The Second Reginald Bretnor Megapack

by Reginald Bretnor

  “Forgive me, good Master Schimmelhorn,” said he, “but just how many drops of the last ingredient did you put into the potion?”

  “Vhy, three,” replied Papa Schimmelhorn cheerfully. “Because die Prinzessin iss nodt lidtle like a girl hum-uncle-us, I giff her more.”

  “‘Od’s blood!” cried Humphrey. “Fair sir, ’tis a wonder she survived it! ’Twas enough—aye, and more—to bring poor dead Cleopatra back to life! Pray do take care, for now there’s no telling what she’ll do, of that I do most fervently assure you! I tremble at the very thought. And, for the love of God, tell no one about me—not even her—oh, most especially not her! Never forget—she is a pagan priestess!”

  “Don’dt vorry!” chuckled Papa Schimmelhorn. “I haff promised nodt to tell, so no vun knows. But die Prinzessin iss a nice girl, vith maybe too much vinegar, vhich iss all right in bed. Anyvay, noding happens—you can trust Papa Schimmelhorn. I am a chenius.”

  “So, I dare say, was that Dr. Faustus about whom Kit Marlowe wrote,” answered Humphrey lugubriously.

  Papa Schimmelhorn gave him a thimbleful of honeyed brandy to cheer him up, promised him again that he had no need to worry, returned him to his jar, and hastened back to his Princess.

  When he arrived, Sarpedon Mavronides was on the point of leaving. He stepped respectfully aside so that Papa Schimmelhorn could enter. He swept them both a deep, low bow. “Highness,” he said, “I shall telephone Herr Doktor Rumpler as you have ordered, and inform him that the gold-making machine is a success. Otherwise, as you have instructed me, I shall tell him nothing except that he is not to try to call you for three days. Your other orders I shall carry out immediately.” Then, as he bowed again and backed out, he murmured, “May you sleep well, Your Highnesses,” and softly closed the door behind him.

  Instantly, the Princess threw her arms around her lover, drew his lips down to hers, and some time passed before he was able to come up again for air.

  “Mein gootness! Philli, shveetheart, haff you heard vot Herr Zorba calls me? Chust like you, a Highness. Vot iss? Königliche Hoheit Schimmelhorn der First?” He roared with laughter. “Imachine! A Highness who makes cuckoo clocks und cuckoo vatches!”

  Her laughter echoed his as she led him to the table where the first course of the banquet, laid on by Ismail, awaited them. She seated him. Once more, she herself poured their wine.

  “My love!” she breathed. “My dearest dear love! Of course Sarpedon called you Highness, for you are now my Prince. But no, you never can be Schimmelhorn the First—that would not be correct. Just as I am the Princess Philippa, so you too must be known by your first name. Come, tell me what it is.” She laughed again. “Certainly you cannot be Prince Papa, nor can I call you Papa in our bed.”

  Papa Schimmelhorn blushed. Under the table, he shifted his feet in much embarrassment. “I—I nefer use it since I am a boy,” he told her. “Vhen I am a young man, all die pussycats say it does nodt sound like me. I—I do nodt like efen to shpeak it.”

  She leaned a little forward, displaying the cleavage he now knew so well. “Even for me?” she whispered.

  He blushed even more vividly than before. “For you, shveetheart—for you, I—I write it down.”

  Nearby there was a notepad on which she had written down her orders for Mavronides. She passed it to him.

  Hesitantly, he scribbled. Reluctantly, he passed the paper to her.

  She looked at it.

  “It iss pronounced Owgoost,” muttered its owner, unnecessarily.

  “August!” she said admiringly. “It befits you, love. It has a truly royal sound to it. Prince August the First! It’s perfect! But if you truly do not like it, if it pains you to hear it spoken, then we shall reserve it only for the most solemn ceremonies, when its use is, of course, de rigueur.”

  It came to Papa Schimmelhorn that Mama, were she to learn about it, would take a decidedly dim view of his sudden ennoblement and, more especially, of the reasons for it, but something told him that it might be imprudent to mention it. In the past, he had always managed to squirm across similar bridges when he came to them, and at the moment it was far easier just to relax and enjoy the pleasant perquisites of princehood.

  They feasted sumptuously. They sipped superb wines. Attended by an enormously cheerful Ismail and a Niobe happy as a lark, they made love subtly with their eyes, their fingertips, their whispered words. Papa Schimmelhorn described, very dramatically, how Twitchgibbet must deliberately have left the window open hoping to trap Gustav-Adolf, and how Mrs. Laubenschneider’s hex signs had enabled Gustav-Adolf to turn the tables on him. He described his picking of the locks, his removal of the evidence, and told her—to her infinite amusement—how, in his opinion, Meister Gassi must have blamed the whole thing on a visitation from der Defil. However, remembering his promise, he made no mention of the homunculus.

  “Well, we have no further need for Gaspar Gansfleisch now,” she said. “With the gold you’ll make us, we can buy the world! I have long been disgusted with the man, and now we can be rid of him. Well, we’ll leave that for later.” She touched his cheek. “Let us devote ourselves to sweeter matters, those which—oh, so unkindly!—duty forced us to interrupt earlier today.”

  They lingered over a liqueur while Niobe cleared the table and Ismail bore everything away. Then, with a glad shout, the Prinz lifted his Prinzessin bodily and, to the accompaniment of her enchanting laughter, carried her back to bed.

  * * * *

  Next morning, after enduring breakfast as another unkind interruption, they shut themselves away again until almost noon. They bathed; they dressed; they lunched in privacy, Niobe and Ismail quietly flitting in and out. Then came the day’s first audience, with Sarpedon Mavronides, who told them joyfully that everyone in the castle and on the island was ecstatic at the news of the Princess having found her hero, that one and all looked forward eagerly to being received by him, that even now they were preparing their humble presents and, for when the time came, their sacrifices.

  The last remark puzzled Papa Schimmelhorn, but as the Princess seemed rather pleased, he decided that it referred simply to some quaint, harmless local custom, and asked no questions.

  Mavronides also reported on his phone call to Dr. Rumpler who, he declared, had first been tremendously excited at the tidings, then had offered to fly to Little Palaeon immediately, and finally had accepted the Fräulein’s dictum with obvious reluctance.

  “As for your other orders, Highness,” he went on, “I have carried them out faithfully. I have informed Meister Gansfleisch that, because of his bad manners during the transmutation, you have barred him from the laboratory until further notice, and though I could see by his eyes that he hated me, I knew that he would not dare to disobey. Finally, as you requested, I paid the two young ladies the sums due them, together with a generous bonus, and they are now on their way back to, I believe, Amsterdam.”

  Papa Schimmelhorn’s jaw dropped. “Die young ladies?” he gasped. “You mean my predty pussycats?”

  “Yes, my true love,” murmured the Princess. “I think you will agree that you no longer need them.” She ran a consolatory hand along his thigh. “And now,” she said, “let us make gold together.”

  [1] HOMUNCULI “Human beings may come into existence without natural parents. That is to say, such beings grow without being developed and born by a female organism; by the art of an experienced spagyricus (alchemist).”—De Natura Rerum, vol. i.

  “The generatio homunculi has until now been kept very secret, and so little was publicly known about it that the old philosophers have doubted its possibility. But I know that such things may be accomplished by spagyric art assisted by natural processes. If the sperma. enclosed in a hermetically sealed glass, is buried in horse manure for about forty days, and properly ‘magnetised,’ it begins to live and
to move. After such a time it bears the form and resemblance of a human being, but it will be transparent and without a corpus. If it is now artificially fed with the arcanum sanguinis hominis until it is about forty weeks old, and if allowed to remain during that time in the horse-manure in a continually equal temperature, it will grow into a human child, with all its members developed like any other child, such as could have been born by a woman; only it will be much smaller. We call such a being a homunculus, and it may be raised and educated like any other child, until it grows older and obtains reason and intellect…”

  Quoted by Franz Hartmann, M.D., The Life of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim… London n.d., p. 256.)

  SCHIMMELHORN’S GOLD [Part 2]

  VIII.

  Prinz Owgoost

  The two burly footmen who once had fetched Meister Gansfleisch to a painful audience with the Fräulein now stood guard against him at the laboratory door, fortified by a variety of signs and sigils rather similar to those used by Mrs. Laubenschneider to protect Gustav-Adolf against spooks and goblins. They bowed respectfully as the Prince and Princess unlocked the door and went in, and assured them that no intruders had even sought to gain entrance. All was secure, they declared, and promised fervently that it would remain so.

  For the next three hours, pausing only occasionally for light dalliance, Papa Schimmelhorn and the Fräulein made gold. She, not at all dismayed by the horrendous moanings, uncanny writhings, and apocalyptic light displays of the device, clapped her hands in glee whenever she saw it operate and an object, made of dull lead scant minutes earlier, emerged as pure gold.

  “But why,” said she, “do you set the dial so low? If you turned it up to fifty or perhaps a hundred, surely we could make much more gold?”

  “Ach, if I do dot,” he answered, “der beam vill shpread, und—und…” But describing complex asymptotic curves was too much for him. “Maybe it shpreads a mile, maybe two. Also vot it does vill chanche, und maybe it iss dancherous. Later I make adchustments. Now ve must shtart vith chust a lidtle.”

  He began with a small sack of birdshot he had found in his own turret and four pieces of lead pipe borrowed from Sarpedon Mavronides; then he converted three leaden mortars dating back to the sixteenth century and with mysterious lettering on them, which had long been the property of Meister Gansfleisch and to which magical properties had been attributed; he followed these with a lead spoon and a variety of small lead vessels, with whose purpose he was unacquainted, but which the alchemist had cherished. Not till the Princess was quite sure that the laboratory was fresh out of lead did she consent to terminate the proceedings. She embraced her lover ecstatically. “My Prince, my King!” she cried. “You have entranced the woman in me with your strength, your passion! Now, by the magic of your genius, you have captured the rest of me—the Princess, the Minoan Priestess, yes, and the Swiss Banker! Truly, love and gold are universal solvents, and together we shall make more of each—much more! But tell me, do the flying hours escape? Does not the day grow late and duty call?”

  “Ja,” replied Papa Schimmelhorn; and the cuckoo watch, at his behest, sang out its hours, minutes, seconds.

  The Princess kissed it. “Oh, let it speak for us!” she said, “as long as it remains silent in the night and does not interrupt our endless hours of love! But now—now Sarpedon again awaits instructions. Will you attend with me?”

  “Ach, such an honor!” He shook his head regretfully. “Aber, lidtle Philli, I must go up und feed mein Gustav-Adolf, und use der bathroom, und see vhere I can find some more lead for tomorrow.” It occurred to him to quip that at least there was again plenty of it in der pencil, but he decided that this would be indelicate.

  She told him not to worry about the next day’s supply, that Mavronides would get them all they might require. Then, with one of the footmen carrying the newly manufactured gold in one of Meister Gansfleisch’s wooden boxes, he escorted her back to her own apartments. There, at the door, she flowed into his arms. They kissed. And he made his way to his now-pussycatless turret, where he found that every evidence of Emmy and Niki ever having been there had been removed. He thought of the good times they had had together. With a mournful sigh, he reached for Gustav-Adolf, who was glaring at him.

  “So they haff left you all alone, poor Gustav-Adolf?” he said sympathetically. “Vell, don’dt you vorry. Now I am a Prinz, predty soon eferything vorks oudt, und you can leafe und fight die oder cats und chase die predty tortoiseshells. But you must shtay here until ve are qvite sure from Meister Gassi you are safe.”

  Gustav-Adolf shrank back from him. He growled and hissed. “Goddam ol’ hippercrite!” he grumbled. “How’d you like t’ be stuck up here all day, huh, supposin’ it was the other way around, with me doin’ the tomcattin’ like I oughta be? Just take a gander at that there door, too.” He glared at the door to the battlements, which someone had inadvertently left shut. “How’d you like it if you couldn’t even get out to the john?”

  Papa Schimmelhorn, of course, could not speak Cat, but he still managed to get the drift. He apologized to his friend, and quickly let him out onto the battlements, where—after he himself had retired into the bathroom—Gustav-Adolf used his catbox furiously, kicking out enough of its contents to make certain that there’d have to be a clean-up job. Then he stalked back with a massive feline dignity, and grunted, “Well, chum, what’s to eat?”

  Half a pound of steak later, he decided that he was partly mollified, and jumped to his favorite perch on the Schimmelhorn shoulder. But I’ll be durned if I purr fer the old bastard, he thought, not fer a while I won’t! That’ll learn him!

  By this time, Papa Schimmelhorn had taken Humphrey out for his afternoon tot of honeyed brandy, and the homunculus was questioning him anxiously about how matters were proceeding.

  “Now look you, Master Schimmelhorn,” he said worriedly, “for the moment you and—if you do not resent my so calling her—your inamorata, the Princess, seem to have held this vile Gansfleisch off successfully. But have a care! Why, ’tis scarce a fortnight since he was trying to sell his immortal soul to Satan for some devil’s promise of her in his bed, and it was only when she became angry with you and seemed to favor him that he rubbed out the pentacle he had prepared, imagining that he could gain his ends by other means—as you learned much to your sorrow. Be warned, my good kind friend!”

  Papa Schimmelhorn promised him that Meister Gassi wasn’t going to get away with anything. He explained, with many a chuckle, that he was now a Prinz, und maybe soon he vould be able to shnap his fingers und say, “Off vith der head!”

  “Oh Lord, deliver us!” cried Humphrey. “Sir, do you not know what being the Prince of such a pagan isle may mean? Have you no notion of what their evil customs may demand of you?”

  “Vell, I haff heard shtories aboudt how sometimes ein Prinz had vot-you-call ‘right of der first night’ vith all die predty lidtle pussycats.” Again he chuckled. “But maybe meine Prinzessin does nodt like dot, nein?”

  “Jus primae noctis—ah, if that were all!” Little Humphrey actually started to get down on his knees. “I do beg and pray you—for never an instant relax your vigilance! I trust you have not yet married her?”

  “Married?” laughed Papa Schimmelhorn. “I could nodt do. Iss Mama. Ve are now married more than sixty years. She vould nodt approfe.”

  At the moment, he had no desire at all to wiggle out of his very pleasant situation, but the idea had occurred to him that the fact of Mama might very well, in an emergency, enable him to do just that, as he had wiggled out of other situations in the past. He did his best to assuage Humphrey’s fears and to convince him they were groundless; he gave him an extra thimbleful to cheer him up; he played a game of chess with him which he let him win. Finally, when Humphrey expressed concern regarding what remained of the love potion, he promised that after he had sealed it in another am
pule it would rest securely in the secret compartment, where Humphrey himself could keep an eye on it. Somewhat reassured, Humphrey bade him farewell till the morrow, and said that he would pray for his continued safety and protection. Then Papa Schimmelhorn retired him for the night, insulted Gustav-Adolf by telling him to be a good cat, and went off to rejoin his Princess.

  Halfway there, to his astonishment, he was intercepted by Ismail. “Noble Effendi! Most High and Potent Prince!” Ismail began, whispering and darting cautious glances over his shoulder, with many profound Oriental bows and apologies. “You have spoken of a substance which you believe could restore my manhood. Effendi, could you send for it without delay, before—that is, though Allah is compassionate, all men are mortal, and who knows what the future holds? If anything should happen so you could not send for it…. You understand, Effendi?”

  Papa Schimmelhorn, recalling that his first radiogram to Mama requesting a shipment of the mutated catnip had not even been acknowledged, decided that he would have to try a different tack. He requested pen and paper, which the eunuch produced out of his garments. “I write anoder radiogram,” he told him, “to mein grandnephew, Lidtle Anton, in Hong Kong. Iss bedter he asks Mama for der catnip.” He wrote the message out, instructing Little Anton to procure the catnip subtly and have it delivered directly to Ismail, whom he told not to worry about customs laws because of Little Anton’s extensive experience as a smuggler.