The monster squared off slowly. It didn’t move like a fighter; it seemed to rely on static fire power, like a battle-tank. It reached out a tentacle whose end opened slowly into a steaming nozzle. Almarish snapped away as a squirt of sulfurous matter gushed from the tip.
With a lively blow the sorcerer slashed off the tentacle, which scuttled for shelter. The monster proper let out a yell of pain. One of its lionlike paws slapped down and sidewise at Almarish; he stood his ground and let the thing run into the dirk its full length, then jumped inside the thing’s guard and scaled its shoulder.
“No fair!” squalled the monster.
He replied with a slash that took off an ear. The creature scratched frantically for him, but he easily eluded the clumsy nails that raked past its hide. As he danced over the skin, stabbing and slashing more like a plowman than a warrior, the nails did fully as much damage as he did.
Suddenly, treacherously, the monster rolled over. Almarish birled it like a log in a pond, harrowing up its exposed belly as it lay on its back.
Back on its feet again, the thing was suddenly still. The sorcerer, catching his breath, began to worry. The squawking pants that had been its inhalations and exhalations had stopped. But it wasn’t dead, he knew. The thing was holding its breath. But why was it doing that?
The temperature of the skin began to rise, sharply. So, thought Almarish, it was trying to smoke him off by containing all its heat! He scrambled down over its forehead. The nostril flaps were tight shut. Seemingly, it breathed only by its middle head, the one he was exploring.
His heels were smoking, and the air was growing superheated. Something had to be done, but good and quick.
With a muttered prayer, Almarish balanced the dirk in his hand and flung it with every ounce of his amazing brawn. Then, not waiting to see the results, he jumped down and ran frantically to the nearest rock. He dodged behind it and watched.
The dirk had struck home. The nostril flaps of the monster had been pinned shut. He chuckled richly to himself as the thing pawed at its nose. The metallic skin was beginning to glow red-hot, then white.
He ducked behind the rock, huddled close to it as he saw the first faint hairline of weakness on the creature’s glowing hide.
Crash! It exploded like a thunderclap. Parts whizzed past the rock like bullets, bounced and skidded along the ground, fusing rocks as they momentarily touched.
Almarish looked up at last. La Bete Joyeux was scattered over most of the plateau.
Almarish found the head at last. It had cooled down considerably; he fervently hoped that it had not dried out. With the handle of his dirk he pried up the eyelid and began a delicate operation.
Finally the dead-white sac was in his hands. Unstoppering the vial, he carefully milked the tear gland into it.
“Moira,” he said gently, shaking her.
“You ox!”
She was awake in a moment, ill-tempered as ever.
“What is it now?”
“Your vial,” he said, placing it on his palm beside her.
“Well, set it down on the ground. Me, too.” He watched as she tugged off the stopper and plunged her face into the crystal-clear liquid.
Then, abruptly, he gasped. “Here,” he said, averting his eyes. “Take my cloak.”
“Thanks,” said the tall young lady with a smile. “I didn’t think, for the moment, that my clothes wouldn’t grow when I did.”
“Now—would you care to begin at the beginning?”
“Certainly. Moira O’Donnel’s my name. Born in Dublin. Located in Antrim at the age of twenty-five, when I had the ill luck to antagonize a warlock named McGinty. He shrank me and gave me a beastly temper. Then, because I kept plaguing him, he banished me to these unreal parts.
“He was hipped on the Irish literary renaissance—Yeats, AE, Joyce, Shaw and the rest. So he put a tag on the curse that he found in one of Lord Dunsany’s stories, about the tears of la Bete Joyeux. In the story it was ‘the gladsome beast,’ and Mac’s French was always weak.
“What magic I know I picked up by eavesdropping. You can’t help learning things knocking around the planes, I guess. There were lots of bits that I filed away because I couldn’t use them until I achieved full stature again. And now, Almarish, they’re all yours. I’m very grateful to you.” He stared into her level green eyes. “Think you could get us back to Ellil?”
“Like that!” She snapped her fingers.
“Good. Those rats—Pike and the rest—caught me unawares, but I can raise an army anywhere on a week’s notice and take over again.”
“I knew you could do it. I’m with you, Almarish, Packer, or whatever your name is.”
Diffidently he said, “Moira, you grew very dear to me as you used to snore away in my pocket.”
“I don’t snore!” she declared.
“Anyway—you can pick whichever name you like. It’s yours if you’ll have it.”
After a little while she said, smiling into his eyes:
“My size. Only a little taller, of course.”
1972
The Meeting
C.M. Kornbluth was seventeen years old and Frederik Pohl was not yet twent when the two began writing stories together. Their collaborations spanned a period of about twenty years and produced roughly 35 short stories and seven novels (including GLADIATOR-AT-LAW, WOLFBANE, and THE SPACE MERCHANTS). Cyril Kornbluth died in 1958, still a young man, but now that Fred Pohl is writing sf again we have this new story (based on notes made while Kornbluth was alive) to add to a memorable body of work under the most famous collaborative byline in sf.
HARRY VLADEK WAS TOO large for a man for his Volkswagen, but he was too poor a man to trade it in, and as things were going he was going to stay that way a long time. He applied the brakes carefully (“Master cylinder’s leaking like a sieve, Mr. Vladek; what’s the use of just fixing up the linings?”-but the estimate was a hundred and twenty-eight dollars, and where was it going to come from?) and parked in the neatly graveled lot. He squeezed out of the door, the upsetting telephone call from Dr. Nicholson on his mind, locked the car up and went into the school building.
The Parent-Teachers Association of the Bing-ham County School for Exceptional Children was holding its first meeting of the term. Of the twenty people already there, Vladek knew only Mrs. Adler, the principal, or headmistress, or owner of the school. She was the one he needed to talk to most, he thought. Would there be any chance to see her privately? Right now she sat across the room at her scuffed golden oak desk in a posture chair, talking in low, rapid tones with a gray-haired woman in a tan suit. A teacher? She seemed too old to be a parent, although his wife had told him some of the kids seemed to be twenty or more.
It was 8:30 and the parents were still driving up to the school, a converted building that had once been a big country house-almost a mansion. The living room was full of elegant reminders of that. Two chandeliers. Intricate vineleaf molding on the plaster above the dropped ceiling. The pink-veined white marble fireplace, unfortunately prominent because of the unsuitable andirons, too cheap and too small, that now stood in it. Golden oak sliding double doors to the hall. And visible through them a grim, fireproof staircase of concrete and steel. They must, Vladek thought, have had to rip out a beautiful wooden thing to install the fireproof stairs for compliance with the state school laws.
People kept coming in, single men, single women, and occasionally a couple. He wondered how the couples managed their baby-sitting problem. The subtitle on the school’s letterhead was “an institution for emotionally disturbed and cerebrally damaged children capable of education.” Harry’s nine-year-old Thomas was one of the emotionally disturbed ones. With a taste of envy he wondered if cerebrally damaged children could be babysat by any reasonably competent grownup. Thomas could not. The Vladeks had not had an evening out together since he was two, so that tonight Margaret was holding the fort at home, no doubt worrying herself sick about the call from Dr. Nicholson, while Harry was repres
enting the family at the PTA.
As the room filled up, chairs were getting scarce. A young couple was standing at the end of the row near him, looking around for a pair of empty seats. “Here,” he said to them. ‘Til move over.” The woman smiled politely and the man said thanks. Emboldened by an ashtray on the empty seat in front of him, Harry pulled out his pack of cigarettes and offered it to them, but it turned out they were nonsmokers. Harry lit up anyway, listening to what was going on around him.
Everybody was talking. One woman asked another, “How’s the gall bladder? Are they going to take it out after all?” A heavy, balding man said to a short man with bushy sideburns, “Well, my accountant says the tuition’s medically deductible if the school is for psychosomatic, not just for psycho. That we’ve got to clear up.” The short man told him positively, “Right, but all you need is a doctor’s letter; he recommends the school, refers the child to the school.” And a very young woman said intensely, “Dr. Shields was very optimistic, Mrs. Clerman. He says without a doubt the thyroid will make Georgie accessible. And then-“ A light-coffee-colored black man in an aloha shirt told a plump woman, “He really pulled a whig-ding over the weekend, two stitches in his face, busted my fishing pole in three places.” And the woman said, “They get so bored. My little girl has this thing about crayons, so that rules out coloring books altogether. You wonder what you can do.”
Harry finally said to the young man next to him, “My name’s Vladek. I’m Tommy’s father; he’s in the beginners group.”
“That’s where ours is,” said the young man. “He’s Vern. Six years old. Blond like me. Maybe you’ve seen him.”
Harry did not try very hard to remember. The two or three times he had picked Tommy up after class he had not been able to tell one child from another in the great bustle of departure. Coats, handkerchiefs, hats, one little girl who always hid in the supply closet and a little boy who never wanted to go home and hung onto the teacher. “Oh, yes,” he said politely.
The young man introduced himself and his wife; they were named Murray and Celia Logan. Harry leaned over the man to shake the wife’s hand, and she said, “Aren’t you new here?”
“Yes. Tommy’s been in the school a month. We moved in from Elmira to be near it.” He hesitated, then added, “Tommy’s nine, but the reason he’s in the beginners group is that Mrs. Adler thought it would make the adjustment easier.”
Logan pointed to a suntanned man in the first row. “See that fellow with the glasses? He moved here from Texas. Of course, he’s got money.”
“It must be a good place,” Harry said questioningly.
Logan grinned, his expression a little nervous.
“How’s your son?” Harry asked.
“That little rascal,” said Logan. “Last week I got him another copy of the My Fair Lady album, I guess he’s used up four or five of them, and he goes around singing ‘luv-er-ly, luv-er-ly.’ But look at you? No.”
“Mine doesn’t talk,” said Harry.
Mrs. Logan said judiciously, “Ours talks. Not to anybody, though. It’s like a wall.”
“I know,” said Harry, and pressed. “Has, ah, has Vern shown much improvement with the school?”
Murray Logan pursed his lips. “I would say, yes. The bedwetting’s not too good, but life’s a great deal smoother in some ways; You know, you don’t hope for a dramatic breakthrough. But in little things, day by day, it goes smoother. Mostly smoother. Of course there are setbacks.”
Harry nodded, thinking of seven years of setbacks, and two years of growing worry and puzzlement before that. He said, “Mrs. Adler told me that, for instance, a special outbreak of destructiveness might mean something like a plateau in speech therapy. So the child fights it and breaks out in some other direction.”
“That too,” said Logan, “but what I meant—Oh, they’re starting.”
Vladek nodded, stubbing out his cigarette and absent-mindedly lighting another. His stomach was knotting up again. He wondered at these other parents, who seemed so safe and, well, untouched. Wasn’t it the same with them as with Margaret and himself? And it had been a long time since either of them had felt the world comfortable around them, even without Dr. Nicholson pressing for a decision. He forced himself to lean back and look as tranquil as the others.
Mrs. Adler was tapping her desk with a ruler. “I think everybody who is coming is here,” she said. She leaned against the desk and waited for the room to quiet down. She was short, dark, plump and surprisingly pretty. She did not look at all like a competent professional. She looked so unlike her role that, in fact, Harry’s heart had sunk three months ago when their correspondence about admitting Tommy had been climaxed by the long trip from Elmira for the interview. He had expected a steel-gray lady with rimless glasses, a Valkyrie in a white smock like the nurse who had held wriggling, screaming Tommy while waiting for the suppository to quiet him down for his first EEG, a disheveled old fraud, he didn’t know what. Anything except this pretty young woman. Another blind alley, he had thought in despair. Another, after a hundred too many already.
First, “Wait for him to outgrow it.” He doesn’t. Then, “We must reconcile ourselves to God’s will.” But you don’t want to. Then give him the prescription three tunes a day for three months. And it doesn’t work. Then chase around for six months with the Child Guidance Clinic to find out it’s only letterheads and one circuit-riding doctor who doesn’t have tune for anything. Then, after four dreary, weepy weeks of soul-searching, the State Training School, and find out it has an eight-year waiting list. Then the private custodial school, and find they’re fifty-five hundred dollars a year-without medical treatment!-and where do you get fifty-five hundred dollars a year? And all the time everybody warns you, as if you didn’t know it: “Hurry! Do something! Catch it early! This is the critical stage! Delay is fatal!” And then this soft-looking little woman; how could she do anything?
She had rapidly shown him how. She had questioned Margaret and Harry incisively, turned to Tommy, rampaging through that same room like a rogue bull, and turned his rampage into a game. In three minutes he was happily experimenting with an indestructible old windup cabinet Victrola, and Mrs. Adler was saying to the Vladeks, “Don’t count on a miracle cure. There isn’t any. But improvements, yes, and I think we can help Tommy.”
Perhaps she had, thought Vladek bleakly. Perhaps she was helping as much as anyone ever could.
Meanwhile Mrs. Adler had quickly and pleasantly welcomed the parents, suggested they remain for coffee and get to know each other, and introduced the PTA president, a Mrs. Rose, tall, prematurely gray and very executive. “This being the first meeting of the term,” she said, “there are no minutes to be read; so we’ll get to the committee work reports. What about the transportation problem, Mr. Baer?”
The man who got up was old. More than sixty; Harry wondered what it was like to have your life crowned with a late retarded child. He wore all the trappings of success-a four-hundred-dollar suit, an electronic wrist watch, a large gold fraternal ring. In a slight German accent he said, “I was to the district school board and they are not cooperating. My lawyer looked it up and the trouble is all one word. What the law says, the school board may, that is the word, may reimburse parents of handicapped children for transportation to private schools. Not shall, you understand, but may. They were very frank with me. They said they just didn’t want to spend the money. They have the impression we’re all rich people here.”
Slight sour laughter around the room.
“So my lawyer made an appointment, and we appeared before the full board and presented the case—we don’t care, reimbursement, a school bus, anything so we can relieve the transportation burden a little. The answer was no.” He shrugged and remained standing, looking at Mrs. Rose, who said:
“Thank you, Mr. Baer. Does anybody have any suggestions?”
A woman said angrily, “Put some heat on them. We’re all voters!”
A man said, “Publicity,
that’s right. The principle is perfectly clear in the law, one taxpayer’s child is supposed to get the same service as another taxpayer’s child. We should write letters to the papers.”
Mr. Baer said, “Wait a minute. Letters I don’t think mean anything, but I’ve got a public relations firm; Til tell them to take a little time off my food specialties and use it for the school. They can use their own know-how, how to do it; they’re the experts.”
This was moved, seconded and passed, while Murray Logan whispered to Vladek, “He’s Marijane Garlic Mayonnaise. He had a twelve-year-old girl in very bad shape that Mrs. Adler helped in her old private class. He bought this building for her, along with a couple of other parents.”
Harry Vladek was musing over how it felt to be a parent who could buy a building for a school that would help your child, while the committee reports continued. Some time later, to Harry’s dismay, the business turned to financing, and there was a vote to hold a fund-raising theater party for which each couple with a child in the school would have to sell “at least” five pairs of orchestra seats at sixty dollars a pair. Let’s get this straightened out now, he thought, and put up his hand.
“My name is Harry Vladek,” he said when he was recognized, “and I’m brand new here. In the school and in the county. I work for a big insurance company, and I was lucky enough to get a transfer here so my boy can go to the school. But I just don’t know anybody yet that I can sell tickets to for sixty dollars. That’s an awful lot of money for my kind of people.”
Mrs. Rose said, “It’s an awful lot of money for most of us. You can get rid of your tickets, though. We’ve got to. It doesn’t matter if you try a hundred people and ninety-five say no just as long as the others say yes.”
He sat down, already calculating. Well, Mr. Crine at the office. He was a bachelor and he did go to the theater. Maybe work up an office raffle for another pair. Or two pairs. Then there was, let’s see, the real estate dealer who had sold them the house, the lawyer they’d used for the closing—
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