The Dragon and The George

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "You and me both."

  By the time they had eaten, little time was left. Jim drove back to Stoddard Hall and let Angie out.

  "You'll be through at three?" he asked. "You won't let him keep you overtime?"

  "No," she said, closing the car door and talking to him through the open window. Her voice softened. "Not today. I'll be out here when you pull up."

  "Good," he said; and watched her go up the steps and vanish through one of the big doors.

  Putting the Gorp in gear, he pulled away and around to the other side of the campus to park in his usual space behind the History Building. He had said nothing to Angie, but over lunch a decision had crystallized inside him. He was going to confront Shorles with the demand that he give him his instructorship without any further delay—by the end of spring quarter and the beginning of the first summer session at latest. He ran up the three flights of the back set of stairs and came out into the long, marble floor corridor where most of the top staff members in the department had their offices.

  Shorles was one step above anyone else in the department. He had a secretary in his outer office, who doubled as secretary to the department itself. Jim came through the door now and found her retyping something that looked suspiciously like the manuscript of Shorles' latest paper on the Etruscan roots of modern civilization.

  "Hi, Marge," Jim said. "Is he in?"

  Jim glanced toward the door leading to Shorles' separate office as he spoke, and saw it closed. So he knew Marge's answer almost before she gave it.

  "Not just now," said Marge, a tall, sandy-haired girl in her mid-thirties. "Ted Jellamine's with him. They shouldn't be more than a little while, though. Do you want to wait?"

  "Yes."

  He took one of the hard seats for visitors in the outer office; and, at her desk, Marge resumed typing.

  The minutes crawled slowly by. Another half-hour passed and another quarter-hour on top of that. Suddenly the door burst open and out came Shorles, carrying his ample belly energetically before him and closely followed by Ted Jellamine in cowboy boots and a checkered houndstooth jacket. As they headed for the outer door without pausing, Shorles spoke to his secretary.

  "Marge, I won't be back this afternoon. We're headed for the Faculty Club. If my wife calls, she can find me there."

  Jim had got to his feet automatically as the door opened and taken half a step in pursuit of the two men as they snailed through the room. Noticing him now, Shorles gave him a cheerful wave of a hand.

  "Marvelous news, Jim!" he said. "Ted, here, is going to stay on another year!"

  The door slammed behind both men. Jim stared at it, stunned, then turned to Marge, who looked back at him with sympathy.

  "He just wasn't thinking. That's why he broke the news to you that way," she said.

  "Ha!" said Jim. "He was gloating and you know it!"

  "No," Marge shook her head. "No, really, you're wrong. He and Ted have been close friends for years; and Ted's been under pressure to retire early. But we're a private college with no automatic cost-of-living increases in the pensions, and with this inflation Ted wants to hang on to his job for the present if he still can. He really was just happy for Ted, when it turned out Ted could stay on; and he just didn't think of what that meant to you."

  "Mmph!" said Jim, and stalked out.

  He was all the way back to his parking spot before he calmed down long enough to check his watch. It was almost two-thirty. He had to pick up Angie again in half an hour. He had no time to do much of anything before then, either on his essay, or in the way of his duties as assistant to Shorles—not that he felt overwhelmingly like doing work for Shorles right now. He got into the Gorp, slammed the door and drove off, hardly caring where he went as long as it was away from the campus.

  He turned left on High Street, turned left again on Wallace Drive, and emerged a few minutes later on the Old River Road alongside the Ealing River: two-lane asphalt strip that had been the old route to the neighboring town of Bixley, before Highway Five had been laid over the rolling farmland on a parallel route.

  The old road was normally free of traffic and today was no exception. It was even relatively free from houses and plowed fields, since most of the ground was low-lying and inclined to be marshy. Jim drove along with no particular destination in sight or mind, and gradually the peace of the riverside area through which he was passing began to bring him back to some coolness of mind.

  Gradually he brought himself to consider that possibly Marge had been right and that Ted Jellamine might in his own way have been as concerned about his future and his livelihood as Jim was himself. It was a relief to come around to this point of view, because Ted Jellamine was the one other member of the History Department whom Jim liked personally. Like Jim, he was an individualist. It was only the factors of their situation that made them competitors.

  But, outside of this crumb of comfort, Jim gleaned little happiness out of this new development. Perhaps it was not Ted who was to blame, but the tight economic situation which squeezed them all. Nonetheless, once again Jim caught himself wishing that life and the problems it produced were more concrete and in a position to be attacked more directly.

  He glanced at his watch. It was fifteen minutes till three. Time to head back to Angie. He found a crossroad, turned the Gorp around and drove back toward the campus. Luckily, he had been driving slowly along the river road and was not that far from town. It would not do to have her standing and waiting for him, after all his insistence that she not let Grottwold keep her overtime and make him wait outside.

  He pulled up in front of Stoddard Hall, actually with a couple of minutes to spare. Turning off the motor, he waited. As he sat, he put his mind to work to decide on the best way of breaking the news of his latest blow to Angie. To come up with news of this kind on the same day their hopes of renting the mobile home had been dashed was the worst possible timing. For a short while he played with the notion of simply not saying anything about it today at all. But of course that would never work. She would want to know why he had not told her immediately; and she would be quite right in asking. They would get nowhere if they fell into the habit of hiding bad news from each other out of a mistaken idea of kindness.

  Jim glanced at his watch and was startled to see that while he had been sitting thinking, nearly ten minutes had gone by. Angie was staying overtime, after all.

  Something popped inside Jim. Suddenly he was completely angry—cold angry. Grottwold had pulled his delaying tactics once too often. Jim got out of the Gorp, closed the door and headed up the front steps to the Hall. Inside the big double doors was the main staircase, its shallow stair treads capped with gray granite which had been worn into hollows by student's feet over a number of years. Jim went up them two at a time.

  Three stories up and thirty feet down the hall on the right was the frosted-glass door to the laboratory section in which Grottwold had a ten-foot-square cubicle. Jim went through, saw the door to the cubicle was closed and strode in without knocking.

  Grottwold was standing before what looked like some sort of control panel to Jim's right; and he looked around startledly as Jim burst in. Angie was seated against the far wall in what looked like a dentist's chair, facing Jim, but with her head and the upper part of her face completely covered by what looked like the helmet of the hair dryer in a beauty shop.

  "Angie!" Jim snapped.

  She disappeared.

  Jim stood for a timeless moment, staring at the empty chair and the empty helmet. She could not be gone. She could not have just winked out like that! What he had just seen was impossible. He stood there waiting for his eyes to disavow what he had just seen and return him sight of Angie, still before him.

  "Apportation!"

  The strangled yell from Grottwold jarred Jim out of his half-stunned condition. He swung about to face the tall, shock-haired psychology graduate, who was himself staring at the empty chair and helmet with a bloodless face. Life and purpose came back
to Jim.

  "What is it? What happened?" he shouted at Grottwold. "Where's Angie?"

  "She apported!" stammered Grottwold, still staring at the place where Angie had been. "She really apported! And I was just trying for astral projection—"

  "What?" Jim snarled, turning on him. "What were you trying?"

  "Astral projection! Just astral projection, that's all!" Grottwold yelped. "Just projecting her astral self out of her body. I wasn't even trying to get her to experience an actual projection. All I was hoping for was just enough astral movement to register on the microammeters connected to the plant ganglia I'm using as response indicator. But she apported instead. She—"

  "Where is she?" roared Jim.

  "I don't know! I don't, I swear I don't!" the tall young man's voice climbed the scale. "There's no way I can tell—"

  "You better know!"

  "I don't! I know what the settings on my instruments are; but—"

  Jim took three steps across the room, picked the taller man up by the lapels of his lab jacket and slammed him back against the wall to the left of the instrument panel.

  "GET HER BACK!"

  "I tell you I can't!" yelled Grottwold. "She wasn't supposed to do this; so I wasn't prepared for it! To get her back I'd first have to spend days or even weeks figuring out what happened. Then I'd have to figure out some way of reversing the process. And even if I did, by that time it might turn out to be too late because she'd have moved out of the physical area she's apported to!"

  Jim's head was whirling. It was unbelievable that he should be standing here listening to this nonsense and shoving Grottwold against the wall—but far more believable, at that, than that Angie should really have disappeared. Even now, he could not really believe what had happened.

  But he had seen her disappear.

  He increased his grip on Grottwold's lapels.

  "All right, turkey!" he said. "You get her back here, or I'll start taking you apart right now."

  "I tell you I can't! Stop!—" Grottwold cried as Jim pulled him forward from the wall preparatory to slamming him back against it—or through it, if that was possible. "Wait! I've got an idea."

  Jim hesitated, but kept his grip.

  "What is it?" he demanded.

  "There's just a chance. A long chance," Grottwold babbled. "You'd have to help. But it might work. Yes, it might just work."

  "All right!" Jim snapped. "Talk fast. What is it?"

  "I could send you after her—" Grottwold broke off at something that was almost a shriek of terror. "Wait! I'm serious. I tell you this might work."

  "You're trying to get rid of me, too," said Jim between his teeth. "You want to get rid of the only witness that could testify against you!"

  "No, no!" said Grottwold. "This will work. I know it will work. The more I think about it, the more I know it'll work. And if it does, I'll be famous."

  Some of the panic seemed to go out of him. He straightened up and made an effort—an unsuccessful one—to push Jim away from him.

  "Let me go!" he said. "I have to get my instruments, or I can't do Angie or anyone else any good. What do you think I am, anyway?"

  "A murderer!" said Jim, grimly.

  "All right. Think what you want! I don't care what you think. But you know how I felt about Angie. I don't want anything to happen to her, either. I want to get her back safely here as much as you do!"

  Cautiously, Jim let go of the other man but kept his hands ready to grab him again.

  "Go ahead, then," he said. "But move fast."

  "I'm moving as fast as I can." Grottwold turned about to his control panel, muttering to himself. "Yes, that's the way I thought I set it. Yes… Yes, there's no other way…"

  "What are you talking about?" Jim demanded.

  Hansen looked back at him over one bony shoulder.

  "We can't do anything about getting her back until we know where she's gone," he said. "Now, all I know is I asked her to concentrate on anything she liked and she said she'd concentrate on dragons."

  "What dragons? Where?"

  "I don't know where, I tell you! It could be dragons in a museum, or anyplace! That's why we have to locate her; and why you've got to help or we can't do it."

  "Well, tell me what to do, then," said Jim.

  "Just sit down in the chair there—" Grottwold broke off as Jim took a menacing step toward him. "All right, then, don't do it! Take away our last chance to bring her back!"

  Jim hesitated. Then, slowly, reluctantly, he turned back to the empty dentist's chair at which Grottwold had been pointing.

  "You'd better be right about this," he said.

  He walked over and seated himself gingerly.

  "What are you going to do, anyway?" he asked.

  "There's nothing to worry about!" said Grottwold. "I'm going to leave the control settings just the way they were when she apported. But I'll lower the voltage. That must have been what made her apport in the first place. There was just too much power behind her. I'll reduce the power and that way you'll project, not apport."

  "What does that mean?"

  "It means you won't go anywhere. You'll stay right there in the chair. Only your mind'll reach out and project in the same direction Angie went."

  "You're sure about that?"

  "Of course I'm sure. Your body will stay right in the chair. Just your astral self will go to join Angie. That's the way it should have worked for her in the first place. Maybe she was concentrating too hard—"

  "Don't try to blame it on her!"

  "I'm not. I just—Anyway, don't you forget to concentrate, too. Angie was experienced in this sort of concentration. You aren't. So you'll have to make an effort. Think of Angie. Concentrate on her. Concentrate on her in some place with dragons."

  "All right," Jim growled. "Then what?"

  "If you do it right, you'll end up wherever she apported to. You won't really be there, of course," said Grottwold. "It'll all be subjective. But you'll feel as if you're there, and since Angie's on the same instrument setting, she ought to be aware of your astral self being there, even if no one else there is."

  "All right, all right!" said Jim. "But how do I get her back?"

  "You'll have to get her to concentrate on returning," Grottwold answered. "You remembered how I taught you to hypnotize her—?"

  "I remember, all right!"

  "Well, try to hypnotize her again. She's got to become completely oblivious to wherever her present surroundings are before she'll be able to apport back here. Just put her under and keep telling her to concentrate on the lab, here. When she disappears, you'll know she's come back."

  "And what," said Jim, "about me?"

  "Oh, it's nothing for you," Grottwold said. "You just close your eyes and will yourself back here. Since your body never left here to begin with, you'll automatically return the minute you don't want to be someplace else."

  "You're sure about that?"

  "Of course I'm sure. Now, close your eyes—No, no, you've got to pull the hood down over your head…"

  Grottwold stepped over and pulled the hood down himself. Jim was suddenly in a near-darkness faintly scented with the perfume of Angie's hair spray.

  "Remember now," Grottwold's voice came distantly to him through the open bottom of the helmet, "concentrate. Angie—dragons. Dragons—Angie. Close your eyes and keep thinking those two things…"

  Jim closed his eyes and thought.

  Nothing seemed to be happening. There was no sound from outside the helmet, and with the thing over his head he could see nothing but darkness. The scent of Angie's hair spray was overwhelming. Concentrate on Angie, he told himself. Concentrate on Angie… and dragons… Nothing was happening, except that the hair-spray odor was making him dizzy. His head swam. He felt huge and clumsy, sitting under the hair dryer with his eyes closed this way. He experienced a thudding in his ears that was the sound of his heart, beating along the veins and arteries of his body. A slow, heavy thudding. His head began to swim in
earnest. He felt as if he were sliding sideways through nothingness and in the process expanding until he bulked like a giant.

  A sort of savagery stirred in him. He had a fleeting desire to get up from where he was and tear something or someone apart. Preferably Grottwold. It would be sheerly soul-satisfying to take hold of that turkey and rip him limb from limb. Some large voice was booming, calling to him, but he ignored it, lost in his own thoughts. Just to sink his claws into that george—

  Claws? George?

  What was he thinking about? This nonsense was not working at all.

  He opened his eyes.

  Chapter Three

  The helmet was gone. Instead of into hair-spray-scented darkness, he stared at rock walls leading up to a ceiling also of rock, high above his head and flickeringly lit by reddish light from a torch blazing in a wall sconce.

  "Blast it, Gorbash!" roared the voice he had been trying to ignore. "Wake up! Come on, boy we've, got to get down to the main cave. They've just captured one!"

  "One… ?" Jim stammered. "One what?"

  "A george! A george! WAKE UP, GORBASH!"

  An enormous head with crocodile-sized jaws equipped with larger-than-crocodile-sized fangs thrust itself between Jim's eyes and the ceiling.

  "I'm awake. I—" What he was seeing suddenly registered on Jim's stunned mind and he burst out involuntarily, "A dragon!"

  "And just what would you expect your maternal grand-uncle to be, a sea lizard? Or are you having nightmares again? Wake up. It's Smrgol talking to you, boy. Smrgol! Come on, shake a wing and get flapping. They'll be expecting us in the main cave. Isn't every day we capture a george. Come on, now."

  The fanged mouth whirled away. Blinking, Jim dropped his eyes from the vanishing apparition and caught sight of a huge tail, an armored tail with a row of sharp, bony plates running along its upper surface. It swelled larger as it approached him—It was his tail.

  He held up his arms in front of him. They were enormous. Also, they were thickly scaled with bony plates like those on his tail but much smaller—and his claws needed manicuring. Squinting at the claws, Jim became aware of a long muzzle stretching down and out from where his formerly "invisible" nose had been. He licked dry lips and a long, red, forked tongue darted out briefly in the smoky air.