top stones and had been roofed over with some sort of tenting material. The hatchlings were squatting, one to a stone, and clutching small slates. A strange squeaking sound that filled the air proved to be the four-foot upright alligators writing on the slates with hunks of chalk.
In front of the group, at the far end of the clearing, eighteen feet of prime lady dragon paced back and forth, whipping a large tail in great arcs behind. “I said the next slide, please,” she called out in a vibrato soprano bellow.
A small, harassed-looking man fiddled with a large black box in mid-clearing. “I’m trying, I’m trying,” he replied nervously.
“Constantly,” dragonette agreed. “Ah!” she sighed, breathing out just the tiniest wisp of flame, “there.” After a clicking sound from either the man or the projector, a large picture was cast partly on her and mostly on a backdrop behind her.
Nobody had noticed us standing at the back edge of this outdoor classroom, and I thought it better to keep it that way. “What now?” I whispered to Chester. “Hide here until they go away—or, maybe until I wake up?”
“I refuse,” Chester told me, “to be a figment of your dream. That lacks imagination. Besides, I know who’d get the best part.”
“The question,” I said. “I asked you a question; the least you can do is answer it.”
“Yes. Well. I think the best thing we can do is walk quietly by. The only one in a position to notice us is Madam Teacher, and she’s too busy.”
“Interesting theory, friend,” I said. “Would you care to be the first to make the experiment?”
“Come on, you’ve been a teacher. You know that you have to ignore petty problems so as not to disrupt the class. It would be better to be seen crossing by Teach up there than found hiding by the kids.”
“Okay,” I said. “I just hope it’s not near lunch break.” The four of us bunched together and proceeded to calmly (ha!) and quietly walk by the back of the clearing.
“This,” dragon lady was saying, tapping the picture with a ten-foot pole, “is a famous illustration of one of the great stories of Dragonpast. Can any of you hatchlings tell me what it is?”
I looked as we passed. For a moment the shadings of light and shadow created a pattern that canceled the projection. Then my eye adjusted to the shade, and the picture was clear. It was the classic view of Saint George and the Dragon. You know the one: George on a rearing hors
e, his armor gleaming gold, about to plunge his lance into coils and coils of cowering dragon.
“I know,” a hatchling squeaked like a row of freight cars braking. “That’s the picture of Ethyl the Martyr and the Man in the Tin Suit.”
“That’s right, Marflagiggle. Very good. Now squat back down and I’ll tell you the story.”
We crept by. When we passed out of sight of the reptilian schoolroom we broke into a relieved, but hasty, trot. The last thing I heard as we ran into the distance, was “It was then that Ethyl realized that things were getting out of claw. She....”
After jogging for not quite as long as it seemed, we stopped for a while to breathe hard. “I guess I’ll have to get married,” I said when I had enough wind back to pretend I hadn’t lost it. “With stories like this to tell,” I explained to the puzzled stares, “it would be a shame not to have grandchildren to bore with them. ‘Come sit on my knee, little girl, and Gramps will tell you about the time he audited a class of dragons.’”
“You desire little girl grandchildren?” Sylvia asked.
“The ones that sit on my knee had better be little girls,” I explained.
Sylvia giggled. “All right, Gramps, I’ll sit on your knee; but this time keep your hands to yourself.”
“You learn fast,” I told her. “Either that, or you have un-plumbed depths.”
“We carry different cultures,” Sylvia said, brushing her long hair back from her face. “Sexual mores, for example.... It might be fun for you to plumb my depths.”
Chester, who was busy rubbing Dorothy’s back and explaining about his fetish, suddenly stopped and peered off into the distance; a gesture that was becoming as common with us as with grouse, and for similar reasons. “What,” he complained, “now?”
A large dust cloud approached at a measured pace. “Can you hear anything?” I asked Sylvia. “Hoofbeats?”
She shook her head. “Just some strange rumbling, grinding sound. It’s been getting closer for the past few minutes.”
“It must be coming from whatever’s raising the dust then. Not horses. Cars or trucks?”
Now I heard it faintly in the distance. A steady, low rumbling that you seemed to hear as much with your feet as your ears. A sound associated with volcanoes and natural calamity. But not quite that. It was a noise that my body was familiar with, though my mind refused to identify. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the vibrations beneath my feet.
“A strange sound,” Chester said. “One is tempted to say the gods are angry, but one will resist.”
“Tanks!” I yelped.
“What for?”
“No, tanks. Big things with treads and guns. Named after generals.”
“Ah,” Chester said. “If they’re ours they’re named after generals. Hum. If it isn’t one thing, it’s an army.”
I started to clamber up a tree to get a better look, but just then the dust cloud parted and the first monster rolled out.
“Must have come onto paved road,” Chester commented.
“It won’t be paved after they’ve gone over it,” I said, stretching out on a low fork in the tree. “Those things rip hell out of even the best laid plans. I’ve seen them powder a new stressed-concrete highway. Each one of them weighs twenty-five or thirty tons.”
“What kind are they?” Chester asked. “Or, at least, whose are they?”
I climbed up a few more notches and stuck my head out. “Oh, wow!”
“What? Wow, what?”
“They’re Tigers. I saw one once at a base armory museum in Germany. The biggest and heaviest tanks ever made. Fifty tons. There won’t be enough road surface left to ride a bicycle on. Hitler couldn’t use them as much as he wanted because they ruined the roads for trucks and there wasn’t anything big enough to transport them in. One of his secret weapons.”
“Hitler?” Chester asked.
“Well, the Wehrmacht.”
“What,” Dorothy asked, “are you two talking about?”
“Later,” Chester said. The rumbling and clanking was quite loud now, and the tanks were only a few hundred yards away. I could feel the tree I was in start to shake. “Those are Nazi tanks? I think we’d better get out of here.”
“The war’s been over since we were wee tads,” I reminded him.
“Where you and I come from,” Chester said. “Where the girls came from, it never happened. But here....”
“I get your point,” I said, dropping out of the tree. “I think I saw a swastika on the turret of that monster in front. Let’s split.”
“Halt!” boomed a loudspeaker, blasting the air around us. “You have been seen. Do not attempt to escape!” A sudden explosion cracked in my ears past the pain threshold, and flame belched from the turret of the lead tank. Two seconds later a concussion blast rumpled the earth behind us in counterpoint as the shell landed, and a heat wave enveloped us and passed on. “If you attempt to run you will be destroyed.”
“They’ve made their point,” Chester said.
“What’s happening?” Sylvia asked, a high edge of panic in her voice. “What are those things?”
“They’re machines with men inside them,” Dorothy said perceptively in a grim voice. “We can’t get at them while they’re in the machines, so we’ll have to be nice until they get out.”
Single-minded woman. I agreed with her, reserving the hope that there’d be something we could do when they got out. Even these bloodthirsty girls would have little chance against machine guns. I decided that at the first chance, I’d better explain the function and capability of various hand weapons.
“Throw down your arms.”
Chester called back, “We don’t have any.”
“Resistance is futile. You will be well treated and placed in internment camps for the duration.”
The duration of what? I wondered. Us? The behemoths drew closer. For the first time, I regretted having been circumcised.
“If we scatter and run,” Chester said, “they couldn’t get all of us.”
“I’d bet you on that if I thought I had any chance of collecting,” I told him.
“Look!” Dorothy said. “Strangeness upon strangeness. What do they do?”
We looked. We stared. At the rear of the column of tanks, the dust cloud had been cloven in the air, as though cut with an axe, and half of it removed. To the left, the dust swirled and eddied as the tanks behind made finer particles of the chewed-up asphalt that the lead Tigers had converted the road into. To the right, nothing but clean air. As we watched, the vertical line of intersection, precise as a razor cut, moved steadily forward and left. “Godfrey!” I exclaimed brightly, “No dust.”
“More,” Chester said. “No tanks.”
“No road!” Sylvia exclaimed.
I brought my eyes to ground level. Sure enough; where the razor edge passed it showed a different world: a fresh, unspoiled meadow, with a leaping brook and long, green grass. And the razor edge was approaching, shaving off tank after tank as it came.
“I think we’re seeing a moving blip,” Chester said. “The border between one probability world and another.”
“It would be nice if we could get to that meadow world before those tank things get to us,” Sylvia said, displaying a British capacity for understatement.
“There seem to be two levels, or maybe more,” Chester said. “Light waves travel to and from the meadow world, but more material objects, like tanks, go somewhere else. It would be nice if our somewhere wasn’t their somewhere, wherever it is.” We were all huddled together and, somehow, holding hands.
“Attention! Attention! You will immediately stop using your new secret weapon, or you will be destroyed completely. Immediately! I will count to five.”
“It isn’t ours!” I yelled. “Honest it isn’t.”
“One.”
Another tank blipped out, but I could see that there’d be several left by five. I chose some curse words and aired them gently, stringing them together into strands of
futile disgust.
“Two.”
“Scatter and run like hell,” Chester commanded urgently. “It’s our only chance. I’m sorry, girls, you picked a pair of errant knights. I hope, Michael, that your prayers are heard.”
“I have no regrets,” Sylvia said, squeezing our hands.
Dorothy grimaced. “If this is it, I regret not having a chance to find out what the dirk is happening.”
“Three.”
“Goodbye, Adolphus,” Sylvia murmured. She pulled her hand free, and I realized how tightly I’d been holding it. “Goodbye, dear love,” she whispered to me, and darted off toward the woods. I filed that away to think about later—if there was a later.
“Ciao!” Chester yelled, galloping away.
“See you around,” I called, and was running.
Dorothy dropped to the ground and started squirming toward the lead tank.
BAROOM!
Something kicked against the back of my head, and a large tree cracked to my left. The earth dropped from under me and then rose up to hurt my knees. I ran several more steps before I realized that I was crawling.
BAROOM!
The earth came to meet me, and I tasted grass. A heavy chattering and roaring surrounded me. The scene had a quality of unreality, and I made a note to congratulate the theater manager on the excellence of his sound system. I hadn’t heard heavy machine guns sound so real or so close since I qualified with fifties in the army.
BAROOM!
Something splatted against my face and shoulder. Why was I making those funny motions with my arms and legs? Oh, yes; I was running. But I was prone on the ground and my legs were kicking air. That would never do. I twisted around and climbed to my feet. Something soft and sticky ran down my face.
BAROOM!
A large hole opened to my right, and dirt sprayed out, stinging the side of my face like a thousand wasps and knocking me down....
I sat. For some time I sat, staring at a purple haze in front of me. Then I turned my head and stared at the purple haze to my left I decided to lie down. Everything was quiet. I was deaf, I decided. Or dead. Or both.
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