Operation Chaos

XII

I think that my fury overcame my torment to the degree that I started fighting. I am told I got a fang-grip on the obvious place to bite a beast that is sitting on you, and did not let go. But the pain was too great for me to recall anything other than itself.

Then the salamander had vanished. The street lay bare, dark except for the moon and a distant unbroken lamp and the uneasy red glow from kindled houses, quiet except for the crackle and crash of their burning. When I’d recovered to the point of having a functional nose, what I first noticed was the acrid smoke.

That took several minutes. Barely enough unseared tissue remained to provide a DNA pattern for reconstructing the rest. When sanity returned, my shaggy head was in Ginny’s lap. She was stroking it and crying. I licked her hand, feebly, with a tongue like dried-out leather. If a man, I’d have stayed a while where she had me. But being a wolf with lupine instincts, I struggled to sit up and uttered a faint, hoarse yip.

“Steve . . . almighty Father, Steve, you saved our lives,” Ginny whispered. “Another couple of minutes and we’d have been suffocating. My throat still feels like mummy dust.”

Svartalf trotted from the bar, looking as smug as a cat with singed whiskers is able. He meowed. Ginny gave a shaken laugh and explained:

“But you owe this fellow a pint of cream or something. He may have tipped the scales for you, same as you did for us. At least, he showed me a way to help you.”

I cocked my ears.

“He manned the beer taps,” she said. “I filled pitcher after pitcher and threw them out the door at the salamander. They discommoded it. It shifted around. That may’ve taken the heat off you, and the pressure, till you could manage to use your bite.” She gripped m ruff. “And what an epic that was, those seconds while you clung!”

Beer! I wavered to my feet and back inside Stub’s. They followed me, puzzled until I whined and pointed with my muzzle at the nearest glass. “Oh, I see.” Ginny snapped her fingers. “You’re thirsty. No, you’re dehydrated”

She drew me a quart. I lapped it down in a cataract and signaled for more. She shook her head. “You may have forced the salamander to skip, but we have to deal with it yet. The rest will be plain water.”

My therio metabolism redistributed the fluid and brought me back to complete health. My first truly clear thought was that I hoped no more beer would have to be spent on fighting the elemental. My second was that whatever the means, we’d better apply them soon.

Penalties attach to everything. The trouble with being were is that in the other shape you have, essentially, an animal brain, with a superficial layer of human personality. Or in plain language, as a wolf I’m a rather stupid man. I was only able to realize I’d better reassume the human form . . . so I trotted to the open doorway where the moonlight could touch me, and did.

Ever see a cat grin? “Omigawd!” I yelped, and started to change back.

“Hold on,” said Ginny crisply. “If you must fret about my maidenly modesty, here.” She peeled off her scorched but serviceable fur coat. I doubt if one has ever been donned faster than by me. It was a pretty tight fit around the shoulders but went low enough—if I was careful. Though the night wind nipped my bare shanks, my face was of salamander temperature.

That was one reason I dismissed from among my worries the vision I had had. Another was the immediacy of the peril that confronted us, now and in the flesh. Besides, even more than on the previous occasion, the physical pain which followed the restoration of consciousness had blurred memory of so insubstantial an experience. Finally, I don’t suppose I wanted to think further about it.

The idea flitted through my head: Twice I’ve had a similar illusion while passed out. Maybe I should see a psychiatrist? No, that’d be silly. This can’t be more than an idiosyncratic reaction to a kind of trauma that isn’t likely to hit me again in my life.

I forgot about the matter.

Instead, I asked quickly, “Now where? The damned critter could be anyplace.”

I think it’ll hang around the campus,” Ginny said. “Ample grazing, and it’s not particularly smart. Let’s get moving.”

She fetched her stick from the smoldering barroom and we lifted. “So far,” I said, “we’ve done nothing but waste time.”

“N-no, not entirely. I did get a line on its mind.” We cleared the rooftops and Ginny looked back around at me. “I wasn’t sure of the precise form into which it had been conjured. You can mold the elemental forces into almost anything. But apparently the cheerleader was satisfied to give it a knowledge of English and a rudimentary intelligence. Add to that the volatile nature of Fire, and what have you got? A child.”

“Some child,” I muttered, hugging her coat to me.

“No, no, Steve, this is important. It has all the child’s limiting traits. Improvidence, carelessness, thoughtlessness . . . A wise salamander would lie low, gathering strength slowly. It’d either realize it couldn’t burn the entire planet, or if it didn’t know, would never think of such a thing. Because what would it use for oxygen afterward?

“Remember, too, its fantastic vanity. It went into an insane rage when I said that fires existed more strong and beautiful than it, and crack about beauty hurt as much as the one about strength.

“Short span of attention. It could have destroyed either you first, or Svartalf and me first, before taking care of the minor nuisance the other provided. Instead, it let its efforts be split. And it could have gritted its teeth when you took that mouthful, standing, the pain for the short time needed to weight you down firmly again till you you were dead.” Her voice wavered at that, and she hastened on:

“At the same time, within that short span, if nothing distracts it, it focuses on issue only, to the exclusion of any parts of a larger whole. She nodded thoughtfully. The long blowing hair tickled my face. “I don’t know how, but some way its psychology may provide us with a lever.”

My own vanity is not small. “I wasn’t such a minor, nuisance,” I grumbled.

Ginny smiled and reached to pat my cheek. “Ally right, Steve, all right. I like you just the same, and; now I know you’d make a good husband.”

That left me in a comfortable glow until I wondered precisely what she was thinking of.

We spotted the salamander below us, igniting a theater, but it flicked away as I watched, and a mile off it appeared next to the medical research center. Glass brick doesn’t burn so well. As we neared, I saw it petulantly kick the wall and vanish again. Ignorant and impulsive . . . a child . . . a brat from hell!

Sweeping over the campus, we saw lights in the Administration Building. “Probably that’s become headquarters for our side, said Ginny. “We’d better report.” Svartalf landed us on the Mall in front of the place and strutted ahead up the stairs.

A squad of cops armed with fire extinguishers guarded the door. “Hey, there!” One of them barred our path. “Where you going?”

“To the meeting,” said Ginny, smoothing her tresses.

“Yeah?” The policeman’s eye fell on me. “Really dressed for it, too, aren’t you? Haw, haw, bawl”

I’d had about my limit for this night. I wered and peeled off his own trousers. As he lifted his billy, Ginny turned it into a small boa constrictor. I switched back to human; we left the squad to its problems and went down the hall.

The faculty meeting room was packed. Malzius had summoned every one of his professors. As we entered, I heard his orotund tones: “—disgraceful. The authorities won’t so much as listen to me. Gentlemen, it is for us to vindicate the honor of Gown against Town.” He blinked when Ginny and Svartalf came in, and turned a beautiful Tyrian purple as I followed in the full glory of mink coat and stubbly chin. “Mister Matuchek!”

“He’s with me,” said Ginny curtly. “We were out fighting the salamander while you sat here.”

“Possibly something other than brawn, even lupine brawn, is required,” smiled Dr. Alan Abercrombie. “I see that Mr. Matuchek lost his pants in a more than vernacular sense.”

Like Malzius, he had changed his wet clothes for the inevitable tweeds. Ginny gave him a cold look. “I thought you were directing the Hydro,” she said.

“Oh, we got enough adepts together to use three water elementals,” he said. “Mechanic’s work. I felt my job was here. We can readily control the fires—”

“If the salamander weren’t always lighting fresh ones,” clipped Ginny. “And each blaze it starts, it gets bigger and stronger, while you sit here looking beautiful.”

“Why, thank you, my dear,” he laughed.

I jammed my teeth together so they hurt. She had actually smiled back at him.

“Order, order!” boomed President Malzius. “Please be seated, Miss Graylock. Have you anything to contribute to the discussion?”

“Yes. I understand the salamander now.” She took a place at the end of the table. That was the last vacant chair, so I hovered miserably in the background wishing her coat had more buttons.

“Understand it sufficiently well to extinguish it?” asked Professor van Linden of Alchemy.

“No. But I know how it thinks.”

“We’re more interested in how it operates,” said’ van Linden. “How can we make it hold still for a dismissal?” He cleared his throat. “Obviously, we must first know by what process it shuttles around so fast ,

“Oh, that’s simple,” piped Griswold. He was drowned by van Linden’s fruity bass:

“—which is, of course, by the well-known affinity of Fire for Quicksilver. Since virtually every home these days has at least one thermometer—”

“With due respect, my good sir,” interrupted Vittorio of Astrology, “you are talking utter hogwash. It is simple matter of the conjunction of Mercury and Neptune in Scorpio—”

“You’re wrong, sir!” declared van Linden. “Dead wrong! Let me show you the Ars Thaumaturgica. ” He glare around after his copy, but it had been mislaid and he had to use an adaptation of the Dobu yamcalling chant to find it. Meanwhile Vittorio was screaming:

“No, no, no! The conjunction, with Uranus opposing in the ascendant ... as I can easily prove—” He went to the blackboard and started to draw a diagram.

“Oh, come now!” snorted jasper of Metaphysics. “I don’t understand how you can both be so wrong. As I showed in the paper I read at the last Triple-A-S meeting, the intrinsic nature of the matrix—”

“That was disproved ten years ago!” roared van Linden. “The affinity—”

“Ding an sich—”

“—up Uranus—”

I sidled over and tugged at Griswold’s sleeve. He pattered into a corner with me. “Okay, how does the bloody thing work?” I asked.

“Oh ... merely a question of wave mechanics,” he whispered. “According to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, a photon has a finite probability of being at any point of space. The salamander uses a simple diffraction process to change the spatial coordinates of psi squared, in effect going from point to point without crossing the intervening distance, much like an electron making a quantum jump, although, to be sure, the analogy is not precise due to the modifying influence of—”

“Never mind,” I sighed. “This confab is becoming a riot. Wouldn’t we do better to—”

“-stick by the original purpose,” agreed Abercrombie, joining us. Ginny followed. Van Linden blacked Vittorio’s eye while Jasper threw chalk at both of them. Our rump group went over near the door.

“I’ve already found the answer to our problem,” said Abercrombie, “but I’ll need help. A transformation spell. We’ll turn the salamander into something we can handle more easily.”

“That’s dangerous,” said Ginny. “You’ll need a really strong T-spell, and that sort can backfire. What happens then is unpredictable.”

Abercrombie straightened himself with a look of pained nobility. “For you, my dear, no hazard is too—

She regarded him with admiration. It does take guts to use the ultimate runes. “Let’s go,” she said. “I’ll help.”

Griswold plucked at my arm. “I don’t like this, Mr. Matuchek,” he confided. “The Art is too unreliable. There ought to be some method grounded in nature and nature’s quantitative laws.”

“Yeah”, I said disconsolately. “But what?” I paddled after Ginny and Abercrombie, who had their heads together over the handbook. Griswold marched beside me and Svartalf made a gesture with his tail at the Trismegistus faculty. They were too embroiled to notice.

We went out past an enraged but well-cowed squad of cops. The Physical Sciences hall stood nearby, and its chemistry division held stuff that would be needed. We entered an echoing gloom.

The freshman lab, a long room full of workbenches; shelves, and silence, was our goal. Griswold switched on the lights and Abercrombie looked around. “But we’ll have to bring the salamander here,” he said. “We can’t do anything except in its actual presence.”

“Go ahead and make ready,” the girl told him. “I know how to fetch the beast. A minor transformation—” She laid out some test tubes, filled them with various powders, and sketched her symbols on the floor. Those ball-point wands are handy.

“What’s the idea?” I asked.

“Oh, get out of the way,” she snapped. I told myself she was only striking at her own weariness and despair, but it hurt. “We’ll use its vanity, of course. I’ll prepare some Roman candles and rockets and stuff ... shoot them off, and naturally it’ll come to show it can do more spectacular things.

Griswold and I withdrew into a corner. This was big-league play. I was frankly scared, and the little scientist’s bony knees were beating a tattoo in march time. Even Ginny-yes, sweat beaded that smooth forehead. If this didn’t work, we here were probably done for: either the salamander or the backlash of the spell could finish us. And we had no way of knowing whether the beast had grown too strong for a transformation.

The witch got her fireworks prepared, and went to an open window and leaned out. Hissing balls of blue and red, streamers of golden sparks, flew skyward and exploded.

Abercrombie had completed his diagrams. He turned to smile at us. “It’s all right,” he said. “Everything under control. I’m going to turn the salamander’s energy into matter. E equals m c squared, you know. Just fight me a Bunsen burner, Matuchek, and set a beaker of water over it. Griswold, you turn these lights off and the Polaroid bulbs on. We need polarized radiation.”

We obeyed, though I hated to see an old and distinguished man acting as lab assistant to this patronizing slick-paper adman’s dream. “You sure it’ll work?” I asked.

“Of course,” he smiled. “I’ve had experience. I was in the Quartermaster Corps during the war.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but turning dirt into K rations isn’t the same thing as transforming that monster. You and your experience!”

Suddenly and sickly, remembering how he had bungled with the Hydro, I realized the truth. Abercrombie was confident, unafraid-because he didn’t know enough!

For a minute I couldn’t unfreeze my muscles. Griswold fiddled unhappily with some metallic samples. He’d been using them the other day for freshman experiments, trying to teach us the chemical properties; Lord, it seemed a million years ago ...

“Ginny!” I stumbled toward her where she stood at the window throwing rainbows into the air. “My God, darling, stop—”

Crack! The salamander was in the room with us.

I lurched back from it, half-blinded. Grown hideously bigger, it filled the other end of the lab, and the bench tops smoked.

“Oh, So!” The voice of Fire blasted our eardrums. Svartalf shot to a shelf top and upset bottles of acid onto the varmint. It didn’t notice. “So, small moist pests, you would try to outdo Me!”

Abercrombie and Ginny lifted their wands and shouted the few brief words of transformation.

Crouched back into my corner, peering through a sulfurous reek of fumes, I saw Ginny lurch and then jump for safety. She must have sensed the backlash. There came a shattering explosion and the air was full of flying glass.

My body shielded Griswold, and the spell didn’t do more to me than turn me lupe me. Ginny was on her hands and knees behind a bench, half-unconscious ... but unhurt, unhurt, praise the good Powers forever. Svartalf—a Pekingese dog yapped on the shelf. Abercrombie was gone, but a chimpanzee in baggy tweeds stuttered wailing toward the door.

A fire-blast rushed before the ape. He whirled, screamed, and shinnied up a steam pipe. The salamander arched its back and howled with laughter.

“You would use your tricks on Me? Almighty Me, terrible Me, beautiful Me? Ha, they bounce off like water from a hot skillet! And I, I, I am the skillet which is going to fry you!”

Somehow, the low-grade melodrama of its speech was not in the least ridiculous. For this was the childish, vainglorious, senselessly consuming thing which was loose on earth to make ashes of men and the homes of men.

Under the Polaroids, I switched back to human and rose to my feet behind a bench. Griswold turned on a water faucet and squirted a jet with his finger. The salamander hissed in annoyance-yes, water still hurt, but we had too little liquid here to quench it, you’d need a whole lake by this time—It swung its head, gape-mouthed, aimed at Griswold, and drew a long breath.

All is vanity....

I reeled over to the Bunsen burner that was heating a futile beaker of water. Ginny looked at me through scorched bangs. The room roiled with heat, sweat rivered off me. I didn’t have any flash of genius, I acted on raw instinct and tumbled memories.

“Kill us,” I croaked. “Kill us if you dare. Our servant is more powerful than you. He’ll hound you to the ends of creation.”

“Your servant?” Flame wreathed the words.

“Yeah ... I mean yes . . . our servant, that Fire which fears not water!”

The salamander stepped back a pace, snarling. It was not yet so strong that the very name of water didn’t make it flinch. “Show me!” it chattered. “Show me! I dare you!”

“Our servant ... small, but powerful,” I rasped. “Brighter and more beautiful than you, and above harm from the Wet Element.” I staggered to the jars of metal samples and grabbed a pair of tongs.

“Have you the courage to look on him?”

The salamander bristled. “Have I the courage? Ask rather, does it dare confront Me?”

I flicked a glance from the corner of my eye. Ginny had risen and was gripping her wand. She scarcely breathed, but her eyes were narrowed.

There was a silence. It hung like a world’s weight in that room, smothering what noises remained: the crackle of fire, Abercrombie’s simian gibber, Svartalf s indignant yapping. I took a strip of magnesium in the tongs and held it to the burner flame.

It burst into a blue-white actinic radiance from which I turned dazzled eyes. The salamander was less viciously brilliant. I saw the brute accomplish the feat of simultaneously puffing itself up and shrinking back.

“Behold!” I lifted the burning strip. Behind me, Ginny’s rapid mutter came: “O Indra, Abaddon, Lucifer—

The child mind, incapable of considering more than one thing at a time . . . but for how long a time? I had to hold its full attention for the hundred and twenty seconds required.

“Fire,” said the salamander feverishly. “Only another fire, one tiny piece of that Force from which I came.”

“Can you do this, buster?”

I plunged the strip into the beaker. Steam puffed from the water, it boiled and bubbled—and the metal went on burning!

“—abire ex orbis terrestris—”

“Mg plus H20 yields Mg0 plus H2,” whispered Griswold reverently.

“It’s a trick!” screamed the salamander. “It’s impossible! If even I cannot—No!”

“Stay where you are!” I barked in my best Army manner. “Do you doubt that my servant can follow you wherever you may flee?”

“I’ll kill that little monster!”

“Go right ahead, chum,” I agreed. “Want to fight the duel under the ocean?”

Whistles skirled above our racket. The police had seen through these windows.

“I’ll show you, I will!” The roar was almost a sob. I ducked behind the bench, pulling Griswold with me. A geyser of flame rushed were I had been.

“Nyaah, nyaah, nyaah,” I called. “You can’t catch me! Scaredy-cat!”

Svartalf gave me a hard look.

The floor trembled as the elemental came toward me, not going around the benches but burning its way through them. Heat clawed at my throat. I spun down toward darkness.

And it was gone. Ginny cried her triumphant “Amen!” and displaced air cracked like thunder.

I lurched to my feet. Ginny fell into my arms. The police entered the lab and Griswold hollered something about calling the fire department before his whole building whiffed off in smoke. Abercrombie scampered out a window and Svartalf jumped down from the shelf. He forgot that a Pekingese isn’t as agile as a cat, and his popeyes bubbled with righteous wrath.

“Keek-eek-eek!” said Abercrombie. “Yip-yip-yip!” said Svartalf.