So after all these years he had another new and previously unrecorded specimen, gathered right here in the American Midwest. Possibly a gourmet delight, more likely either a potent hallucinogen or a deadly poison. Finding out which was the necessary first step to finding out whether the thing had any medicinal or dietary value.
Question was, should he test it or not?
That was the way he’d really spread his name back out there in the world half a century ago: testing unknown natural substances that needed testing. Half the reason for saving all those swathes of rain forest and other wilderness areas, wasn’t it? for the pharmacopoeia of natural supplies that were still waiting to be classified and tested. And he’d done his part. Oh, yes, kindly old Doc Mac had done his share, probably more than his share. Any justice in the world, and he’d have been up for a Nobel.
At the very least, they should’ve been keeping him supplied with new substances for testing, getting as much valuable data out of the last half of his life as out of the first. Lord knew, they hadn’t exactly tossed out the results he had left on record for them, any more than they’d renamed all his species in the databanks.
So what if twenty or thirty of the substances he’d tested turned out to have fatal effects? That was how humans had always acquired knowledge. Behind every leaf, berry, and mushroom tagged “deadly” in the manuals there was at least one human death. You couldn’t always get that data from pre-analysis in the laboratory, not in the labs of Macumber’s prime and, he’d be willing to bet, not even in the labs of today, for all their fancy equipment.
Guessing that he’d end up running the Amanita cortinaria test, the next question was, on whom?
Not on himself, for obvious reasons. Science needed him to describe the results, and he was too old to make a good test subject anyway.
Of all their little society in here, Walker was the most worthless, but how’d they ever distinguish any hallucinating A. cortinaria might cause Jorum Walker, from his own personal DT’s? Besides, alcohol reacted with too many other substances. Doc Mac still thought Taraxacum macumbrensum could have been labeled “edible, choice” in the books if gadabout young Jackie Corkson hadn’t broken his doctor’s orders and tippled on the sly a few hours after swallowing the caplet.
The Bluehair probably deserved fatal test results the most, but life would be a lot duller around here without that little peppershaker spicing it up. Tickling even the old sawbones. No, he guessed Delila Bluehair was going to be exempt from experiments—bedroom experiments aside—until if-and-when she developed some tricky disease and he thought he had an untested substance at hand that might help cure it. Like little Rosie Jones Fairchild. Too bad L. macumbrensa had turned out to cure Stivson’s disease rather than vertimia.
Poor little Elsin was out of the running. Tally Magadance, too, at least until they had a chance to get to know her better. Might be a shame to risk even the dullest of the feminine faction, “her ladyship” Larghetta, with the gentlemen outnumbering them. Not like it had been back out there in public practice, with slightly more females than males to choose from even after exempting all the uncomplicated pregnancies.
Of the presently available males, John Stock was the dangerous one, but he also came in handy for making sure the others stayed undangerous. There was also Warren, but Warren was a pretty decent chief of staff, as that breed went. Better not risk losing Warren before his time and maybe getting some petty tyrant or nincompoop to replace him.
That left the Amerindian, the religious nut, and the fancydan speedster.
The staff and service personnel too, but some of them would be as hard to replace as Warren, and a lot of them would come under nitpicking investigation if they died suddenly. At this stage, ol’ Doc Mac would just as soon blank out without any extra red tape and brouhaha. He was old enough; the world could wait a few more years to find his work on A. cortinaria after his natural death.
Couldn’t be he was just getting cold feet in his old age, could it? Liking floaters used to be all the more reason for taking ’em in on the glory of scientific discovery.
Naw. Nup. Not cold feet. Just that when society got sparse and hard to replenish, it only made sense to keep your favorites around as long as you needed the comfort and company.
Still left him the Amerind, the nut, and the speedster. Maybe all three, for comparative analysis. There was enough mushroom for three, maybe even enough to try a little on Lady Larghetta later. If he decided to go ahead and test the thing. If he wasn’t just daydreaming for old times’ sake. But God knew when he’d get another chance to test anything.
Thinking about daydreaming, his glance hit the Dreamstone. He picked it up, chuckled, and, on a whim, stuffed it underneath his pillows. Wouldn’t do anything, of course. Most of your experts agreed that the common afternoon nap was too short for any real, tuck-into-it dreaming anyway, even if Macumber should happen to catnap at all. But if Tally asked him, he could wink in her face and honestly tell her he’d given it a try.
* * * *
The castle had two dull black wings veeing back slightly from a dull white tower. Altogether, it covered about as much ground as your average football field, and might have fit beneath the bad-weather dome, globular golden roof and all. That globular roof perched on top of the central tower, making it about a story higher than the wings. The gold was a tad tarnished because of the giant who lived inside.
There wasn’t any moat. The castle sat in the middle of an oblong patch of sand-colored sand. The tract of sand sat in the middle of a forest of giant, spiky grasses. The average blade of grass was blackish green and a little taller than a fullgrown apple tree, if a lot thinner. All the grass looked healthy, but where it bordered the bare sand it was fairly sparse. A few feet farther from the castle it got about as thick and close-set as rows of corn in a Hoosier farm field.
The hero was prowling around in the tall grasses, circling the castle, waiting for the giant to come out. He had nothing but his youth, his strength, and his sword to help him kill the giant and save the land. It was a long sword, broad, shiny, and very sharp. That the giant was evil was understood.
The white tower had a doorway that reached from the ground almost to the goldball roof. That was too tall for a door, so the doorway stood open and empty, with nothing to guard it except a flagstone threshold, two strides across but on a dead level with the sand.
Next time the hero got back to the front in his circling of the castle, he saw that the giant was standing in the tower doorway, his head almost touching the arch. His only clothing was a fur kilt. He had a guinea pig the size of a sheepdog on one shoulder, a snake the size of a boa twined around the opposite arm, and a long, broad, sharp, shiny sword in his hand. It was the hero’s own sword.
Understanding that the giant had come out to see what was rustling in the tall grasses, the hero crouched down and watched, very still. The giant stood there a little while, looking round and round, his big nostrils flaring and his big jaw working back and forth.
At last he took a stride forward and was off the flagstone onto the sand. The hero, who had been waiting for this, lobbed a stone at the castle’s far wing. When it hit, and the giant turned to face the sound, the hero rushed forward and sprang onto his back.
With a roar, the giant reached over his head, seized the hero by the thighs, hauled him up and over, and began a hard bear hug.
Prepared for this, the hero gave him a full kick right in the groin.
The giant only laughed and squeezed harder.
Caught kicking between earth and air, the hero heard somebody shout: “Sunset! When sunset comes, you can get him then!”
The giant laughed again and lifted the sword. The hero bit his arm. Blood spurting, the giant yelped and dropped him. He fell on the flagstone threshold, looked up, saw the sword descending.
The hero rolled off onto the sand just in time. The sword struck the thre
shold and sent up a skyrocket of sparks. As the giant groped through the glittery shower above him, the hero reached the safety of the tall grasses.
Here he waited for sunset. Back and forth the giant patrolled in front of the doorway, while the shadows lengthened. In the lengthening of the grass shadows, the people of the land gathered on the edge of the sand. Poor folk. Rich ones. Beggar and thief. Lawyer. Doctor. Amerind Chief. Sportster. Speedster. Reveler in grief. Lady Magadance. Little, coffee-faced Elsin Fairchild. Drunkard. Everett Gabardine. Aaron Angelfish who proved the toxicity of A. magrudium. All the people of the land, waiting for their happiness.
Swearing a private oath to deliver them, the hero gripped the sword. It had split neatly in two along the blood runnel, each half still solid in the hilt, but separated from each other by a long, narrow V of empty space up their length.
About half an hour before sunset, when the shadows of grass were reaching all the way across the bare sand to touch the castle walls, the giant had his back to the tower doorway, as part of his turning around to pace the other way, and the hero thought he saw his chance to reach the sword—which was lying on the threshold—and get into the castle. Zigzagging between the towering blades of grass and groups of people, he ran.
Slowly the giant continued his turn. Quickly the hero continued his race. He was halfway across the barren sand when the giant finished turning, but the people closed in. Moving smoothly as a casual wave, they moved in between the hero and the giant, hiding each from the other’s sight, and the hero reached the threshold.
Understanding his surprise at reaching it only when he got there, he threw himself flat on the flagstones and rolled, holding the broken sword up between himself and the giant. It acted like a mirror, throwing his reflection back down into himself so that he was invisible to the giant, who stepped over him and disappeared back into the castle.
By night, the giant was a black-robed sorcerer. He had to go in and change.
The best, the only time to slay him was while he was changing, there somewhere in the bowels of his castle between day and night. Gripping his sword, the hero stood up and stepped across the threshold into the castle.
Its corridor was stone, smooth, and empty. To each side were doorways with no doors, and what he could see of the chambers through their open doorways was stone, smooth, and empty. Except for the snake. The giant-sorcerer’s snake was somewhere in one of these chambers, guarding the entrance.
It came, gliding out of the chamber to the left. Not there one instant, there the next, blocking the passage. Sitting up on its coils, open-mouthed and hissing to show its fangs, blocking the passage.
There was only one way to slay it: show it its reflection in the sword. The sword was broken. It might work anyway. Ripping off one shiny half, the hero held it flashing at the snake’s eye level.
The snake’s coil constricted about itself into a hard, tight knot. The snake’s jaws opened wider and from its throat came a spitting, a hiss, a sizzle. Spinning and shrinking in a split second, the snake hisstled in on itself, collapsed, and was a grublike corpse, eyes staring up like egg ends painted with black X’s.
Thunder crashed. The hero looked around. Through the castle doorway he could see a horizon of sand and tall grass. The people of the land were gone. All of them, gone. Only the grass was left, brown and rust-spotted, rustling a little as it waved.
Intending to press on deeper into the castle, he turned back. Over the body of the snake stood the sorcerer’s second animal helper, the giant guinea pig. But now it was a second snake.
It said: “You killed them all. The snake, the giant, the sorcerer, the people. You killed them all.” It lunged forward and fastened its fangs in his jugular.
* * * *
James Fitzpatrick Macumber blinked his eyes open and squinted up at the reading screen, which was throwing a page of the latest report on Valdez’s disease down on his face in a soft brown glow. After a second, he chuckled and checked the time. It was 15:43.
Still chuckling, he clawed Tally’s toy out from underneath his pillows and held it up in front of his face. It didn’t look like that much, just a dark little oval eclipsing part of one paragraph on the overhead screen.
“Even a surprise ending,” Doc Mac remarked half aloud, with one more chuckle. “Blessed Stone even gave it a dam’ surprise ending! Let’s see, now ...”
For all his passing acquaintance with close to two centuries of psychoscientific dream interpretation, Macumber had never tried it on any of his own dreams. He’d been around for almost half those years of dream research, but all the best symbols and meanings theories had pretty well stabilized during the first century of work, and the second century, the one he’d seen so much of, hadn’t had that much to do except apply ’em. Almost never remembering his own dreams, his interest had been limited to knowing enough to guess what school of psychoshrink he could recommend for the rare patient who started confiding dreams to a family GP.
And here Tally’s Dreamstone had handed him a regular long fairytale of a dream that fairly cried out to be interpreted. Be a pity not to give the poor little thing a go at it. Sitting up, he blanked the reading screen, pulled over his allpurpose unit on its swinging shelf, flipped it on and got a quick outline into its chip memory by 16:05. Then he took another ten minutes to make up a list of symbols, dream characters, and suchlike.
He considered it while getting himself dressed, slowly and leisurely, with plenty of glances back at the screen. By 16:35, he reckoned he had it pretty well figured out. Not to key his theories into the record, just to play around with them in that old personal organic databank in the braincase.
The hero and the giant-sorcerer were both himself. Most of the more impressive theories would probably agree on that, even if he couldn’t remember ever seeing or feeling anything from the giant’s point of view and wasn’t all that sure about the hero’s, except for the moments of looking at all the people’s faces and the part at the very end, killing the snake and then getting bitten by the second snake, the one that had started out as a guinea pig.
A lot of dream experts would have said that both snakes, all the people, and maybe the sword, the castle, the threshold, and every last blade of grass and grain of sand was himself as well, but Doc Mac would have doubted them there. The sword and two snakes were obviously the medical caduceus, if they’d ever gotten together instead of putzing around, each one off on a separate track. That probably made the castle Medicine itself. The people were themselves: the ones he knew nowadays and the ones he’d treated and tested substances on back in the outside world half a century ago. He hadn’t figured out the sand, the grasses, and the flagstone threshold yet.
That caduceus was the key. Casting his mind way, way back, he could just about remember bright young Jimmy Fitz Macumber swearing the ancient Hippocratic oath with eyes and conscience all shiny, all fixed on the hallowed old symbol. You might say the caduceus had been that kid’s life.
That’d be why the sword—the stem of the caddy—the dreamer’s life—kept passing back and forth between hero and giant-sorcerer. When that sword split, it’d be because the hero-giant had already split. When the first snake shriveled up and died, it wasn’t so much because the sword made a mirror, but because it was split: really only half a mirror.
The story’s real surprise ending was that the hero had been fooled about himself. The people had been fooled about him. All along, that hero had been the real bad guy. The giant and his animals—the snakes who gave the caduceus life—they had been the real good guys.
What was it Tally had said about the nightmares? With most people, they started the second time you tried using the Dreamstone. With a few really bad bananas, the first time brought a nightmare.
Well, Doc Mac’s hadn’t been a nightmare. The bad guy had gotten his, the second snake had presumably brought the good guy back to life, to patch things up. That made it a happy
ending, even if you wouldn’t guess it without analyzing all those symbols and thinking ’em through. And nightmares didn’t have happy endings. Besides, he’d woke up out of it chuckling.
All the same, he took another hard look at Amanita cortinaria. Then he carried it into the comfort room, dropped it in the commode, cinerated it to ashes, and stomped the pedal to dump the ashes into the ashbin below the building. Thinking the whole time about the water flush toilets of his early youth, how they’d have swirled A. cortinaria around before gulping it down whole.
After that he washed his hands and put the Dreamstone in his pocket. Might as well give it back to Tally Magadance ... or maybe she’d rather be called Maggie? ... right away. Finally, Dr. James Fitzpatrick Macumber picked a white carnation out of the vase on his dresser, tucked it into the boutonniere slit on his wide collar, and set off humming to join the ladies for afternoon coffee on the veranda.
HELLMOUTH PARK
In these next two sections, we are back to Cagey Thursday’s generation of the 2030s and 2040s.
THE PICKETS OF HELLMOUTH
Sometimes the fantasy-perceivers’ angle takes center stage in a story, sometimes not. About the only things that mark “The Pickets of Hellmouth” as belonging to this cycle are: we know from “The Cyclops Killer” that Ace and Zoe are cousins of fantasy-perceiving sleuth Cagey Warrington Thursday; and Hellmouth Theme Park appears or is mentioned in several other fanciers/realizers yarns, while this story was written well before I ever thought of re-imagining a fanciers-free R.S.A.
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 98
