The Inadequate Adept

by Simon Hawke

  "Rumors! Get your fresh, hot rumors here!"

  "I'd like a rumor, please."

  "That'll be two bits."

  "Two bits? I say, that's a bit steep."

  " Tis the going rate, you know."

  "Are you a licensed rumor monger?"

  "Absolutely. Here, see? There's me scroll."

  "How do I know 'tis a genuine rumor monger's license?"

  "You can read, can't you?"

  "Uh...never mind. I suppose it looks all right. Very well, here's two bits. I want to hear a rumor."

  "Well, rumor has it Warrick's taking all the prisoners from the royal dungeons and turning 'em into dwarves, then sending 'em to work the mines up in the mountains."

  "But I already heard that rumor last week!"

  "Oh, you want the latest rumor then?"

  "Well, that's what I said, didn't I?"

  "No, you merely said you'd like to hear a rumor."

  "I meant the latest rumor."

  "Ah, well, you didn't specify. That'll be two bits, milord."

  "1 already paid you two bits!"

  "That was for last week's rumor."

  "But I already heard last week's rumor!"

  "Well now, how was I to know that? You asked for a rumor, I sold you a rumor. You see the sign? It says, 'No refunds.' You paid for a rumor, you got a rumor."

  "See here, you're trying to cheat me! I'm going to report you to the Better Business Guild!"

  "Well now, milord, I'm sorry you feel that way, but you see, 'twas a perfectly legal business transaction. You requested a rumor, and you were sold a rumor. That's straight mongering, that is. If you wanted the latest rumor, you should have specified the latest rumor. I can't be held responsible."

  "You're a bloody robber, is what you are! I want the latest rumor!"

  "That'll be three bits, milord."

  "You said two bits before!"

  "We reserve the right to change the price at any time, due to prevailing market conditions. If you wish the latest rumor, I would suggest you buy now, before the price increase."

  "But you've already increased the price!"

  "I mean the next price increase. Which is liable to come at any minute now."

  "All right, all right, here's three bits, blast you! Now I wish the absolutely latest rumor, you understand?"

  "Right. Well, rumor has it Warrick is taking all the prisoners from the royal dungeons and stealing their life force in an attempt to come up with an immortality elixir."

  "No!"

  "Oh, aye, milord. 'Tis the very latest rumor."

  "Who'd you hear it ftom?"

  "I have it on very good authority."

  "By the gods! That's terrible!"

  "Aye, milord, I quite agree. Check back with me tomorrow and I'll let you know if there's been any new developments."

  "Is that included in the price?"

  "Well, no, milord, you paid only for the latest rumor as of today. Tomorrow it'll be a brand-new rumor. We rumor mongers have to make a living too, you know."

  So with rumors flying and the demand driving the price up every day, the stories spread like wildfire through every tavern and marketplace in Pittsburgh. Amid all the conflicting rumors, one thing remained clear. Warrick's minions had stopped snatching people off the streets, but now the sheriff's deputies were doing it for him, under the justification of the new, repressive edicts. The king had not responded to the petitions after all, but had merely devised an elaborate subterfuge for Warrick's benefit. And so, poor, Bumbling King Billy got the blame and while the concept of impeachment hadn't been invented yet, regicide was a well-established practice, with a long and respectable tradition behind it. King Billy didn't know it yet, but his job-and his very life-were hanging by a thread.

  In the meantime, Warrick did not concern himself with such trivial matters. (Warrick? Good, he's still unconscious. And Teddy's hiding underneath the stairs.) One after another, Warrick had the prisoners from the royal dungeons brought into his sanctorum, where he had Teddy strap them into the machine. Initially, he had simply activated the machine by magic, and watched the prisoners disappear, hoping that close observation would reveal something about what happened to them. However, that did not prove very productive, so he then attempted to reverse the spell to see if he could bring them back. However, after a number of unsuccessful efforts, he decided to abandon that approach. He tried scrying with his crystal ball, in an attempt to see if the visions in the crystal would reveal where the subjects of his experiments had gone, but no matter how hard he concentrated and focused his energies, the crystal remained cloudy and the fate of the vanished prisoners remained unknown.

  Warrick then embarked upon a new course of action. He placed each of his subjects under a spell of compulsion before he had them strapped into the machine, a spell that would compel them to return to his sanctorum and reveal what happened to them. If he couldn't find a way to bring them back, he figured, he'd place a spell upon them that would irresistibly compel them to find their own way back. Exactly how they would manage to accomplish this was not his problem. Sooner or later, one way or another, he was certain that at least one of them would manage to return from wherever he was sending them, and then he'd know exactly what was going on.

  Unfortunately, this made things rather difficult for the subjects of his experiments. As we have already established, the time machine was not designed to be operated by magical remote control, and so this method of operation had certain rather erratic results. The hapless subjects of Warrick's experiments were not all sent to the same place. When Blackrune 4 had accidentally stumbled upon the spell in the first place, he had managed to transport himself to Los Angeles. That same spell later transported his apprentice to the East Village in New York. Subsequent experiments transported Warrick's subjects to places as diverse as Tokyo, Honolulu, Paris, Reykjavik, Copenhagen, Liverpool, Tijuana, Rapid City, Albuquerque, Johannesburg, and Sydney. Once there, Warrick's hapless subjects were then faced not only with the shattering reality of a completely different universe, but seized with a powerful, irresistible compulsion to return from whence they came. Only they had no time machine to do it with.

  Not to put too fine a point on it, this caused certain problems. Dropping residents of a primitive, medieval city into a modern, high-tech metropolis such as New York or Tokyo, and on top of that, imbuing them with an insane, relentless, driven urge to get back home no matter what, was akin to locking a claustrophobic gorilla inside a narrow linen closet. And considering that a large number of these people were criminally inclined to begin with, the result was a series of highly unusual incidents.

  In Albuquerque, New Mexico, one of Warrick's subjects attacked a mounted policeman and knocked him off his horse, then stole the horse and led the police on a mad chase as far as Corrales, where it took six cruisers and a dozen men to cut him off and subdue him.

  In New York City, a wild-eyed young man battered his way through the divider between the driver and the rear passenger section, held a dagger to the cabbie's throat, and demanded to be taken to Pittsburgh. The terrified cabbie drove him all the way to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his passenger raving all the while, and when his passenger insisted that it wasn't Pittsburgh, that it looked nothing at all like Pittsburgh, and if he didn't take him to Pittsburgh right away, he would fillet him, the cabbie dove out of the car and escaped with only minor injuries while the cab crashed into a bridge abutment and exploded.

  In Tokyo, Japan, a strangely garbed man went berserk and ran screaming through the streets, knocking into people and picking up whatever he could find and use as weapons, causing numerous injuries until police subdued him and found someone who could speak English (for as we all know from watching Star Trek, everyone in the entire universe speaks English, while hardly anyone speaks Japanese), whereupon they found that the man was convinced he had been transported to the underworld, where he was surrounded by slanty-eyed demons who gibbered at him incomprehensibly and wanted to poss
ess him. He kept babbling something about a "sanctorum" in Pittsburgh, so they gagged him and stuck him in a straitjacket and put him on a plane to the United States, where he eventually wound up in a sanitarium in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

  In Johannesburg, South Africa, a man appeared out of nowhere in the middle of a busy street and ran amok, dodging between vehicles and screaming until he was shot down in a hail of gunfire from passing motorists.

  In London, England, a wild-eyed young woman suddenly appeared in the House of Commons and started shouting and waving her arms about. For about ten minutes, no one could hear her over the noise made by other MP's, but eventually she got the floor and a lively debate ensued.

  In Memphis, Tennessee, a pockmarked, ale-ravaged, young prostitute arrested in The Stealers Tavern for refusing to give one of the sheriff's deputies a freebie suddenly materialized onstage, behind a mike, in the middle of an Allman Brothers concert. Frightened out of her wits, she started tearing her hair and wailing about wanting to get back home. The audience gave her a standing ovation and she was hailed as a great white blues artist, given a recording contract with Atlantic Records, and about nine months later, she disappeared after giving birth to a beautiful boy with long blond hair.

  In Boulder, Colorado, a wiry young man mysteriously appeared out of nowhere in Scott Carpenter Park, in the middle of a Society for Creative Anachronism weapons practice session, where he grabbed a heavy wooden sword and proceeded to lay waste to the entire field. When it was all over and the grassy meadow was littered with broken, bleeding bodies, the surviving members of the medievalist group awarded him a title. The puzzled young man was then escorted off the field by several shapely young women in full armor and was not seen again for two weeks, when he was observed to be in shock, walking unsteadily, with a dazed expression on his face and three favors bound around his sword arm.

  Some of these incidents passed all but unnoticed, except in the localities where they occurred, others managed to make national headlines, and it wasn't long before a certain reporter for a Florida-based tabloid of questionable journalistic integrity noticed a pattern beginning to emerge.

  Now, whether this reporter was simply a throwback to another time, or had seen too many episodes of Kolchak: The Night Stalker was a question that was open to debate, but it should suffice to say that after twenty-five odd years in the newspaper business, he had been fired from some of the best jobs in journalism and had finally struck the bottom of the barrel, where he remained comfortably ensconced with a bottle of Jack Daniels. Outside his chosen field, he was virtually unknown, but in the journalism business, Colin Hightower was infamous.

  Few people could approach the colorful uniqueness of his resume. He had once been punched in the nose by Benjamin Bradlee, and on another memorable occasion, he had been kneed in the groin by Barbara Walters. He had been shot at with a .44 Magnum by gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, and Geraldo Rivera had once tried to run him over on the streets of New York City with a Kawasaki motorcycle. Anchorwoman Diane Sawyer got the hiccups every time his name was mentioned and Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner was alleged to have chased him through the lobby of the Fontainbleu Hotel with a baseball bat.

  The man who prompted such extreme reactions looked nothing if not placidly average and normal. Born and raised in Liverpool, Colin Hightower came to the United States to pursue a career as an investigative journalist after being fired from the London Daily Mirror over an incident allegedly involving Princess Margaret and a rock group called The Yardbirds. Of average height and with a stocky build, he had the rosy-cheeked, wide face of a friendly Irish bartender, with an easy smile and eyes that twinkled like those of a mischievous ten-year-old. He habitually dressed in rumpled khaki twill trousers and shapeless, nondescript sport coats, and on the rare occasions when he wore a tie, it was always at half mast, with the top two buttons of his frayed, button-down-collar shirt undone. There was never any danger of his being wooed by the television media, because he simply wasn't telegenic. Even Jimmy Breslin looked better on camera than he did. Besides, Colin's first love was always the print medium and he considered himself a purist. Damon Runyon would have loved him, but the only public figure who ever had a kind word to say about him was G. Gordon Liddy, who once described him as "a tough, old snapper who knows how to hold his liquor."

  Unfortunately, Hightower's breed of newspaper reporter had died out with the birth of the Columbia School of Journalism and Colin was as out of place in modern newspaper reporting as an Edsel at a sports-car rally. Nevertheless, he persevered, stubbornly refusing to change. For Colin, the only thing that mattered was The Story. And when he first noticed the strange pattern of similarities in these apparently isolated incidents occurring at different locales throughout the world, he began to suspect that he had stumbled on a big one.

  "Listen to this, Jack, here's another one," he said as he barged into his editor's office without knocking. "Man comes wandering in out of the Sonoran Desert in Tucson, Arizona, half dead from exposure and raving like a lunatic."

  "Colin...."

  "No, listen! Get this... he's dressed up in medieval clothing, and he keeps babbling about Pittsburgh and somebody named Warwick or Warrick. He's taken to ER and given treatment, but he breaks out and takes off again, injuring two doctors and three nurses, and he hasn't been seen since."

  "Look, Colin...."

  "Don't you see, Jack? It's the same as all the others! The weird, medieval-style clothing, the references to Warrick or Warwick and Pittsburgh and the white tower... over and over again, in all these different, seemingly isolated incidents, the same things keep coming up. Here's one in Albuquerque, here's another one in London, and one in New York, and another one in Tokyo-"

  "All right, Colin!"

  "All right, what?"

  "All right, you can do the story, I give up! You're driving me crazy. So do it, already. What's your angle?"

  "I don't know yet," Hightower replied. "But I'm going to follow up on all these common threads. Find out who this Warrick or Warwick is, what the deal is with this tower they keep talking about-"

  "So then you're going to Pittsburgh?"

  "To begin with, yeah. They've got one of these people locked up in a sanitarium there. But I'm going to track down each and every one of these different incidents and-"

  "And it'll cost a fortune in traveling expenses," said the editor.

  "So what? This is a real news story, Jack, not one of those World War Two planes discovered on the moon, things you've got those hacks out there dreaming up. It's off the wall, it's mysterious, and it's genuine, for God's sake!"

  "Okay, okay, you've talked me into it. But I want receipts for every dime you spend, you understand?"

  "You got it. You won't regret this, Jack. There's something big here, I can smell it."

  "Yeah, yeah, just go. Bring me a story. What the hell, it'll be nice to do some real investigative journalism for a change. Just try not to run the bills up."

  So Colin Hightower, intrepid newshawk from a bygone time, started to investigate. He had no doubt there was a story here. He had also had no doubt that this investigation would take him fairly far afield. What he did not suspect was just how far.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  "I still don't understand the part about the traveling," said Rory the dragon, sitting on the parapet of Brewster's tower, his huge, leathery wings folded back and his powerful, iridescent claws gripping the stone masonry.

  It was a quiet, moonlit night, and the clearing below was peaceful, everyone having staggered home after the feast. Rory had dropped in-literally, out of the sky-to perch on Brewster's tower and chat with him about the world he came from. Rory's curiosity about Earth was due to the curious fact that dragons happen to dream about our universe, and there are many things that dragons see in their dreams about our world that they do not quite understand.

  "Well," said Brewster, "you're supposed to continue dribbling as you move down the court, and if you take more
than three steps without dribbling, then that's traveling, and that's a foul."

  "I still don't quite understand," said Rory, in a voice that sounded like a cross between a cement mixer and a locomotive. "The point of the game is to travel down the court and stuff the little ball into the netted hoop, and yet one is penalized for traveling?"

  "No, no," said Brewster, "you're penalized for traveling if you don't dribble at the same time."

  "Doesn't that make the playing court rather messy?" asked the dragon.

  "No, no," said Brewster, shaking his head, "you don't understand. Not drooling, dribbling."

  "What's the difference?" asked the dragon.

  "Dribbling is what it's called when you bounce the ball as you travel down the court," Brewster explained. "They simply call it dribbling. The players themselves don't actually dribble."

  "Then why do they call it dribbling? Why don't they simply call it bouncing?" Rory asked.

  Brewster shrugged. "I haven't the faintest idea," he replied. "I'd never really thought of it that way before."

  "Oh, very well," the dragon said. "Let it pass for now. So this bouncing of the ball is known as dribbling, correct?"

  "Right," said Brewster.

  "And one must do this dribbling whilst one travels down the court?"

  "Correct," said Brewster.

  "But traveling is not permitted and is called a foul?"

  "That's right," said Brewster.

  "Then how in thunder does one get to the opposite end of the playing court to make a basket?" asked the dragon, frowning.

  "You dribble," Brewster said.

  "As you travel," said the dragon.

  "Right," said Brewster.

  "But traveling is a foul?"

  "Correct."

  "Then how do you get to the other end of the court without committing a foul?"

  "You dribble. Or you could pass the ball."

  "To whom?"