The Reluctant Shaman and Other Fantastic Tales

MR. ARSON

As Clem Buckminster, M. H. S. I. salesman for the Bronx, hung up a slightly overheated telephone, his superior cocked an eye at him and asked: "Was that the Dangerous Dane?"

Buckminster snickered dutifully. "Yeah, that was Grin-nig. He's all excited about somepin. He wants me to come—"

"Does he want to shift his course again?" inquired the sales manager for the New York district

"No; least he didn't say that. He wouldn't tell—"

"I've told you before, Clem," continued Andrews, "that this business of signing Grinnig up for a new course every month has got to stop. Let him finish one of the old ones. He's begun courses in—let me see—air conditioning, highway engineering, structural drafting, fruit growing, welding, and oil heating, and he's never gotten beyond the first lesson of any."

"But" pleaded Buckminster, "every time he finishes the first lesson, he calls me in and says, 'To hell with it Gimme another.' 'Scuse me, Miss Cope." The last was to Andrews' secretary. "What can I do?"

"Let him slide. He's not the type that can benefit from a correspondence course."

"But I gotta earn my living. Hi, Harry!" This was to Harrison Galt, M. H. S. I. salesman for Brooklyn, who had just come in to collect the daily list of inquiries from prospective students in his district, which had been forwarded from the home office in Paterson.

Andrews continued implacably: "I know you want your half of the ten-dollar deposit. But I have specific instructions from the home office to stop signing up these light-weights who just happen to be short on sales resistance. They figured that handling their courses costs more than it's worth. Anyway, it gives the Mercury Home Study Institute a bad name."

"Anyway," sulked Buckminster, "I never signed up no Earl Browder, like one of our competitors did."

Andrews, a dryly precise man, ignored this. He asked: "What about Grinnig? Does he want to shift from oil heating to bee keeping?"

"He ain't on oil heating," said Buckminster. "He's on that new one, nigromancy."

"Huh?"

"Yeah, doncha remember? Some new idear of the School of Shop Practice. We ain't even got a folder on it, but when Grinnig seen it in one of the ads, he just had to have it. So I wrote Paterson and asked: would they please send Grinnig the first lesson booklet as soon as it was off the press."

Galt put in a word: "Speaking of the School of Shop Practice, one of my prospects told me he thought it would have to do with legal shenanigans, how to kite checks and such. Get it? He thought I meant sharp practice!"

"Ha, ha," said Buckminster. "The dialeck some of these guys talk, you wonder how they understand themselves. Well, so long, Mr. Andrews, I gotta—"

"Remember, Clem, no more changes of course!" interrupted Andrews. "What is this nigromancy course, anyway? Something to do with race relations?"

Buckminster shrugged. "I dunno. Neither did Grinnig. That's why he wanted it."

"He's crazy," said Andrews. "And so are some of the heads in Paterson, I suspect. Nigromancy! Since the Old Man's been sick, Thurtle's been running the homer office, practically." Julian Thurtle was the head of the School of Shop Practice.

"So long, Clem," said Galt. "One of these days, the Dangerous Dane's gonna remember all those deposits you talked him outa, and take a poke at you."

"Grinnig's all right," grinned Buckminster. "He gets in fights because he's just an overgrown kid. That's it, an overgrown kid. But him and me get along fine. 'By." And Clem Buckminster, an inconspicuous figure of forty-odd with abundant but graying hair, went out softly singing:

Buckminster first sought Carl Grinnig at his normal place of employment, having assumed from Grinnig's wild talk that he was telephoning from there. But the shop head of the Alliance Oil Burner Co. informed Buckminster that the company's able but erratic mechanic was not in, allegedly because of sickness.

So the M. H. S. I. salesman rattled over to East Tremont Avenue and turned north toward the boardinghouse where Grinnig lived. This was a large, wooden, frame building with a front porch and wooden scrollwork.

At the first intersection, a policeman held up Buck-minster's car with a decisive "Not this way, buddy!" Buckminster himself could see, beyond the cop, the backs of a small crowd of people, and over the heads of these the upperworks of a fire engine standing in front of Grinnig's house. He turned the car down a side street, parked, and walked toward the scene, observing that the house had several broken windows and that from these, dark streaks of smoke or char ran up the clapboarded sides of the house.

"Mr. Buckminster!" said a voice. It was that of Carl Grinnig, a large, powerful, blond young man with a black eye and a couple of purplish discolorations about the jaw. He seized a flabby Buckminster arm in one huge hand.

"Yeah?" said Buckminster, suppressing the desire to wince. "Had a fire?"

"Had a fire? Yust wait till I tell you—"

Grinnig's explanation was drowned by an outburst of sound: exclamations from the crowd, smothered curses from a couple of firemen who ran out of the house to the engine, from which they took a couple of chemical extinguishers and dashed back. People pointed toward a curl of smoke, which rose suddenly from one of the broken windows. Buckminster could hear people running about inside the house, and presently the smoke ceased.

A stout, harassed-looking civilian came out of the house and pushed through the people. Buckminster recognized the man as Grinnig's landlord. Grinnig called out: "Hey, Mr. Feldman! What is it this time?"

Feldman made motions of pulling nonexistent hair. "A book! A book up off the table I was lifting, just a ordinary book it was, and when I open it, into flames it bursts! Right in front of it the gentleman from the insurance company was standing. His own eyes he don't believe! Me, I'm going crazy!" The house owner departed distractedly.

"You see, Mr. Buckminster?" rumbled Grinnig. "It's been like this all morning. First it was a calendar on the wall went up, whoof. Then a mattress caught fire. This book's about the twentieth screwy fire. After the fire department had turned out for five or six of 'em, they yust left an engine here and guys sitting in every room with chemical extinguishers."

"Did you get hurt in the fires?" asked Buckminster, eying the mechanic's obvious contusions.

"Naw, that was just a little fight with a coupla sailors. Di'n't amount to nothing on account of there was only three of them. But I gotta see you, quick."

"What have I got to do with—" began the correspondence-course salesman, but Grinnig shushed him warningly.

"We gotta talk alone somewheres. Come on, maybe there ain't nobody in old man Feldman's garage." And Grinnig dragged Buckminster willy-nilly up the driveway, growled, "Beat it, you kids," to a pair of small boys who were watching events from the roof of the two-car garage, and shoved the salesman within.

"Look, Mr. Buckminster," said the mechanic, "it's that nigromancy course you sold me."

"What is?" queried Buckminster.

"That made these here fires. But don't you say nothing about it," he added ominously.

"Course I wouldn't," said Buckminster hastily. "After all, we got a reputation to protect, too. But how come the course had anything to do with the fires? Don't make sense. If you don't like it, why doncha change?"

"I'm not interested in changing my course, but in stopping these here fires!" persisted Grinnig.

"We got a swell new course in aviation mechanics," said Buckminster. "Wuncha like to be an aviation mechanic? Big future; not like messing around with these smelly oil boiners. You could make some real dough with—"

"Listen," said Grinnig with strained patience, "every time you sell me a new course, you tell me it'll make me rich. Well, I ain't rich. If they're so hot, why don't you take one? How come you're still selling 'em on commission and living on coffee and sinkers?"

Buckminster shook his head sadly. "Too late for me. Shoulda started when I was a young guy like you, steada playing around and wasting my dough. My future's behind me." (This was all fairly close to the truth.) "Now, about that avi—"

"Shut up!" bellowed Grinnig. "I don't wanna hear nothing about no new courses."

The burly mechanic fished out of a pocket a six-by-nine booklet with stiff, green paper covers. "Look at this thing!"

Buckminster read:

Mercury Home Study Institute

NIGROMANCY

by Julian A. Thurtle

(Dean, School of Shop Practice)

Volume 1 Conjuration of Saganes

He turned the cover and looked at the beginning of the text It began:

1. What nigromancy is. The science of nigromancy was defined many years ago by Paracelsus (P. A. T. B. von Hohenheim) as the conjuration, control, and exorcism (banishment) of the elemental spirits of earth, air, fire, and water, called collectively Saganes. Since Paracelsus' time, the knowledge of this science has largely gone out of existence, so that today it is regarded by many as mere superstition. This is incorrect. Used with proper knowledge and care, this science can be as useful to modern technicians as any other. Accordingly, this course, based on recent research into some of the little-known writings of Paracelsus and his contemporaries, has been prepared.

2. Outline of the Course. The first three volumes deal respectively with the conjuration, control, and banishment of elemental spirits. Students are warned not to attempt any experimental conjurations whatever until they have mastered at least three parts and have passed the examination at the end of each volume. The later volumes deal with the more advanced aspects of nigromancy and with allied subjects such as necromancy, hydromancy, enchantment, and sortilege—

Buckminster commented: "Now I know the home office is nuts. What happened?"

"Well," said Grinnig, "I wasn't feeling so good after I finished with those sailors, see? Musta been something I ate. So I called the shop and they said sure, I could have the day off. So I thought I'd see if this course would really do the things it said it would. So I look through the book and find a ritual for conjuring up a salamander. You know what a salamander is; one of those little red things like a lizard."

Buckminster put in: "It says here not to try no conjurations until you finish the first three lessons."

"Yeah, I know, but you think I'm gonna pay for a whole course if I don't know if it works? Anyway, I figure one of those little lizardy things couldn't do no damage."

"And it started the fires? G'wan!"

"Not the salamander; I mean, I didn't get no salamander, but a kind of a ball of fire. It ducked quick into a pair of work pants I had hanging up on my door and set 'em on fire. I grab the pants off the hook to beat the fire out, and the fireball dodges out through the crack of the door, so quick I can't hardly see it. And it's been flying around the house all morning setting fire to things."

"G'wan," repeated Buckminster. "Sure one of those sailors didn't clip you with a piece of pipe or somepin?"

"Naw," said Grinnig scornfully. "I seen what I seen. And I figure I gotta have the third volume of the course right now, on account of it tells how to get rid of these things."

"You can't," replied the salesman. "The second volume oughta be just about off the press, and the third ain't even printed. Anyway, I think you imagined it. Come down to the corner and I'll buy you a beer and tell you about how to be an aviation mechanic."

"I did not imagine it," persisted Grinnig.

"Okay, then, show me how you did it."

"Okay, wise guy, I'll show you. Gimme the book." Grinnig fished out the stub of a pencil, frowned over the diagrams, and slowly drew a number of complicated lines on the concrete floor of the garage. He took out a candle no longer than his thumb, lit it, and placed it on the floor. Then he mumbled a long series of sounds that sounded to Buckminster like continuous double-talk, pausing now and then to draw imaginary figures in the air with his pencil.

Carl Grinnig ended his spiel and shut the lesson book. "Aw right, Mr. Buckminster, you— Yumping Yudas!"

Over one of the diagrams, about ten feet from the two men, something was swiftly materializing. First came smoke and a smell of sulphur dioxide, then a dull-red glow, which brightened to orange. Then they were confronted by what looked like the nude iron statue of a powerfully built man at incandescent temperatures. The heat from the apparition beat on their faces like the glow from an open furnace door, and they began to sweat.

The fire man surveyed Buckminster and Grinnig. When he spoke, it was in a deep, harsh, strongly accented voice: "Where—is—my—fiddle—creature?"

"I dunno what you're talking about," said Grinnig, his fair skin paler than usual.

"Please, mister, go away," added Buckminster. "It's all a mistake!"

"Ha," rasped the newcomer. "Mistake. Mistake. But few mistakes does your trade allow. Where is my salamander?"

Grinnig swallowed and croaked: "You mean that fire thing? It's in that big house in back of you."

The visitor turned his massive head and whistled piercingly. Almost immediately, a sphere of flickering orange flame the size of a soft baseball arrived with a rush, danced up and down in front of its master, and at length snuggled up under his armpit.

The glowing head raised slightly, and the men felt by the increase of heat rather than saw the glowing eyeballs fasten upon them. "And now," said the fire man, "wherefore have ye broken the Treaty?"

"What treaty?" said Grinnig.

"Ye know not? Ha." The apparition put out a hand to lean against the wooden side of the garage. There was an immediate burst of smoke where the hand touched the wall.

"Hi!" yelped Buckminster. The fire man took his hand away with a slight, grim smile, leaving a charred spot the shape of a hand on the wood.

"What, then, do ye know?" he demanded.

"N-not so much," quavered the massive Grinnig. "I yust got this little book from the Mercury Home Study Institute, and I wanted to try it out. So I did a little spell. Please, buddy, who are you and when are you going to let us out of here? It's damned hot!"

The thing smiled even more broadly. "Ye know not my real name even? Ye cannot control me?"

"I ain't come to that part of the course—"

"Ha! 'Tis rare fortune, indeed, that the Covenant should be breached by a brace of such witless bunglers as ye! This much will I tell you: that I am of the race of the

Saldines, which the meddling Paracelsus ignorantly called Rolamandri; one of the peoples of the fire world, even as my little salamander is one of the beasts of the world. When my pet vanished, I suspected some foul doings in your world and watched for another opening of the door, the same which you forthwith furnished me. Ha! Now truly shall Fire come into its own!"

"Whatcha mean?" piped Buckminster.

"I'll show you what I mean! Give me that book!"

Grinnig extended the lesson booklet, and snatched his hand back as the red-hot arm shot out to seize the volume, which instantly went up in a puff of flame.

"Freeze it!" roared the fire elemental. "I should have bethought me of the perishability of your paper. Where can I obtain another such volume?"

"I dunno," babbled Buckminster, "unless you wanna go clear out to Paterson."

"Where?"

"Paterson, New Jersey, where the home office is. They got the whole course out there."

"Then let us forth. But stay! I cannot move abroad without some garment, lest I attract the attention of the general."

"I'll say you would," murmured Buckminster. "You'd attract the whole army."

"Give me, then, your clothing."

"Hey!" squawked the salesman. "They're too small for you, and anyway they'd burn up if you tried to put 'em on!"

"True," growled the Saldine. "I have it! There exists in your world a substance known before the Treaty as salamander skin, which in sooth is but a fabric woven of the strands of a certain fibrous rock. Fetch me a suit of this forthwith!"

"He means asbestos," explained Grinnig.

"Yeah, but how—"

"Fetch it!" thundered the Saldine, "ere I set my pet upon you!" He plucked the salamander from under his armpit and whispered to it. It zipped over close to the men and bobbed menacingly about them. They could feel its heat even in that oven atmosphere.

The elemental added: "But one of you; the smaller. The other shall remain as hostage, and do ye but essay any treason or alarums, I'll embrace the fellow thus!" He grinned fiendishly and wrung an imaginary dishrag with his huge, fiery hands.

"Okay," capitulated Buckminster. "Got any dough, Carl?"

Grinnig wordlessly handed over his wallet. The elemental stood aside long enough to let Buckminster, wincing at the scorching radiation, duck out the garage door. The Saldine called the salamander back to him and fell into a statuesque pose in the doorway, arms folded across his mighty chest and feet spread.

Carl Grinnig, seeing the only easy exit blocked again, sat down wearily on the concrete floor. In the ensuing wait, he recovered some of his aplomb. Although he did not feel like a particularly dangerous Dane, he was too big and tough to be completely intimidated for long.

He remarked: "You never told me who you really are and what you want."

"Ha!" barked the Saldine and relapsed into silence.

"Okay, then I'll have to call you Arson."

"Arson?" The being grinned. "A good name, forsooth. How good, ye have yet no notion."

"How come you talk so funny?"

"Talk so funny?" frowned Arson. "What mean ye? Verily, I speak what was the best English at the time of the Treaty, in your year 1623. I can comprehend that the tongue may have degenerated since then."

Grinnig shed his dripping shirt. A package of cigarettes flopped out of the breast pocket; he took one out and lit it, and blew out the match.

"You!" shouted the elemental suddenly, and advanced with menacing steps. "What mean ye by destroying Fire, in my very presence?"

"B-but ... I just blew out the match. You wouldn't want me to burn my fingers? Or would you?" Grinnig flattened himself against the rear wall of the garage as the heat became intolerable.

"For that," thundered Arson, "ye shall— But not yet, for I need you as hostage. 'Tis such vile comportment that marks you and your kind for their just deserts! I am even informed that ye keep whole companies of men trained to quench fires!"

"You mean the fire departments?" sweated Grinnig. "Yeah, when a house catches fire, they try to put it out, natchly."

"Foul, wanton vandalism!" cried the Saldine. "When my brethren come—" He closed his mouth with a snap and retired, leaving Grinnig red of skin and half fainting from the roasting he had received.

"Hey, Mr. Grinnig!" called Clem Buckminster from outside the garage. "Tell him I got his stuff!"

Arson stood aside to admit the salesman with an armful of canvaslike material.

Buckminster explained: "I got it from a fire-apparatus company; it's one of these here asbestos suits. Got shoes and gloves. I borrowed a pair of tinsnips and some wire and fixed the helmet up so it looks almost like a hat. Looky. Took all our dough, even though it's secondhand."

While Buckminster chuckled with naive pleasure over his ingenuity, the elemental pulled on the suit. When it was all in place and he had put on the altered helmet, he looked quite human except for the orange glow of the face that glared out from under the hat brim. Otherwise he might have been an ash collector or some other dirty-job worker in the costume of his calling. The two men drew long breaths of relief as the searing heat rays were cut off for the nonce.

"Come!" commanded Arson. "To Paterson, Oo Jersey!" He cuffed them roughly ahead of him out of the garage and down the driveway, pausing to cast a speculative eye at Feldman's boardinghouse.

The fire engine was gone from the curb, although a couple of firemen were still in evidence. Several people were stacking furniture in the back yard. None paid attention to the trio, for in the bright sunlight, even the incandescence of Arson's face was not noticeable unless one looked closely.

The Saldine muttered: "Right well has my little pet done, and he shall yet have an opportunity to finish his task. Would I could stop to attend the matter myself! Go on, ye two!"

"Hey!" wailed Buckminster. "Are we gonna walk the whole way?"

"Of a certainty, unless you can provide a conveyance."

The salesman glanced down the street to where his car was parked, its stem just visible around the corner. "I got my car, but—"

"But what?"

"There wouldn't be room for all three of us, and anyway you'd burn it up!"

"Ha," said Arson flatly. He looked about. In the opposite direction a coal truck stood at the curb a block away. He pointed. "Is that one of your conveyances?"

"Yeah, it runs, if that's whatcha mean."

"Then shall we take it. It looks to be made of fire-resisting material."

"But it ain't ours! You can't just steal a truck like that!"

"Say you so?" snarled the fire man. He moved his arms, and the salamander appeared, bobbing up and down from the palm of his outstretched hand. "Shall I set my pet—"

"No, no," amended Buckminster quickly.

As they approached the truck, the men's hearts sank as they observed it to be unoccupied.

"The large one," announced Arson, "shall mount the rear of the conveyance with me. The other shall drive."

Grinnig hesitated just long enough for the elemental to make a move as if to seize him and throw him up into the empty truck bodily; the mechanic scrambled quickly up under his own power. Arson followed more deliberately. The truck's springs creaked as though a considerable load had been added.

When Buckminster nervously slid into the driver's seat, the Saldine banged on the back of the cab. "Can ye hear me?" he bellowed.

"Yeah, sure."

"Good. To Paterson, Oo Jersey, and swiftly!"

To get accustomed to the ponderous vehicle took Clem Buckminster several miles, and then he came to one of the approaches of the George Washington Bridge. Just before he reached the approach, it occurred to him that perhaps trucks were not allowed on the bridge. While he slowed the truck, torn between fear of Arson and fear of the law, a second thought told him that to get pinched was exactly what he wanted. On his whole trip from East Tremont Avenue, he had not seen a single policeman, who belong to a species that vanish like the snows in spring whenever one had a real need for them.

An occasional smell whiffed through the driver's cab; undoubtedly, thought Buckminster, scorched paint. The asbestos suit would eventually warm up so that it radiated almost as much heat as the naked Arson. He pushed the accelerator to the floor as the truck crested the middle of the bridge roadway and roared down the long slope toward the toll booths on the Jersey side.

He began to slow down as the distant blue-coated figures of the toll collectors came into view. Then a banging on the back of the cab informed him that Arson had words for him. They were: "Hasten! No stopping!" When Buckminster continued to apply the brake, he heard a shriek from Grinnig. Arson had snatched off a glove and thrust a fiery hand close to the luckless mechanic's face.

Clem Buckminster speeded up again, looking for a toll booth before which no autos were lined up. He found one, to his disappointment. Well, maybe the truck was too big to squeeze through the restricted opening and would get stuck between the concrete piers. If he had had suicidal courage, he might have chanced deliberately ramming an obstacle, but he was not that kind of person. He sighted on the opening as best he could and steered right through without even scratching the paint.

He was in the midst of the tangle of ramps west of the bridge when he at long last heard the welcome we-e-e-e-ew of a siren. Now he had to stop. As he slowed, a motorcycle pulled alongside. The cop pointed: "Down there!"

Buckminster steered into the less-used ramp indicated and came out on an ordinary street, where he stopped. The cop parked his cycle ahead of the truck and walked back. As he took out his pad he looked up at the cab with an expression more of pity than of anger. He said:

"Say, buddy, don't you know anything about the traffic laws?"

When Buckminster could not answer, the policeman added: "A grown man like you oughta know you can't drive ya truck across the bridge at fifty—"

"Ain't my truck," croaked Buckminster.

"Now listen, buddy, it don't matter whether you're hired to drive—"

"I stole it, see?" said the salesman.

At this the policeman's voice simply dried up, and he stared with his mouth open until a motion on the curb side of the truck attracted his attention. This was Arson, who had descended from the truck body and was walking forward to the motorcycle. The elemental bent over the vehicle with interest.

"Hey, leggo that!" yelled the cop as Arson experimentally wiggled the handle bars.

The Saldine ignored the command and removed his gloves for more intimate contact. As the policeman started toward him, he clamped his red-hot hands on the framework, picked the cycle up, and with a creaking of tortured metal calmly twisted the whole thing out of shape.

Buckminster could see the paint beginning to curl and smoke. A tire burst into flame. Then, with a loud whoof, the gasoline tank went off, and Arson was completely hidden in a vast cloud of flame and smoke. The cop jumped back and banged his elbow against a fender of the truck.

When the smoke cleared and the flames subsided, Arson was standing in a small sea of burning gasoline and still holding the blazing wreck of the cycle. He was unchanged except that his asbestos suit was of a dirtier gray than before.

"It ain't ... isn't real," said the cop to himself, rubbing his elbow.

The elemental now started toward the policeman, an evil grin on his glowing face. As he tramped he raised the motorcycle over his head. The cop shouted something which Buckminster missed, then drew his pistol. The gun barked three times, at a range where a miss was impossible. Each shot was followed by a metallic clang such as one hears after a hit on a shooting-gallery target. Arson grinned more widely and hurled the motorcycle. The cop ducked, but a handle bar struck his head and he tumbled to the concrete as the cycle whizzed past the cab window.

Arson in leisurely manner walked back and climbed into the truck. Far down the street a few civilians were standing and watching, but none seemed eager to investigate. "Hence!" roared the Saldine through the back of the cab.

As he started the truck again, Clem Buckminster, for the first time in some years, prayed.

Before the truck came to the bridge over the Passaic River, the heat and stench which Buckminster now automatically associated with the presence of Arson became too strong for comfort even inside the cab. A glance in the mirror showed a fair-sized cloud of smoke billowing out from the truck body. As the salesman began to slow . the vehicle again, there was a muffled explosion and a burst of flame. The temperature soared alarmingly.

Buckminster pulled on the hand brake and swerved the truck off the road into the weeds. He scrambled out before it stopped rolling, to find the rear half of the truck enveloped in flames and Grinnig and the elemental already descended to earth. The mechanic was a pitiful sight, with blistered hands and singed eyebrows, and black with sweat-streaked coal dust.

"How much farther?" growled the Saldine.

"Coupla miles," said Buckminster resignedly.

"Good. We shall walk!" And Arson, shooing the men ahead of him, set out at a brisk stride.

When they had gone a few hundred yards from the conflagration, a car stopped to investigate the burning truck, and another, until there was a traffic jam on that section of the road. A police siren whined.

"Continue to wend," snapped Arson, "and look not back!"

They passed a section of road that was being widened, although no workmen were in sight at the moment. Several pieces of road machinery stood around on the new strip with canvas covers over their works.

"Conveyances!" muttered Arson. "Let us take another for our own use, as the journey grows tedious."

"Hey!" bleated Buckminster. "The gas tanks'll blow up if you get aboard, same as the truck did!"

"That" grinned the elemental nastily, "will be your misfortune!" He inspected a bulldozer. "Into the driver's seat, small one!"

"Won't do no good, Mr. Arson," protested Buckminster. "Gas tank's empty. See this here gauge?"

"Another, then," snorted Arson. But all the other pieces of equipment proved to have empty fuel tanks as well, the contractor having thriftily drained them before temporarily laying them up.

The last two machines inspected were a pair of road rollers; one a modern gasoline roller, the other an old-fashioned steam roller with a vertical boiler. This, too, lacked fuel, but investigation disclosed that it had water in its boiler.

Arson remarked: "I begin to fathom the operation of these devices. Yet this one appeareth to be of a nature different from the others. What is the quintessence of its active principle?"

Grinnig huskily explained the essentials of steam-engine operation.

"Ha!" grinned Arson. "Whereas it needs nought but a modicum of heat for its operation, forsooth I will furnish that!" He opened the door of the fire box, climbed onto the body, removed a shoe, and thrust a glowing foot into the opening. After a few minutes' wait, the elemental exclaimed: "Why starts this conveyance not? I wax impatient! O fool, think ye to deceive me?"

"No, no!" chirped Buckminster. "Look at the gauge; she'll have steam pressure up any time now!"

They fell into silence, waiting, Buckminster hoping that by some miracle the United States Army would descend on them to rescue him and his student and subdue Mr. Arson, if need be with heavy artillery. But nothing of the sort occurred; automobiles purred by indifferently. Buckminster was bright enough to guess that to yell "Help!" to one or two uncomprehending and ineffective civilians would merely make a bad situation worse.

At last steam was up. Buckminster opened the throttle and spun the steering wheel, which was connected to the forward roller by a worm gear and a chain. With a rapid pop-pop-pop, the machine shudderingly ground over the unfinished road surface, and on the highway, and rattled on into Paterson.

Buckminster stopped the roller and pointed to a group of slightly dilapidated buildings that occupied one of Paterson's outlying blocks. "That's them," he explained. "The Mercury Home Study Institute."

As the party approached the nearest building, Buckminster thought furiously. Arson's vague threats had certainly implied that the fire elemental was up to no good. The salesman suspected that the Saldine wanted to get control of a set of the course booklets in order to conjure up more of his fiendish kind. But if he, Clem, could get hold of one of those booklets first, notably the ones dealing with the control and banishment of elementals, perhaps he could beat Arson to the punch.

So it was in a state of extreme alertness that Buckminster approached the building housing the Mercury printing establishment. He turned to Arson and said:

"The books are all in there. You wait here and I'll—"

"Ha, think you I'm such a dunce? Lead on and I'll follow!"

"But you'll set this old building on fire—"

A shove sent Buckminster staggering toward the nearest doorway. He shrugged and went in, Grinnig and

Arson following. The elemental left black footprints of charred wood on the aged floor.

Down one side of the printshop ran a row of a dozen flat-bed presses, about half of which were in action, their beds weaving back and forth under the cylinders with a continuous loud grumble. On the other side of the aisle along the presses was a row of low hand trucks, each of which bore a pile of large white sheets, varying from a foot to four feet in height. Some of these piles were fresh paper for the presses, some had been printed on one side only and some had been printed on both sides and were waiting to be fed to the folding machines in the bindery, which occupied the other half of the building. At the far end of the bindery were a lot of hand trucks of another kind, on which were stacked hundreds of completed green Mercury lesson booklets and sets of advertising literature. The first printing of Volume 1 of the nigromancy course would probably be here, unless it had been taken over to the school building, whence the booklets were mailed to students and where the students' examinations were corrected.

Buckminster moved slowly down the line of trucks bearing the stacks of big squares of paper. He suppressed a whoop as he found what he wanted: a pile of printed sheets, each sheet having forty-eight pages of text on each side, and among the pages the first page of a Mercury booklet, with a heading:

NIGROMANCY

Volume 2 Control of Saganes

Buckminster ran his eye hastily over the sheet but encountered a difficulty. The pages were not grouped on the sheet in the order in which they would be read, but were so arranged that when the sheet was put in the folding machine, and folded and cut and folded and cut down to final form, these pages would then be in the proper order.

Nevertheless, Buckminster ran over the pages quickly, regardless of the fact that half of them were on the underside of the sheet and half the remainder were upside down. Sure enough, a subtitle caught his eye:

12. Control of Trifertes (Fire Elementals). The salamander, being a trifertis of relatively low intelligence, is comparatively easy to control—

"Excuse me," said a voice behind him, "but have you gents got permission from the office to look around the shop?"

Buckminster started guiltily; then recognized the foreman of the printshop. He said:

"Hello, Jim; 'member me? Clem Buckminster, from the New York office."

"Hello," said the foreman mechanically. "It's pret' near quitting time, you know, and you'll have to—"

"Can you lend me a pencil, Jim?" asked Buckminster quickly. The foreman handed one over, and Buckminster, referring back to the printed sheet, began to draw figures on the floor.

"Ho!" muttered Arson suddenly. "What do ye, wretch?"

The foreman looked at the elemental closely for the first time and backed away in alarm as he observed the orange glow of the Saldine's visage, which was fairly conspicuous indoors.

"Hey," he said, "who is this?"

"Mr. Arson, meet Mr. Slezak," mumbled Buckminster. "But—what's the matter with him?" "He got sunburned, out at Jones Beach," explained the salesman, frowning as he realized that he would have to turn the print sheet over to get the information necessary to complete his ritual.

"I'll say he got burned," said Slezak. "You gotta use discretion. I got some good suntan oil that—"

"I see!" roared Arson. "Ye prepare a spell for me, eh? Bah!" The elemental snatched off his gloves, stuck them between his teeth, and began to assault the pile of sheets with his glowing hands. The upper sheets at once began to burn. Arson whipped them off in great handfuls, crumpled them, and tosssed them, flaming, right and left.

Cries of alarm rang through the printery as smoke and pieces of burning paper rose and spread. At that moment, the five-o'clock bell rang. The printers shut down their presses and raced for the doors, Buckminster and Grinnig among them. The whole middle of the printery was now a mass of blazing paper, from whose invisible center Arson roared with demoniac laughter.

Buckminster caught Grinnig's belt in the rear and hung on lest they be separated in the rush. When they had put a respectable distance between themselves and the now furiously smoking building, they looked back. Workmen were scattered all over the intervening area; clerks and instructors poured out of the school building. Among these Buckminster recognized a small group of men in coats and neckties as the executives.

"Come on," he said to Grinnig. "If we can find Thurtle, maybe we can fix Arson's wagon."

A policeman cleared a way for the fire engines. Buckminster and Grinnig worked their way around the cleared area to where the executives stood. The former called:

"Oh, Mr. Thurtle!"

Julian Thurtle, dean of the School of Shop Practice of the Mercury Home Study Institute, looked about as much like a chimpanzee with a white handle-bar mustache as a man can without actually being a chimpanzee with a white handle-bar mustache. But he was a wise old teacher of technics whose courses, the texts for many of which he wrote himself, were up to college standards and had actually helped many ambitious young men on their way to success, as claimed in his company's advertisements.

He was conversing with the vice president in charge of sales, who was saying: "—of course, it's all insured, but it'll raise Ned with our publishing schedule, not to mention interrupting a lot of the courses. The Education Everywhere Institute won't be sorry to hear of it."

Thurtle sighed. "Yes, yes. Dear me. Maybe we could persuade the I. C. C. to help us out; they're pretty decent fellows—" He saw Buckminster and said: "Yes? Yes? You are ... don't tell me ... Buckmaster of the Philadelphia office, aren't you?"

The salesman corrected him and asked: "Can I see you a minute—"

"Not now, not now, my dear fellow. This is too important. Go on, get your hoses inside the building, you ... you twerps!" The last sentence was addressed in a low voice to the distant firemen.

A policeman approached with a pad in hand. He said: "Oh, Mr. Thurtle—"

"Yes? Yes? Oh, hello, Bill. What—"

"There was an alarm sent out for a gang of pyromaniacs that's terrorizing northern New Jersey," said the cop. "They burned a truck and a coupla houses, and they knocked a cop unconscious at the George Washington Bridge. I was wondering if they mightn't have something to do with this—"

"Yes. No. Dear me, I don't know. I'm too upset, officer."

"Okay, Mr. Thurtle," said the cop and wandered off.

Then there were sudden cries from the crowd. A crew of firemen were advancing on a doorway with a hose, which they played through the aperture, when a large figure in shapeless gray garments came out that door from the burning building. The stream of water from the hose struck the figure squarely, but instead of knocking him back into the building as it should have done, it gave a colossal hiss and turned into a vast cloud of steam. Some witnesses, including Clem Buckminster, had a glimpse of the gray figure dodging out of the steam cloud and vanishing around the corner of the building.

"Good gracious," said Thurtle. "What—"

Buckminster cried: "That's what I wanna see you about, Mr. Thurtle! This here is Carl Grinnig, who got the first lesson in that new course of yours!"

"Oh." Comprehension dawned in Thurtle's eyes, and he followed the salesman unprotesting.

When they were out of earshot of the spectators, Buckminster gave a brief account of events.

"This is terrible!" exclaimed Thurtle. "Mr. Grinnig, you should never have tried an incantation before—"

"How was I to know—" protested Grinnig.

"You couldn't; it was partly my fault, too. I should never have put out that course. The only reason I did it was that I hated to see all that powerful scientific knowledge going to waste, and I did want to put one over on our competitors. I got hold of a copy of Paracelsus' 'Ex Libris de Nymphis, Sylvanis, etc.'; not the abridgment published by Nissensis of Danzic in 1566, which omits all the effective spells, but the last original— Well, that's water over the dam; the question is, what'll we do?"

"I was just gonna ask you that," said Buckminster.

"Yes, yes, I suppose so. It's a difficult problem. From what you've told me, the Rolamander is practically indestructible by physical means; water and bullets don't bother him in the least"

"How about freezing him?" asked Grinnig.

"I don't know; I think you'd practically have to incase him in an iceberg. He gets his energy from the fire world."

Buckminster here suggested: "Maybe we could lure him into a big refrigerator and shut the door!" "Not likely; he's too crafty."

"We could call out the army," said Grinnig hopefully. "They could bomb him."

"Perhaps; but the time we convinced them, he'd have found a way to let his fellow hellions into this world."

Buckminster asked: "What does he wanna do that for?"

"To burn everything combustible, I suspect. And don't ask me why they want to burn things. They just do."

"Unreasonable sorta guys," commented the little salesman.

"Not necessarily; it's that their scale of moral values is entirely different from ours. We can't understand them. Fire's a good servant but an ill master, you know. Let's see; let's see. The printed nigromancy course is no more; the first two volumes were all in the printshop, except for Grinnig's copy, and those that weren't burned up will be ruined by the water. The manuscript in the typesetting room went, too, I fancy. There remains only my copy of the manuscript. Neither we nor Mr. Arson want that destroyed; we want to use it to banish him, and he wants to use it to invoke his fellow Rolamanders. But if he finds us with it, he'll force us to perform the conjuration spell on pain of a horrible death, since he can't handle the papers himself without burning them."

Buckminster asked: "Couldn't we pretend to do the conjuring spell, but really do the banishing spell?"

"That's the trouble; he'd know in a minute we were trying to fool him, and with his fiery disposition you can imagine what would happen. These spells aren't simple things that you can say 'hocus pocus' and the elemental vanishes, you know. Since he escaped from Grinnig's control, we'd have to get him back into a servile state first, and I confess I'm not sure how to do it. Dear, dear. Oh, what's he wearing?"

"An asbestos fire fighter's suit," responded Buckminster.

"Aha, now perhaps—" Thurtle broke off and stared past the other two men, horror growing in his face.

"Ha!" The rasping monosyllable and the feeling of warmth on their backs told Buckminster and Grinnig that their enemy was behind them. "Foolish wights, I grow weary of these pastimes. Fetch me forthwith a set of the rest of those books!"

Thurtle spoke: "I ... I'm sorry, Mr. Arson, but they're all destroyed. No, no, don't blame us, old fellow; you started the fire yourself!"

"So I did," grinned Arson. "But I know something of the habits of you of the Cold World. Do not try to tell me that all copies of the work were burned up; you would have an extra somewhere. Lead me to it, and attempt no stratagems such as burning it, unless you wish a speedy but painful death."

"I swear there are no more copies!" cried Thurtle. But Arson simply grinned more widely and began to toss his salamander meaningfully from hand to hand.

"Will you lead me to it, for the last time?" purred the elemental.

"I tell you it doesn't ex—" That was as far as Julian Thurtle got, for the salamander swooped at him and ignited one end of Ms magnificent mustache. Thurtle, with a small shriek, clapped a hand to smother the blaze. When he removed the hand, the right side of the mustace was intact, but of the left wing only a short black stubble on the upper lip remained. The salamander whirled in a small circle around the dean's head.

"All right," groaned Thurtle. "Follow me."

He led them for several blocks into a grimy district, whose buildings were largely devoted to the sale of raw materials, chemicals, and agricultural and industrial machinery. There were few people on the depressing street, most of the people who did business in this neighborhood having gone home to supper.

"Hasten," growled Arson, "for it grows dark, and I cannot wander abroad in this village at night with my face lighting the way like a beacon." His face was in fact becoming pretty conspicuous, though the sun would not set for another hour.

Thurtle stopped the procession in front of an old wooden frame building bearing the sign:

WILLIAMS & GIBBON

Welding Equipment & Supplies

Buckminster almost asked why the devil Thurtle chose to keep the spare copy of his manuscript in such a place, but thought better of it. Thurtle himself said: "Wait here, Mr. Arson, and I'll get the papers."

"Ha, so think you. I'll come with you—"

"Oh, no, you won't, unless you want to set this house on fire, too! Then there really wouldn't be any more copies."

"Very well," grumbled the fire elemental. "I will keep these two as hostages. Do you but attempt a spell behind my back, I shall know, and do them most horribly die!"

Thurtle darted into the building, called, "Tom!" and ran up the stairs.

Buckminster and Grinnig remained uneasily with Arson, who had taken up his statuesque pose in front of the doorway. Buckminster was badly frightened; he was sure that Thurtle was up to something, that it might not work, and that Arson would take it out on him and Grinnig. Maybe the old boy would destroy the manuscript, which would prevent further invocations of elementals, but would leave the invulnerable and vindictive Arson abroad in this world. Buckminster clenched his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering.

A window creaked overhead. Carl Grinnig was too far gone to look up. Clem Buckminster would ordinarily have done so had not the crisis given his otherwise mediocre wits a preternatural sharpness. He fought to control his eyes and face, lest he betray his knowledge of things taking place on the second-story level.

There was a brilliant white flare of light.

Several persons claimed afterward to have seen what happened, but they saw from a distance of a block or more, did not begin to notice until the process was well under way, and told stories differing so widely from each other and from the version of Julian Thurtle, an eminent and respected citizen, that not much credence was given these stories.

The flare was caused by the lighting of a magnesium ribbon stuck in the top of a bucket of gray powder, which Thurtle and his acquaintance, Tom Gibbon, had lowered on a wire from the upstairs window until it was a foot or so over Arson's unsuspecting head. Right after the flash the bottom of the bucket fell out, and a cascade of blindingly incandescent material poured down over Arson while the elemental was just beginning to look up to see what was going on.

Buckminster and Grinnig staggered back, shielding their faces from the scorching heat and blinding light. Buckminster blinked for a few seconds before he could see anything at all.

Where Arson had stood was a shapeless thing about half the stature of a man, which sank and slumped and ran out, across the sidewalk, up and down the gutter, spreading scintillating whiteness over an area twenty feet across. The glare dimmed to a mere yellow that could be looked at directly without scorching the eyeballs, and Julian Thurtle from the upstairs window called: "Fire! You, Buckmaster, turn in the alarm!" In truth, the front of Williams & Gibbon's building had begun to burn; little flames ran up the door posts in businesslike fashion.

An alarm had already been turned in. In a few minutes, a fire truck extended a ladder up to the window. Thurtle and Gibbon scrambled down it, slightly smoke-blackened but otherwise unhurt.

"No, no, no, thank you," Thurtle said to those who helped him off the ladder and asked if he wanted hospitalization. "I'm not hurt, really. Perhaps this poor boy, who tried to get up the stairs to us—" He indicated Grinnig, who displayed several minor bums from his previous experiences.

"Naw," said Grinnig. He grinned and tugged Thurtle and Buckminster aside. "Hey, doc," he said to the former, "whad ya do to the guy?"

"I melted him," said Thurtle.

"What with?"

"Thermite! Arson thought he was pretty hot, but you bet he wasn't so hot as that thermite! I knew Williams & Gibbon had some thermite on their place, and I got Tom Gibbon to help me with the bucket and the fuse.

"That's all, except that if you fellows take my advice, you won't try to tell anyone about Arson or the nigromancy course—which is all gone now anyway—or your adventures today. I'm going to forget the course and stick that manuscript away in a sort of private time capsule."

"I getcha, boss," said Buckminster. "Say, Carl, hadn't we better stop in at a drugstore and smear some of that tannic-acid junk on ya burns?"

Grinnig looked at his blackened hands. "The main thing I want is yust to get washed up."

"Okay, this here joint oughta have a washroom. And while we're fixing you up, I'll tell you all about our swell new course on how to be an aviation mechanic. We'll have to switch you to a new one, and you wanna make some real dough, doncha? Okay. Hey, wassamatta, Carl? I didn't say nothing! HELP!"

Sock!