Compliments Of The Author

by Henry Kuttner

  Compliments of the author.

  Cryptic-but significant! Tracy looked up grimoire, but the word wasn't in his dictionary. It meant a book of magic, he remembered rather vaguely, a collection of spells.

  Thoughtfully he flipped the book's pages again. Spells? Advice, rather. Certainly the advice about the coupé's windshield had come in very handy.

  Tracy's lips tightened in a crooked smile. One advantage of the accident: he had forgotten to be worried by the murder! Maybe that wasn't so good. If the police grew suspicious- But there was no reason why they should be. His presence in Laurel Canyon was easily explained; the boulevard was a well-traveled thoroughfare. And Gwinn's body might not be discovered for days, in that isolated section.

  He stood up, stripping off the ragged overcoat and tossing it aside with a gesture of distaste. Tracy liked clothes, with an almost sensuous feeling. He went into the bathroom to start the shower, and came back instantly, followed by the beginnings of steam clouds. He picked up the book from the couch.

  It lay on a stand as he bathed and donned pajamas and a robe. It was in his hand as he slippered back into the living room, and his gaze was upon it as he mixed himself a drink. It was a stiff drink and, as he sipped the whiskey, Tracy felt a warm, restful languor beginning to seep into his mind and body. Till this moment he had not realized how jangled were his nerves.

  Now, leaning back, he pondered on the book. Magic? Were there such things? He thumbed through the pages again, but the printed lines had not altered in the least. Extraordinary, and quite illogical, how that message about the windshield had saved his life. The other pages-most of them bore sentences wild to the point of lunacy. "Werewolves can't climb oak trees." So what?

  Tracy fixed himself another drink. He was going somewhat beyond his capacity tonight, for fairly obvious reasons. But he didn't show it, except for a glisten of perspiration on his high, tanned forehead.

  "This should develop into something interesting," a soft voice said.

  It was the cat. Fat, glossy, and handsome, it sat on a chair opposite Tracy, watching the man with enigmatic eyes. The mobile mouth and tongue of a cat, he thought, were well suited for human speech.

  The cat rippled its shoulder muscles. "Do you still think this is ventriloquism?" it asked. "Or have you progressed to hallucinations?"

  Tracy stood up, walked across the room, and slowly extended his hand. "I'd like to make certain you're real," he said. "May I-"

  "Gently. Don't try any tricks. My claws are sharp, and my magic's sharper."

  Satisfied by the feel of the warm fur, Tracy drew back and looked down consideringly at the creature. "All right," he said, his voice a little thick. "We've progressed this far, anyhow. I'm talking to you-admitting your existence. Fair enough."

  The cat nodded. "True. I came here to congratulate you on escaping the dryad, and to tell you I'm not discouraged."

  Tracy sat down again. "Dryad, eh? I always thought dryads were pretty. Like nymphs."

  "Fairy tales," the cat said succinctly. "The Grecian equivalent of yellow journalism. Satyrs only made love to young deciduous dryads, my friend. The older ones-well! You may be able to imagine what the dryad of a California sequoia would be like."

  "I think so."

  "Well, you're wrong. The older an anthropomorphic being grows, the less rigidly the dividing lines are drawn. Ever notice the sexlessness of old human beings? They die, of course, before they progress farther than that. Eventually the line between human being and god is lost, then between human being and animal, and between animal and plant. Finally there's a commingling of sentient clay. Beyond that you'd not care to go. But the sequoia dryads have gone beyond it." The cat eyes watched, alert and inscrutable. Tracy sensed some definite purpose behind this conversation. He waited.

  "My name, by the way, is Meg," the cat said.

  "Female, I presume?"

  "In this incarnation. Familiars in their natural habitat are sexless. When aliens manifest themselves on earth, they're limited by terrestrial laws-to a certain extent, anyway. You may have noticed that nobody saw the dryad but you."

  "There wasn't anybody else around."

  "Exactly," Meg said, with an air of satisfaction.

  Tracy considered, conscious more than ever that he was dueling with the creature. "O.K.," he nodded. "Now let's get down to cases. You were Gwinn's-eh?-familiar. What does that imply?"

  "I served him. A familiar, Tracy, serves a wizard as a catalyst."

  "Come again."

  "Catalysis: a chemic reaction promoted by the presence of a third unaffected substance. Read 'magic' for 'chemic.'

  Take cane sugar and water, add sulphuric acid, and you get glucose and levulose. Take a pentagram and ox blood, add me, and you get a demon named Pharnegar. He's the dowser god," Meg added. "Comes in handy for locating hidden treasures, but he has his limitations."

  Tracy thought that over. It seemed logical. All through the centuries, folklore had spoken of the warlock's familiar. What purpose the creature had served was problematical. A glorified demoniac valet? Rather silly.

  A catalyst was much more acceptable, somehow, especially to poor Tracy's alcohol-distorted brain.

  "It seems to me we might make a bargain," he said, staring at Meg. "You're out of a job now, aren't you? Well, I could use a little magical knowledge."

  "Fat chance," the cat said scornfully. "Do you think for a minute magic can be mastered by a correspondence course? It's like any highly trained profession. You have to learn how to handle the precision tools, how to train your insight, how to-My master, Tracy, it's something more than a university course! It takes a natural linguist to handle the spells. And trained, whiplash responses. A perfect sense of timing. Gwinn took the course for twenty-three years before he got his goatskin. And, of course, there's the initial formality of the fee."

  Tracy grunted. "You know magic, apparently. Why can't you-"

  "Because," Meg said very softly, "you killed Gwinn. I won't outlast him. And I had been looking forward to a decade or two more on Earth. In this plane, I'm free from certain painful duties that are mine elsewhere."

  "Hell?"

  "Anthropomorphically speaking, yes. But your idea of Hell isn't mine. Which is natural, since in my normal state my senses aren't the same as yours."

  Meg jumped down from the chair and began to wander around the room. Tracy watched it-her-closely. His hand felt for and clutched the book.

  The cat said, "This will be an interesting game of wits. The book will give you considerable help-but I have my magic."

  "You're determined to-to kill me?" Tracy reached for his topcoat. "Why?"

  "I told you. Revenge."

  "Can't we bargain?"

  "No," Meg said. "There's nothing you can offer me that would be any inducement. I'll stick around, and enlist a salamander or something to get rid of you."

  "Suppose I put a bullet into you?" Tracy asked, taking his automatic from the coat. He leveled it. "You're flesh and blood. Well?".

  The cat sat down, eyeing Tracy steadily. "Try it," Meg said.

  For no sensible reason, the reporter felt curiously frightened. He lowered the gun.

  "I rather wish," Meg said, "that you had tried to kill me."

  "Oh, hell," Tracy grunted, and got up, the book in his hand. "I'm going to get another drink." Struck by a thought, he paused. "For all I know, you may still be a hallucination. A drunken one. In that case-" He grinned. "May I offer you a saucer of cream, Meg?"

  "Thanks," said the cat appreciatively. "I'd like it."

  Tracy, pouring the cream, grinned at his reflection in the kitchen window. "Toujours gai, all right," he soliloquized. "Maybe I should put rat poison in this. Oh, well."

  Meg lapped the cream, keeping her eyes on Tracy, who was dividing his attention between his drink and the book. "I wonder about this," he said. "There doesn't seem to be anything magical about it. Do messages appear-like a clairvoyant's slate?"

  The cat snorted delicatel
y. "Things don't work that way," she said. "The book's got fifty pages. Well, you'll find an answer to every conceivable human problem on one of those pages."

  Tracy frowned. "That's ridiculous."

  "Is it? History repeats itself, and human beings live a life of cliches. Has it occurred to you, Tracy, that humanity's life pattern can be boiled down to a series of equations? Fifty of them, I think. You can find the lowest common denominator, if you go far enough, but that's far beyond human understanding. As I see it, the author of that book analyzed humanity's lives, boiled them down to the basic patterns, and expressed those equations as grammatical sentences. A mere matter of semantics," Meg finished.

  "I don't think I get it. Wait a minute. Maybe I do. 13ab minus b equals 13a. '13ab' stands for eggs: Don't count your chickens before they are hatched."

  "Muddy reasoning, but you have the idea," Meg acknowledged. "Besides, you forgot the hen."

  "Incubator," Tracy said absently, and brooded over the book. "You mean, then, that this has the answer to every known human problem. What about this: 'Werewolves can't climb oak trees'? How often does anybody meet a werewolf?"

  "Symbolism is involved. And personal psychological associations. The third-but-last owner of that book, by the way, was a werewolf," Meg purred. "You'd be surprised how beautifully it all fits."

  "Who wrote it?" Tracy asked.

  The cat shrugged, a beautifully liquid gesture. "A mathematician, of course. I understand he developed the idea as a hobby."

  "Satan?"

  "Don't give yourself airs. Human beings aren't important. Earth isn't important, except to provide intellectual exercise to others. Still and all, this is a simple world, with too little of the uncertainty factor."

  Tracy started to laugh. After a while he said, "I just realized I was sitting here discussing semantics with a cat."

  But Meg had vanished.

  Familiarity with an enemy destroys wariness, and no doubt the cat knew that well enough. Obviously Tracy should have been on guard. The fact that Meg had drunk his cream-the equivalent of bread and salt-meant nothing; cats are amoral, familiars, by preference, immoral. The combination was perilous.

  But Tracy, his mind slightly hazy with whiskey, clutched the book like a buckler and felt safe. He was thinking about formulas of logic. "Matter of deduction," he muttered. "I suppose the author made a lot of graphs and things and arrived at his conclusions that way. Tested them by induction. Whew.'" It was a dizzying thought.

  Again he examined the book. The white circle on the cover was luminous again, and there was a number visible there. Tracy's stomach lurched.

  Page 34.

  He glanced around hastily, expecting anything; but the apartment seemed unchanged. Meg had not reappeared.

  Page 34 said, "Canaries need oxygen."

  Canaries?

  Tracy remembered. A few days ago, a friend had given him an expensive roller canary, and he had not yet got rid of the creature. Its cage hung in a corner, covered with a white cloth. No sound proceeded from it.

  Tracy went over and pulled the cover away. The canary was in trouble. It was lying on the bottom of the cage, kicking spasmodically, beak wide open.

  Oxygen?

  Tracy whistled under his breath and whirled to the windows, yanking them open one by one. The gusts of cold, fresh air made his head spin. He hadn't realized how drunk he was.

  Whiskey, however, didn't account for the feeling of sick nausea in his stomach. He watched the canary slowly revive, and chewed at his lip. The air in the room hadn't been depleted enough to kill a bird. This wasn't a coal mine.

  A coal mine-gas-yeah! Tracy, grinning tightly, dropped to his knees beside the gas radiator. As he had expected, the cock was turned on full, and he could hear a soft hissing.

  Meg didn't always depend on magic. And a cat's paws were handy little tools.

  Tracy closed the valve and made a circuit of the apartment, finding another open radiator in the bedroom. He attended to that. The canary recovered and peeped feebly. Tracy threw the cover back over its cage and considered.

  The book. The numerals on the cover had faded again.

  He felt a resurgence of panic. Ten references were allowed him. He had used two. That left eight-only eight. And Meg was a resourceful familiar, hell bent on revenge.

  There was a thought stirring at the back of Tracy's mind, but it refused to emerge. He relaxed and closed his eyes. After a while the thought came out of hiding.

  In his hands he held a magical power whose potentialities were unlimited. The brown book had the answer to every human problem. If Napoleon had possessed it, or Luther, or Caesar-well! Life was a succession of problems. Men were handicapped by their inability to visualize the complete equation. So they made mistakes.

  But this book, Tracy thought, told the right answer.

  Ironic that its powers should be wasted. That was what the situation amounted to. Ten references were allowed; after that, Meg would get her revenge, unhindered by the book's countermagic. What a waste!

  Tracy rubbed his temples hard. A gold mine had been dumped in his lap, and he was trying to figure out a way of using it. Any time danger threatened, the book would give the solution, according to the equation of logic. Then the magic was, so to speak, passive.

  Not quite. If Tracy faced financial ruin, that would certainly come under the classification of danger. Unless the meaning embraced only the danger of bodily harm. He hoped there were no such limitations.

  On that assumption, if Tracy faced ruin, the book would give a page number that would save him. Would it simply point out a way of returning to his former financial status? No. Because that status had already been proved unsound and dangerous by the mere fact of its cancellation.

  Casuistic reasoning, perhaps, but with clever manipulation, Tracy felt confident that he could play the cards close to his chest. He wanted money. Very well. He would place himself in a position where financial ruin was imminent, and the book would come to his rescue.

  He hoped.

  There were only eight page references left, and it would not do to waste them in making tests. Tracy skimmed through the book, wondering if he could apply the messages himself. It didn't seem probable. "Say no to everything," for example. In special circumstances, that was no doubt good advice. But who was to know when those circumstances would arise? Only the book, of course.

  And-"An assassin awaits." Excellent advice! It would have been invaluable to Caesar-to most of the Caesars, in fact. Knowing that a murderer was in ambush, it would be easy to take precautions. But one couldn't be on guard all the time.

  The logic was perfect, as far as it went. But one element was ever lacking-the time-variable. Since that particular variable depended entirely on the life pattern of the book's owner, it was manifestly impossible for it to be any rational sort of a constant.

  Meantime, there was Meg. Meg was murderously active, and determined on her vengeance. If Tracy used the book-could use the book-to get what he wanted personally, he'd use up the other eight chances and leave himself unguarded against attack. Fame and fortune mean little to a corpse.

  A red glow came from the window. A small, lizard-like creature crawled into view. There were suction pads on its toes, like a gecko's, and a faint smell of charring paint came with it as it scuttled over the sill. It looked like red-hot metal.

  Tracy looked at the book. It was unchanged. This wasn't a danger, then. But it might have been-if he hadn't turned off the gas. Introduce a blazing salamander into a gas-filled apartment, and-Yeah.

  Tracy picked up a siphon at his elbow and squirted soda at the salamander. Clouds of steam arose. The creature hissed and fled back the way it had come.

  Very well. Eight chances were still left. Eight moves in which to outwit and destroy Meg. Less than that-as few as possible, in fact-if any chances were to be left. And it was necessary to leave a few, or Tracy's status in life would remain unchanged. Merely escaping from danger wasn't enough. He wanted-What?


  He got pencil and paper and sat down to figure it out. Happiness was too vague-another variable, depending on the individual. Power? Women? Money? He had them all, in sufficient quantity. Security?

  Security. That was a human constant. Security against the ominous shadows of the future. But one couldn't simply wish for security. The book didn't work that way. Abstractions were beyond its scope, seemingly.

  What gave people security? Money was the first answer, yet that was not satisfactory. Tracy tried a new tack. Who was secure?

  Paisanos, on the whole, were more contented than potentates. However, Tracy didn't want to be a paisano. What about Herrick, the publisher? Security? Well, no. Not when the world itself was unstable.

  In the end Tracy decided nothing. Perhaps the best solution was to get himself into the worst spot possible, and leave the rest to the book. And, if the book failed him…

  It might do just that. But Tracy was a gambler. What was the worst thing that could happen now?

  The answer was obvious. The loss of the book!

  A fire was laid ready in the grate. Tracy touched a match to a fold of newspaper, and watched the flames creep up till the hardwood was crackling. If he purposely rendered himself helpless, the book should logically reveal a panacea-a cure-all that would eliminate all his difficulties. It was worth trying.

  Tracy grinned at his own cleverness.

  He threw the book into the fire, face up. The flames licked up hungrily. Instantly two numerals appeared on the white oval.

  43

  The ultimate answer! The cure for the loss of the book!

  Tracy plunged in his hand and snatched the volume out of the grate, amid a scattering of embers. The brown cover was slightly singed, but the pages were unharmed.

  Breathing a little hoarsely, he crouched on his hams and turned to Page 43.

  It said, with a certain touch of naïve malice:

  "That's right."

  Tracy got up, face expressionless. He picked up his empty highball glass and smashed it against the wall. That done, he went to the window and looked out unseeingly at the night.

  Seven references were left.

  Tracy slept well enough, untroubled by dreams, and with the book under his pillow. The next morning a cold shower and black coffee steadied him for the forthcoming ordeal. He had no illusions about what was going to happen. Meg had not given up.