by Robert Adams
"Could we see some identification, please?" the second one asked in a near-polite manner. "I know who the guy on the phone said you were, you understand, but I need to see for myself, too."
With his identity clearly proven, the two men became much more friendly and almost fawningly polite. They took down his description of the other assailant (not that he gave them a completely accurate one) and, upon the arrival of a second car bearing aboard a sergeant, a search of the premises was ordered and commenced. Of course, said second assailant was not found and it could only be assumed that, in order to avoid the exit gate and guards, he had possibly climbed down the outside from the second or third level to a point where he could safely drop to the sidewalk.
"I 'spect that there boy's long-gone by now, Mr. Goldfarb, sir," averred the sergeant, "but his de-
scription's out by now and all the rolling patrols'll be on the lookout for him. Can you go back down to the precinct with me and look at some mug-books, tonight, sir?"
Pedro sighed with a genuine weariness. "Sergeant, I can . . . but f d rather do it some other time. I have to be in court tomorrow and I think I should get at least a few hours of sleep beforehand."
"Cert'nly, sir." The sergeant preferred a card. "Just you call thishere number and ask for . . ."he took back the card briefly and scribbled a name on the back of it, then returned it, "ask for Detective Langford; I'll have been done filled him in on ever-thing, sir."
and the K-Bar and odds and ends, plus my clothes and boots and I'm bound to be carrying and carrying damned easily over two-thirds of my total body weight.
"Yet, here I am, fifty-six years old and doing it all. I was never any kind of lunatic body-builder or health nut, either. I recall that, not too long ago, I'd come in at the end of a day of lugging around just a lousy vacuum cleaner and briefcase abso-fucking-lutely exhausted, so tired it was often all I could do to put down some food for Tom, take off my shoes and coat and tie and pour myself a stiff drink. Back then, I'd have needed a dolly to move the load I'm now carrying for any distance, or a wheelbarrow, anyway. Hell, back then I'd have most likely been huffing and puffing, wheezing like a ruptured bagpipe and seriously wondering if my heart could take it from just trying to climb a slope like this carrying no load at all. So how? Why? What made me different, huh? It's almost as if I'm growing younger, for God's sake, not older! And Pedro Goldfarb, others too, have remarked that I'm looking not only more tanned, fitter, but younger, too.
"So, what brought all this about? Answer me that, Fitz, my lad. Could that be what Tom . . . Puss . . . the telepathic grey panther I keep dreaming about (but am I really dreaming at those times? It all seems so real ...?), when he . . . she talks . . . beams thoughts concerning certain powers I'm in the process of gaining or regaining, is it part of those powers, becoming younger and stronger? Maybe, but somehow I get the impression that that's not really what Puss is talking . . . thinking (oh, the hell with it!) talking about, so that still leaves me with the beginning question not yet answered.
'This island or whatever it is (and I'm starting to think it's not in the real world, the world into which I was born, at all, if any sane man or woman could believe it) is truly, unmistakeably a weird place. Just look at the wildlife, for a for instance, as Mom used to put it in her County Wicklow brogue.
"Starting out where I first started out, back to the south, on the beach, that beach and the miles of dunes that back it, just seems to go on forever; I once rode for almost three days east and never found an end or any real change to it, then did the same thing westward for the almost identical result. Its just all the same, everywhere along it I've been, sand and surf and dunes, gulls of five or six kinds, long-legged beach birds, short-legged beach birds, insects, crabs (good eating, too, most of those crabs, especially those with bodies the size of a football), driftwood and more shells than I've ever seen on any beach, anywhere, plus bunches of seaweeds of several kinds, dried sea horses and sand dollars, strands of shark-egg pouches and what have you . . . but all, every bit of it, natural, not one single bottle or beer can, no disposable diapers, no plastics of any kind, no soggy wads of paper and, with the sole exception of that wrecked hulk of a galley (no, that's right, a dromon), no worked wood even.
"Those fish I've seen or caught by surf-fishing don't seem to be unusual, though there were a few I'd never seen before. I'm sure there're more than a few fish I've never seen before back where I came from, too. The seals that occasionally flop up onto the beach look like seals. But that humongus crocodile, the one Puss calls Kassandra: now, she's some-
thing else again—at least forty feet long and with jaws ten or twelve feet long.
"She's the only weird animal I've seen on the beach or among the dunes, but the plain beyond those dunes is different. There're enough strange critters there to make up for the beach and more. And up here in the hills . . . whew! There is up here, in these hills, glens, and plateaus the damnedest mixture, the most jumbled conglomeration of animals I've ever before seen or even heard about. There're more kinds of deer and antelopes than I knew existed in any one place, easily a thousand different kinds of birds, squirrels of sizes and colors I can't find any references to in any of my wildlife books, monkeys, flying lizards like those out on the plain but bigger and more colorful. And Cool Blue's memories show lions (real lions, not ensorcelled beatnik musicians, like him), leopards, wild boar, bears, some kinds of shaggy, horned things that could be bison except their horns are too long, two or three lands of really big—moose-size or bigger—cervines with unbelievable racks of horns, and some other beasties I can't find described anywhere. Then too there's the thing that scared him out of that big swamp up north of here: his mental image looks like nothing so much as either a dinosaur or an honest-to-God, fire-breathing, mythological dragon.
"North of the chateau of the man he calls the Count of Saint Germaine, the one he says ensorcelled him into his current lion-body, he says there are unicorns, though he never saw any of them. He also says that this man or wizard or whatever he is keeps an assortment of monsters for pets, but I've never
been able to find a clear, close-up memory of one of them in his mind.
"Sir Gautier, now, says that he and his bunch of misplaced Crusaders wandered for awhile on and around the fringes of a plain whereon were elephants —he didn't know the name of them but his mental images were of small herds of what looked to me like Indian elephants, the ones with small ears, not big ones like the African elephants have—plus some kind of animals with bodies like big deer but with un-branched horns on their heads and a single, forked one on the nose. Then he saw some things he called Tmmpless camels,' but the picture his memory brought up looked more to me like a bastard outcome of crossing a giraffe with the biggest llama you could imagine. The other animal that made a real impression on that doughty knight was, if his memory is as accurate as usual, of a breed to make a lasting impression on anybody—the all-time biggest, bulkiest, hornless rhinoceros's body on a set of legs from a vastly oversize African elephant so that its belly is a good twenty feet of the ground. But he said that the pair of the monsters he and his men came across at the edge of the forest was very placid, just ignored them all and kept feeding of the top-shoots of thirty-foot trees.
"Still, at that time, having Cool Blue's swamp-dragon in mind, I at once thought of dinosaurs and questioned Sir Gautier in some detail, but up close they were obviously mammals of some strange breed. Their skins were wrinkled and in folds at places but not scaled, and they did have hair, though not much of it. The real proof, though, was the one he saw
closest: she had what could only have been nipples on her abdomen, four of them, each about the size of my head.
"I hope to God that if I run into anything bigger than those two, it's equally mild-mannered. But, thinking of big beasts, here I've been hiking up this glen for nearly three hours now, and the biggest things I've seen have been squirrels and birds. Where the hell is all of the game? I may just end up eating out o
f cans again tonight, if this keeps up."
Since Fitz had come down the northern slope of the hill and proceeded westward, the glen had opened up, become much wider, with good-sized expanses of grasses and weeds and dark-green herbs now flanking the broader, shallower and less fast and turbulent stream. But he had been hiking farther up on the hillside, at the brushy fringes of the mixed forest that clothed it, so that he would have tree trunks to blaze as mark of his passage for Sir Cautier and Cool Blue.
It had been his experience that these glens commonly teemed with small game and often larger animals as well—rabbits or hares, racoons, a multiplicity of rodents, odd little animals that Sir Gautier called desmana, birds ranging in size from sparrows to wild turkeys, occasionally a colony of oversize gopherlike animals that he had tried, at Sir Gautier's urgings, and found delicious. Sometimes there were to be found one or two or more deer of some variety in the glens, as well as opossums, armadillos, wild goats and pairs of spike-horned gazelles about the size of grown collie dogs.
But even though he was moving far enough up the slope not to spook or frighten animals down below,
nearer to the central stream, he had seen few birds of an edible size and no furry beasts bigger than a rat, save for the large and smaller arboreal beasts and birds that all seemed to be staying high up in the trees, not foraging the forest floor as was the normal wont of many of them.
"If it's been like this for long," he thought, "it's no wonder poor Cool Blue was so hungry he ate frogs. Even a good, determined hunter would have trouble feeding himself . . . and I somehow feel that Cool Blue is more determined on finding someone else to feed him than he is on feeding himself by his own efforts. Something has clearly scared all of the game into lying up in the safest places they can find, but I don't think that something was me. So what, I wonder?
"Wait a minute. Cool Blue, yesterday, when he first came into camp there by the overhang, was opining that this Saint Germain character had let loose some of his so-called pets to run in the hills and glens and that they'd scared all the game away. Then, too, last night, what was it Puss had to say about me going on west alone? Something about many and great dangers is all I remember clearly now. But Cool Blue said I should sleep in tall trees, I do recall that, and it sounds reasonable. You can't build a cooking fire in a tree, but if I have no fresh meat to cook, what the hell will I need a fire for?"
He walked onward along the verges of the forest of pine, hemlock, maples, beech, basswood and occasional ginkgo, hacking a mark into a trunk every few hundred yards. He noted that, ever so gradually, the grassy lea downslope was narrowing on either side of the stream arid that the stream itself was growing
narrower, deeper and faster-flowing. In the distance ahead the wall of trees looked to be solid, but as he neared he could discern the reality.
The glen he had been following for most of the day ended in a narrow, water-filled declivity, the swift-flowing stream finally leaping out over a rocky lip to fall fifty feet into a broad pool at the base of a steep, precipitous cliff. The ground below was invisible under a deep carpet of needles from the towering, straight-boled pines, whose upper reaches had aided in giving the appearance from afar of an unbroken wall of trees.
Fitz looked down the almost vertical cliff face and hissed between his teeth. Glances to right and left through the mists of water spray indicated that at no point was the dropoff any lower than it was here. He uncased and tried his binoculars. Yes, a long way off to the south, the cliff-line did seem to converge with a ridge, but it was a really long way south, maybe feu-enough to put him back in the range of the Teeth-and-Legs, and this time lacking either speedy transport or his big elephant gun. Besides, that far a passage through even moderately heavy forest and its associated brush-thickets could conceivably take days, even as much as a week, for one lone man to hack his way through, and Puss was certain to strongly dislike the delay.
He peered down the cliffside again; it didn't look to afford a descent any whit easier or safer on the second look than it had on the first. Where not covered with soggy-looking mosses and lichens, the rocks all were shiny*wet and crumbly, like sandstone. There were plants—pine seedlings, vines and
herbs—but not a one he could see that looked as if it could bear more than its own weight.
With a sigh and a shake of his head, he doffed the pack and unlashed the coil of rope. On the verge of looking for a secure anchor up where he was, he suddenly snapped, aloud, "Damn me for an idiot! It hasn't been even two full days and I clean forgot what Danna showed me how to do. That's the best way I can think of to get down this in one piece. Of course, how Sir Gautier and Cool Blue will get down is another question, but from what I've gotten to know of that little Normal, I guarantee you he'll find a way to do it."
When he had tied the coil of rope back into place on the pack frame, he removed his pistol-belt and secured it too to the pack, then emptied his pockets of every iron or steel item and stuffed them in a side compartment of the pack. All this accomplished, he closed his eyes for a brief moment, concentrating to recall the exact mindset required, remembered it, and smiled to himself.
Setting his mind just so, he willed the pack to rise It did not; it just sat there and glared at him. He tried once again. The contrary pack still sat in place on the dead leaves and coarse pebbles. Consciously forcing down his emotions, he carefully ran his hands over his body, finding nothing of the iron or steel which he and Danna had found were inimical to the practice of lifting things with their minds . . . nothing, that is, until his hands reached his boot tops. With the brace of boot-knives stowed away in the pack with the other ferrous items, he tried yet again, wondering just what he would or could do if his newfound talent failed to work this time, too.
But this time the laden pack frame rose. He halted its rise at his waist level, then took a strap in hand and towed it, now light as a helium-filled balloon, to the lip of the cliff; there, he gave it a gentle push and mentally triggered a slow descent. Gradually, as he watched,, the load sank until it was pressed deeply into the bed of pine-tags.
After he had released control of the pack, Fitz gulped once, resisted an impulse to sign himself, then bade his own body to rise from the ground. When more than a foot-distance of empty air lay between his boot-soles and the pebbly soil, he willed himself forward, toward the edge of the steep, high, treacherous cliff. All too soon he was past the last of that top, was hanging unsupported over terrifyingly empty air, the needle-covered ground and his pack looking horrifyingly far below his all-too-vulnerable flesh and bone.
Ever so carefully, he willed his body to sllooowlly descend. And it did just that, even more slowly than had the pack. Once again standing with his boot-soles pressed upon hard, solid ground, Fitz realized why his jaws had been aching so severely and with effort unclenched his teeth.
"I DID IT!" he shouted joyously, "By damn, I did it! It works! Dammit, I really can fly! How many other men of my age or any other can fly without some land of mechanical contrivance, huh? But, by God, old Fitz sure as hell can!"
Feeling suddenly very, very tired, he sank down beside his pack, thinking, "Danna can do it too; she could do it before I could and showed me how, for that matter. I wonder if I can pass it on? I'd like to
be able to teach Sir Gautier and Cool Blue and Puss how to do it. If they all could do it along with me, we'd sure get to wherever I'm supposed to be going one hell of lot faster and easier, I'd think."
Reaching around the pack, he unhooked his pistol-belt, buckled it back around his waist, then replaced all of the smaller items of iron or steel into pockets and boot tops before pulling out his canteen and filling his mouth with the water. It was become warm as blood in the closed container, despite the cooling evaporation from the thoroughly wetted cover. He spat the mouthful into the pine needles, emptied the steel bottle and levered onto his feet. Kneeling at the side of the broad pool, he reached out as far as he could and submerged the canteen long enough to fill it, took a lon
g, long drink from it, then submerged it again before replacing it in the cover. On the point of arising, he noted the strange tracks imprinted in the sandy soil right at water's edge.
He thought for a brief moment that they were handprints, there being five digits and an impression that could have been a narrow palm, but then he looked closer to see that the digits obviously mounted claws and that the one on each foot that seemed to be at least partially opposed was on the outside, not the inside of the foot. Where had he seen—and fairly recently, at that!—a print similar to these?
He suddenly remembered, and jumped backward from the pool so violently that he ended up sprawled helplessly on his back for a long moment of terror before he regained his balance and his reasoning took over.
Big as those prints were—they each were much
bigger than his hands—they still were nowhere near the size of those of the nesting crocodile back on the beach. Steeling himself to go back and examine the prints once again, he could easily discern other differences than just size. The digits were, proportionately, longer and slenderer, not intended to bear as much weight; and too, there was no trace of webbing-scuff between the digits. The conclusion to which he finally came was a big lizard of some kind.
"Seems to be nowhere in sight now, whatever it is/' he tried to reassure himself. Nonetheless, before he reshouldered his pack and started on westward, he drew the shot-loads from the two smoothbore barrels of the drilling, replacing them with solids— twelve-bore rifle slugs. He also filled the empty chamber in the cylinder of his revolver.
The waterfall and its pool-basin fed a stream that flowed roughly westward, and Fitz followed the waterway for more than two miles beneath a canopy of pines, some of them towering over a hundred feet, he estimated. There was little low-growth or brush to impede his progress, for so deep and dense a layer of resinous tags was sufficient to effectively discourage or choke out most other plants, that and the shade cast by the spreading branches high above the ground; even so, he quickly learned the folly of proceeding onward without probing his footing with the butt of his staff, for beneath the endless bed of needles—in some places, as much as two feet deep— lay such obstacles as fallen limbs, loose rocks and, not uncommonly, whole boles of fallen pine trees. However, there was no dearth of tree trunks for him to blaze along the way.
