The 34th Golden Age of Science Fiction: C.M. Kornbluth

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “If they make it quicker than the nymphs—” breathed the general. Then he sighed relievedly. They had not. The carnage among the dragons was almost funny; at will the nymphs lifted them high in the air on jets of steam and squirted melted rock in their eyes. Squalling in terror, the dragons flapped into the air and lumbered off southward.

  “That’s ocean,” grinned the general. “They’ll never come back—trying to find new homes, I suspect.”

  In an incredibly short time the field was littered with the flopping chunks that had been hewed from the Krakens. Living still they were, but powerless. The general shook his hand warmly. “You’re on your own now,” he said. “Good luck, boy. For a civilian, you’re not a bad sort of egg at all.” He walked away.

  Glumly Peter surveyed the colossal fortress of Almarish. He walked aimlessly up to its gate, a huge thing of bronze and silver, and pulled at the silken cord hanging there. A gong sounded and the door swung open. Peter advanced hopelessly into a sort of audience chamber.

  “So!” thundered a mighty voice.

  “So what?” asked Peter despondently. He saw on a throne high above him an imposing figure. “You Almarish?” he asked listlessly.

  “I am. And who are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m Peter Packer of Braintree, Mass. I don’t even expect you to believe me.” The throne lowered slowly and jerkily, as if on hydraulic pumps. The wizard descended and approached Peter. He was a man of about forty, with a full brown beard reaching almost to his belt.

  “Why,” asked the sorcerer, “have you come bearing arms?”

  “It’s the only way I could come,” said Peter. “Let me first congratulate you on an efficient, well-oiled set of political machinery. Not even back in the United States have I seen graft carried to such a high degree. Second, your choice of assistants is an eye-opener. Your Mr. Pike is the neatest henchman I’ve ever seen. Third, produce the person of Miss Millicent or I’ll have to use force.”

  “Is that so?” rumbled Almarish. “Young puppy! I’d like to see you try it. Wrestle with me—two falls out of three. I dare you!”

  Peter took off his coat of blue serge. “I never passed up a dare yet,” he said. “How about a mat?”

  “Think I’m a sissy?” the sorcerer jeered.

  Peter was stripped for action. “Okay,” he said. Slowly Almarish advanced on him, grappling for a hold. Peter let him take his forearm, then shifted his weight so as to hurl the magician over his shoulder. A moment later Peter was astonished to find himself on the floor underneath the wizard.

  “Haw!” grunted Almarish, rising. “You still game?” He braced himself.

  “Yep!” snapped Peter. He hurled himself in a flying tackle that began ten feet away from the wizard and ended in a bone-crushing grip about the knees. Peter swarmed up his trunk and cruelly twisted an arm across his chest. The magician yelped in sudden agony, and let himself fall against the floor. Peter rose, grinning. “One all,” he said cheerfully.

  Almarish grappled for the third fall; Peter cagily backed away. The wizard hurled himself in a bruising body block against Peter, battering him off his feet and falling on the young man. Instinctively Peter bridged his body, arching it off the floor. Almarish, grunting fiercely, gripped his arm and turned it slowly, as though he were winding a clock. Peter snapped over, rolling on the wizard’s own body as a fulcrum. He had his toe in his hand, and closed his fist with every ounce of muscle he had. The sorcerer screamed and fell over on his face. Peter jammed his knee in the wizard’s inside socket and bore down terribly. He could feel the bones bend in his grip.

  “Enough!” gasped the wizard. Peter let him loose.

  “You made it,” said Almarish. “Two out of three.”

  Peter studied his face curiously. Take off that beard and you had—

  “You said it, Grandfather Packer,” said Peter, grinning.

  Almarish groaned. “It’s a wise child that knows its own father—grandfather, in this case,” he said. “How could you tell?”

  “Everything just clicked,” said Peter simply. “You disappearing—that clock—somebody applying American methods in Ellil—and then I shaved you mentally and there you were. Simple?”

  “Sure is. But how do you think I made out here, boy?”

  “Shamefully. That kind of thing isn’t tolerated any more. It’s gangsterism—you’ll have to cut it out, Gramp.”

  “Gangsterism be damned!” snorted the wizard. “It’s business. Business and common sense.”

  “Business maybe—certainly not common sense. My boys wiped out your guard, and I might have wiped out you if I had magic stronger than yours.”

  Grandfather Packer chuckled in glee. “Magic? I’ll begin at the beginning. When I got that dad-blamed clock back in ’63, I dropped right into Ellil—onto the head of an assassin who was going for a real magician. Getting the setup, I pinned the killer with a half nelson and the magician dispatched him. Then he got grateful—said he was retiring from public life and gave me a kind of token—good for any three wishes.

  “So I took it, thanking him kindly, and wished for a palace and a bunch of gutty retainers. It was in my mind to run Ellil like a business, and I did it the only way I knew how—force. And from that day to this I used only one wish and I haven’t a dab of magic more than that!”

  “I’ll be damned!” whispered Peter.

  “And you know what I’m going to do with those other two wishes? I’m going to take you and me right back into the good old U.S.A.!”

  “Will it only send two people?”

  “So the magician said.”

  “Grandfather Packer,” said Peter earnestly, “I am about to ask a very great sacrifice of you. It is also your duty to undo the damage which you have done.”

  “Oh,” said Almarish glumly. “The girl? All right.”

  “You don’t mind?” asked Peter incredulously.

  “Far be it from me to stand in the way of young love,” grunted the wizard sourly. “She’s up there.”

  Peter entered timidly; the girl was alternately reading a copy of the Braintree Informer and staring passionately at a photograph of Peter. “Darling,” said Peter.

  “Dearest,” said Millicent, catching on almost immediately.

  A short while later Peter was asking her, “Do you mind, dearest, if I ask one favor of you—a very great sacrifice?” He produced a small, sharp penknife.

  And all the gossip for a month in Braintree was of Peter Packer’s stunning young wife, though some people wondered how it was that she had only nine fingers.

  6

  “Drat it!” cursed Almarish, enchanter supreme and master of all Ellil. “Drat the sizzling dingus!” Lifting his stiffly embroidered robes of imperial purple, he was dashing to left and right about his bedroom, stooping low, snatching with his jeweled hands at an elusive something that skidded about the floor with little, chuckling snickers.

  Outside, beyond the oaken door, there was a sinister thud of footsteps, firm and normal slaps of bare sole against pavement alternating with sinister tappings of bone. “Slap-click. Slap-click. Slap-click,” was the beat. Almarish shot a glance over his shoulder at the door, his bearded face pale with strain.

  “Young ’un,” he snapped to an empty room, “this ain’t the silly season. Come out, or when I find you I’ll jest take your pointed ears and twist them till they come off in my hands.”

  Again there was the chuckling snicker, this time from under the bed. Almarish, his beard streaming, dove head-long, his hands snapping shut. The snicker turned into a pathetic wail.

  “Leggo!” shrilled a small voice. “You’re crushing me, you ox!”

  Outside the alternating footsteps had stopped before his door. A horny hand pounded on the solid oak.

  “Be with ye in a minute,” called the bearded enchanter. Sweat had broken out on his
brow. He drew out his clenched fists from under the bed.

  “Now, young lady!” he said grimly, addressing his prize.

  The remarkable creature in his hands appeared to be young; at least she was not senile. But if ever a creature looked less like a lady it was she. From tiny feet, shod in rhinestone, high-heeled pumps to softly waved chestnut hair at her very crown, she was an efficient engine of seduction and disaster. And to omit what came between would be a sin: her voluptuous nine inches were encased in a lamé that glittered with the fire of burnished silver, cut and fitted in the guise of an evening gown. Pouting and sullen as she was in Almarish’s grasp, she hadn’t noticed that the hem was scarcely below her ankles, as was intended by the unknown couturier who had spared no pains on her. That hem, or the maladjustment of it, revealed, in fact, that she had a pretty, though miniature, taste in silks and lacework.

  “Ox!” she stormed at the bearded sorcerer. “Beastly oaf—you’ll squeeze me out of shape with your great, clumsy hands!”

  “That would be a pity,” said Almarish. “It’s quite a shape, as you seem to know.”

  The pounding on the door redoubled. “Lord Almarish!” shouted a voice, clumsily feigning anxiety. “Are you all right?”

  “Sure, Pike,” called the sorcerer. “Don’t bother me now. I have a lady with me. We’re looking at my potted plants.”

  “Oh,” said the voice of Pike. “All right—my business can wait.”

  “That stalled him,” grunted Almarish. “But not for long. You, what’s your name?”

  She stuck out a tiny tongue at him.

  “Look here,” said Almarish gently. He contracted his fist a little and the creature let out an agonized squawk on a small scale. “What’s your name?” he repeated.

  “Moira,” she snapped tartly. “And if your throat weren’t behind all that hay I’d cut it.”

  “Forget that, kid,” he said. “Let me give you a brief résumé of pertinent facts:

  “My name is Packer and I’m from Braintree, Mass., which you never heard of. I came to Ellil by means of a clock with thirteen hours. Unusual, eh? Once here I sized things up and began to organize on a business basis with the assistance of a gang of half-breed demons. I had three wishes, but they’re all used up now. I had to send back to Braintree my grandson Peter, who got here the same way I did, and with him a sweet young witch he picked up.

  “Before leaving he read me a little lecture on business reform and the New Deal. What I thought was commercial common sense—little things like bribes, subornation of perjury, arson, assassination and the like—he claimed was criminal. So I, like a conscientious Packer, began to set things right. This my gang didn’t like. The best testimony of that fact is that the gentleman outside my door is Balthazar Pike, my trusted lieutenant, who has determined to take over.

  “I learned that from Count Hacza, the vampire, when he called yesterday, and he said that I was to be wiped out today. He wrung my hand with real tears in his eyes—an affectionate chap—as he said goodbye.”

  “And,” snarled the creature, “ain’t that too damn’ bad?”

  “No,” said Almarish mildly. “No, because you’re going to get me out of this. I knew you were good luck the moment you poked your nose through the wall and began to snicker.”

  Moira eyed him keenly. “What’s in it for me?” she finally demanded.

  There was again the pounding on the door. “Lord Almarish,” yelled Balthazar Pike, “aren’t you through with those potted plants yet?”

  “No,” called the sorcerer. “We’ve just barely got to the gladioli.”

  “Pretty slow working,” grumbled the trusted lieutenant. “Get some snap into it.”

  “Sure, Pike. Sure. Only a few minutes more.” He turned on the little creature. “What do you want?” he asked.

  There was a curious catch in her voice as she answered, “A vial of tears from la Bête Joyeux.”

  “Cut out the bunk,” snapped Almarish impatiently. “Gold, jewels—anything at all. Name it.”

  “Look, whiskers,” snarled the little creature. “I told you my price and I’ll stick to it. What’s more I’ll take you to the right place.”

  “And on the strength of that,” grinned the sorcerer, “I’m supposed to let you out of my hands?”

  “That’s the idea,” snapped Moira. “You have to trust somebody in this lousy world—why not me? After all, mister, I’m taking your word—if you’ll give it.”

  “Done,” said Almarish with great decision. “I hereby pledge myself to do everything I can to get you that what-ever-it-was’s tears, up to and including risk and loss of life.”

  “Okay, whiskers,” she said. “Put me down.” He obliged, and saw her begin to pace out pentacles and figures on the mosaic floor. As she began muttering to herself with great concentration he leaned his head against the door. There were agitated murmurs without.

  “Don’t be silly,” Pike was saying. “He told me with his own mouth he had a woman—”

  “Look, Bally,” said another voice, one that Almarish recognized as that of a gatekeeper, “I ain’t sayin’ you’re wacked up, but they ain’t even no mice in his room. I ain’t let no one in and the ectoplasmeter don’t show nothin’ on the grounds of the castle.”

  “Then,” said Pike, “he must be stalling. Rourke, you get the rest of the ’breeds and we’ll break down the door and settle Lord Almarish’s hash for good. The lousy weakling!”

  Lord Almarish began to sweat afresh and cast a glance at Moira, who was standing stock-still to one side of the mosaic design in the floor. He noted abruptly a series of black tiles in the center that he had never seen before. Then others surrounding them turned black, and he saw that they were not coloring but ceasing to exist. Apparently something of a bottomless pit was opening up beneath his palace.

  Outside the padding and clicking of feet sounded. “Okay, boys! Get it in line!”

  They would be swinging up a battering ram, Almarish surmised. The shivering crash of the first blow against the oaken door made his ears ring. Futilely he braced his own brawny body against the planking and felt the next two blows run through his bones.

  “One more!” yelled his trusted lieutenant. And with that one more the door would give way, he knew, and what they would do to him would be no picnic. He had schooled them well, though crudely, in the techniques of strike-breaking effected by employers of the 1880s.

  “Hurry it up!” he snapped at Moira. She didn’t answer, being wholly intent, it seemed, on the enlargement of the pit which was growing in the floor. It would now admit the passage of a slimmer man than the sorcerer, but his own big bones would never make it.

  With agonizing slowness the pit grew, tile by tile, as the tiny creature frowned into it till her face was white and bloodless. Almarish fancied he could hear through the door the labored breathing of the half-breed demons as they made ready to swing again.

  Crash! It came again, and only his own body kept the door from falling in fragments.

  “Right—dive!” shrilled the little voice of Moira as the battering ram poked through into the room. He caught her up in one hand and squeezed through into the blackness of the pit. He looked up and could see a circle of faces snarling with rage as he slid down a kind of infinitely smooth inclined tunnel. Abruptly the patch of light above him was blotted out and there was absolutely nothing to be seen.

  All Almarish knew was that he was gliding in utter blackness at some terrifying speed in excess of anything sane down to a place he knew nothing of in the company of a vicious little creature whose sole desire seemed to be to cut his throat and drink his blood with glee.

  7

  “Where,” asked Almarish, “does this end?”

  “You’ll find out,” snarled the little creature. “Maybe you’re yellow already?”

  “Don’t say that,” he warned. “N
ot unless you want to get playfully pinched—in half.”

  “Cold-blooded,” she marveled. “Like a snake or lizard. Heart’s probably three-ventricled, too.”

  “Our verbal contract,” said the sorcerer, delicately emphasizing verbal, “didn’t include an exchange of insults.”

  “Yeah,” she said abstractedly. And though they were in the dark, he could sense that she was worried. “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “What’s the matter?” he demanded.

  “It’s your fault,” she shrilled. “It’s your own damned fault hurrying me up so I did this!” The man knew that she was near distraction with alarm. And he could feel the reason why. They were slowing down, and this deceleration, presumably, was not on Moira’s schedule.

  “We on the wrong line?” he asked coolly.

  “Yes. That’s about it. And don’t ask me what happens now, because I don’t know, you stupid cow!” Then she was sniffling quietly in his hand, and the sorcerer was wondering how he could comfort her without breaking her in two.

  “There now,” he soothed tentatively, stroking her hair carefully with the tip of a finger. “There, now, don’t get all upset—”

  It occurred to him to worry on his own account. They had slowed to a mere snail’s pace, and at the dramatically, psychologically correct moment a light appeared ahead. A dull chanting resounded through the tube:

  “Slimy flesh,

  Clotted blood,

  Fat, white worms,

  These are food.”

  From Moira there was a little, strangled wail. “Ghouls!”

  “Grave robbers?” asked the sorcerer. “I can take care of them—knock a few heads together.”

  “No,” she said in thin, hopeless tones. “You don’t understand. These are the real thing. You’ll see.”

  As they slid from the tube onto a sort of receiving table Almarish hastily pocketed the little creature. Then, staring about him in bewilderment, he dropped his jaw and let it hang.

  The amiable dietary ditty was being ground out by a phonograph, tending which there was a heavy-eyed person dressed all in gray. He seemed shapeless, lumpy, like a half-burned tallow candle on whose sides the drops of wax have congealed in half-teardrops and cancerous clusters. He had four limbs and, on the upper two, hands of a sort, and wore what could roughly be described as a face.