Smart Dragons, Foolish Elves

by Alan Dean Foster

  Elsie Moonish took out a pound of old newspaper, then a ball wrapped in velvet. Carefully, but not too carefully, she unwrapped the egg and there it was. Just an egg, a few inches bigger than a chicken’s, dotted with violet splotches.

  To make it sound as if I were in on this from the start, I said, “Uh-huh. There it is all right.”

  She gave me the egg and I examined it. It was warm and seemed to be in good condition. As soon as possible, I put it back in the velvet nest.

  “Dr. Hikhoff sat where you are sitting,” she said, “for hour after hour. He called the egg his family. He was quite involved.”

  “He was.”

  “ “There are chills in this room, drafts,’ he would say. A very protective man.”

  “Definitely.”

  “Mr. North, perhaps it’s time to talk business, a crass thing in face of the occasion. But life goes on. ”

  “Business,” I said. “Per Dr. Hikhoff’s instructions, I have in my pocket a checkbook, and I am prepared to give you a draft for $2,500.”

  “Mr. North,” she said, “that’s sweet,” fitting the egg back into its box.

  “Think nothing of it.”

  “Mr. North, let me say that I feel like the queen of bitches, forgive the expression. But the Nagle person called this morning with an offer of $4,500, all his money in the world, and for the very same egg.”

  “But you promised Dr. Hikhoff. …”

  “Mr. North, what is money to me? Time? Health? It’s only that hypochondria is dreadfully costly. Doctors charge outrageous fees; it’s a disgrace. Let me show you something.”

  She took the egg back to her bedroom and returned with a large book, an album.

  “Browse this. My x-rays. Five years of x-rays and some of friends and family. There. My uterus. Fifty dollars. My coccyx. Fifteen or twenty, as I recall. Heart, lungs, the lower tract. Do you have any idea of the cost?”

  Looking at her insides was embarrassing for some reason, on so short an acquaintance. If medical magazines had centerfolds, she would have done well. Her organs were neat and well cared for. After finishing a flip of the pages, I actually felt as if I had known her for years.

  “Miss Moonish,” I said, “I will level with you, cards on the table, face up. Dr. Hikhoff left me with a certain amount of cash. Enough to pay you, live a little, and get the Glak back home.”

  “The Nagle person was so insistent,” she said. “Willing to risk all.”

  “I’ll match his offer,” I said, “though it will mean hardship. Plus one dollar.”

  “Marvelous. I’m so relieved. It’s thrilling when two grown men meet in conflict. Especially the moment, Mr. North, when their bids are equal, when they have exhausted materia] resources. Then they are thrown back on primitive reserves. Spiritual and physical qualities. The plus, as you said. The plus-plus.”

  “You lose me.”

  “Your money, Mr. North, or Mr. Nagle’s money. They add up to the same thing. So the bids erase each other. Two men yearn for my egg. Each has offered gold. Now other factors creep into the picture. The plus-plus. You know, I hesitate to give up this situation. I lead a dull life, Mr. North.”

  “What you said about other factors. What other factors?”

  “The city is frozen. Everything strains under tons of snow. I will tend my shop, care for my pets, cut poodle hair, and so forth. I will eat, sleep, wait out the dull months. Despite my x-rays, I feel hollow inside at this time of year. Like an empty jug. An empty jug yearning for, how shall 1 put it, honey. I want honey, Mr. North, the honey plus-plus. Memory.”

  “Are you suggesting. Miss Moonish, to a total stranger, anything in any way directly or indirectly involving the possibility of what the students call “body contact?”

  “You have a quick mind, Mr. North. You have a frankness. Being around nature, 1, too, am a to-the-point person.”

  “Miss Moonish, I work as a campus cop. I write poems. I read a lot. I hardly have a social life. I am not exactly a bulldozer. In fact I am a sexual camel. I can go for miles without. My sex is my work. I sublimate. And I don’t know you well enough.”

  “I find you charming, Mr. North.”

  “And then there is the Nagle person. A terrible amoral fellow from what I gather. Suppose, for the sake of discussion, you find the Nagle’s plus-plus more charming.” Elsie Moonish stood up and did a slow turn, stretching. “It’s my Glak. I’m in the catbird seat. The Glakbird seat. The Glak-egg seat. I’m absolutely enraptured by the entire chain of events.”

  “All right, five thousand, though now I am including my own small reserve, retirement money. Five thousand dollars.”

  “Are you offering an additional four hundred ninety-nine dollars not to make love to me?”

  “Yes. Yes and no. It’s nothing personal.”

  “It feels personal. Or is it just the price of your own dear insecurity. You don’t want this little competition to be decided on the basis of your … ability?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “It is that.”

  “Maybe it is.”

  “Find courage.”

  “Something is chirping downstairs, Miss Moonish. Maybe a prowler. …”

  “You are the prowler. Prowl.”

  Damn Hikhoff. What is my debt to you? First a vow. Now, if you take things seriously, my most precious possession. For a Glak?

  “I like involvement,” I said.

  “Who doesn’t? Who among us doesn’t? But there is a lot to be said in months with R in them for love without possession. The most painful kind of human contact. Transients welcome. Exciting, infuriating. The ultimate act, but without the owning. It teaches a lesson, Mr. North. It renews the lesson of separation. It reminds one of the magic of flesh in winter. Fusion and non-fission. It builds immunities against the terrible desires of SPRING.”

  All that on one exhale, and I thought she would burst from decompression.

  “I’m no philosopher,” I said.

  “Philosophy is in the tip of the tongue,” she said, “the small of the back, behind the ears, where the legs meet the trunk, inside the thighs, behind the knees, on the mountain peaks, in the valley. The demilitarized zones.”

  “I fear my own rust,” I said. “Lust. A Freudian slip. I’m not calm.”

  “Come,” said Miss Moonish.

  Naked, Elsie Moonish was very nice, though I had a tendency to see past her skin to the insides. We stayed together for hours fusing and non-fusing, loving without possessing, beating the winter odds and strengthening the blood against spring. Our music came from the animals downstairs, and her bed could have been grass. We were in the country. Elsie was wet and ready again and again. I was a fountain of youth to my amazement. It had been so long.

  “How long, Harold?”

  “Two years.”

  “Who?”

  “A coed doing a paper on police brutality.”

  “1 hate her.”

  Then too soon, she said, “Now. I have reached the point where I want you to stay. So go.”

  “Once more.”

  “No.”

  “Plus-plus.”

  “Go.”

  We took a shower together. She soaped me and said she liked my body. I told her, soaping her, that the feeling was mutual. She said, while I dressed, that I should telephone tomorrow.

  I went out into the cold shaking like gelatin, blowing steam. I would have gone back, but she locked the shoppe behind me.

  Back home I saw that I had been broken and entered, ransacked.

  The room was upside down. The only thing taken was the letter FIRST. Luckily I had FINALLY with me. I called Elsie Moonish right away, but got only a buzz.

  A Nagle who would rob is a desperate Nagle, I thought. How would he deal with the owner of the egg? I worried for Elsie. Then for myself. He might deal very well. I never had seen the Nagle. Maybe he was a football type, a walking penis.

  I sat worrying about the Nagle’s secondary sexual characteristics, and would h
ave stayed in that trance of doubt, had it not been for my cop brain which saved me. Here I was, following the rules, waiting to hear if I won the egg, while an unleashed Nagle of no principle was running loose. What a passive idiot I was. By the time I bolted into the snow, Elsie Moonish could already be inside a camp trunk on her way by American Express.

  I caught a cab to Poodleville, and none too soon.

  As we pulled in front of the shoppe, I saw a man hurrying along down the street. He was carrying a large parcel, too small for a camp trunk but large enough. While I paid the driver, not before, it came to me that it was the Glak box.

  That very moment a window flew open upstairs from Poodleville. I saw Elsie, wrapped in a wrap, lean out, look from side to side and shout, uGlak snatcher. ”

  I flew after the fleeing Nagle, my shoes skimming on glossy pavement. The Nagle ran, holding the Glak box before him and would have gotten away but for fate. The old part of town is as hilly as Rome. From nowhere a fat child on a sled came swooshing down the street and caught the Nagle at his ankles. His legs opened like a scissor. The egg box soared through the air. The sledder went crashing; the Nagle collapsed in a lump.

  I intercepted the box in midair. Then I fell, tail down, box up, on top of the skidding sled and went with it down the Poodleville hill.‘The sidewalk was frozen glass. The sled broke Olympic records. The world blurred. I caught a glimpse of Miss Moonish as as I went by, then saw the branches of trees and grey sky. Down and down I went, and heard the twing twing of bullets around me.

  The Nagle was firing and getting close. Fortunately, the sled jumped the sidewalk and hustled along in the gutter. There was no traffic, and clear sailing. I felt a hot flash. I was hit but not dead.

  Down I went, about a thousand miles an hour, toward the railroad tracks. I heard whistle and clang up ahead. The traffic blinker turned red. The zebra-striped bar that stops cars came down. I headed right for the crossing, shot under the roadblock, hit the track, saw the front of the freight, a smoky Cyclops, locked my arms on the box, left the sled, turned upside down, and came down in a snowbank with the train between my and my enemy.

  Forgetting pain, I grabbed my box and climbed into an empty car.

  So this is it, I thought. My body will lie here and roam the United States, a mournful cargo. I bawled. There was so much work still undone. Here I was cut at the budding.

  A brakeman found me in the Utica yards. I was in the General Hospital when I woke.

  “Do you have medicare?”

  “Ummm.”

  “You are here mostly for exposure and shock. But not entirely. To state it unemotionally and simply, Mr. North, you have been perfectly circumcised by a 22 calibre bullet. Are you sure this was not some kind of muffed suicide attempt?”

  “Hikhoff,” I raged aloud. “If the Nagle were a more accurate shot, I would have collected your ashes, reassembled you and kicked you in the ass. I have always been intact from cuticles to appendix, and now this. What trauma you have caused.”

  They tranquilized me.

  Soon I learned that when they brought me to the hospital, they brought my egg too. It was in a hot closet near my bed. What damage the excitement might have done to the Glak I could not know.

  Poor Glak, I said in a whisper. What if you are bom slightly bent? Forget it. Let the world know you have endured hard knocks. All survivors should carry scars, if only in the eyes. Be of good cheer, Glak.

  Hikhoff would have enjoyed the sounds of the hospital. Pain sounds, fearsome in the deep darkness. Baby sounds full of good rage and wanting. For those sounds, my companions in the night, the vowels have not shifted. And the sounds of the loudspeaker calling Dr. this and Dr. that, and Dr. Mortimer Post when they do a dissection, and the sounds of the trays and televisions, the visitors, the wheeling carts, all these sounds would interest Hikhoff for there is the honesty of a white wall about them. Hikhoff, but not me.

  Joyfully, I left the hospital an ounce or two lighter, none the worse. I carried my box with new enthusiasm. The Nagle’s bullets motivated me. I had a stake in this adventure now, a small but sincere investment.

  There were six weeks to endure (it was March) before the egg would pop, assuming it would pop at all, and Labrador to reach on a limited budget. And a Nagle to watch for, a fanatic Nagle who would surely pursue us. Clearly, the first order of business was to find a hideout, an obscure off-the-track place where a man and his egg would be left alone.

  I searched the classifieds. Two ads caught my eye. One of them was addressed directly to it:

  H.N. KNOW YOU ARE IN UTICA. ALL FORGIVEN.

  CAN WE TALK? AGREEMENT CAN BE REACHED

  PROJECT G. RIDICULOUS TO CONTINUE HOSTILE.

  DANGEROUS TO WAIT.

  Dangerous to wait. So the Nagle had traced the destination of the train. Smart man, and a compromiser. If there had been no shooting, no tampering with my equipment, however slight, I would have answered his P.O. box. And why not? He was his father’s son, acting on correct impulses. Hikhoff was not even a blood relation.

  But, with soreness when I walked, I was in no mood to negotiate.

  The second ad was for a room in a nice, clean, well-heated house with a good view, kitchen privileges, housekeeping, good family on a tree-lined street near transportation and churches of all denominations. The price was right. I called the number and, yes, the room was vacant.

  The house was welcoming. There was a small garden where a snowman stood and even an evergreen. I rang the doorbell, self-conscious over my package, which I held in my arms since the steps looked cold. I tried to take the attitude that this was a pregnancy and that I was blooming and entitled.

  The box made no difference to Mrs. Fonkle who owned the property. Probably there was a buyers’ market for rooms up there.

  I told her I was a scientist, but not the kind who makes bombs. I was dependable, safe, well-mannered, a person who asked only tidbits from existence, not noisy, good-natured, involved in breeding a new kind of chicken big enough to feed multitudes. Mrs. Fonkle liked, but worried over, the idea of big chickens.

  “How big?” she said, and I held out my hands three feet apart.

  “Some chicken,” she said, laughing herself into a red face.

  The first night she invited me to dinner.

  The Fonkles were a mixed grill. Mrs. Fonkle had been married once to a pencil of a man, a man who lacked pigmentation. He was dead now but left a daughter behind, a girl in her mid-twenties who was pretty, all angles, intense and full of gestures.

  Mrs. Fonkle’s present husband, a plumber, was a side of beef, medium well. Her daughter by him was a dark, soft affair, just nineteen, filled with inner springs that pushed out.

  At dinner, there were comments about science and the mushroom cloud and how the world was better before. The daughter of Husband One, Myma by name, said, “People are beginning to realize that war accomplishes nothing.”

  “So how come everybody is fighting,” Cynthia said.

  “Two things can stop wars,” I said. “First is discovering life from another part of the sky with a big appetite for all kinds of people, regardless. Second is the hope implicit in the fact that nations good at sex are bad at marching.”

  “Tell me, are you a married man?” Mrs. Fonkle said, handing me seconds.

  “No. I have no family. I am married to my work.”

  “She’s getting personal,” Mr. Fonkle said.

  “In a house where doors are left open,” Mrs. Fonkle said, “I’m entitled to a few questions.”

  Mrs. Fonkle’s house was truly a house where doors are left open. Even me, a paranoid now, watching for shadows of the Nagle, took to leaving my bolt unclicked.

  The first week went well. You could say an intimacy grew between me and the family. I had never lived so close to people.

  I spent my days writing. At night I checked the egg and took walks. My Hikhoff sat on a dresser, on top of a doily, and he too seemed serene. But problems arose.

  One
evening, an ordinary evening, I came in from my dinner. As always, I examined the egg. It was trembling, shivering, moving. I thought earthquake, catastrophe. But nothing was shaking the egg. It was the egg itself moving around, rolling a little.

  I put the box closer to the radiator, and the jumping slowed.

  Then I did what I knew from the beginning I would have to do.

  I sat on the egg.

  I put it on a pillow, put the pillow on a chair, stripped to my underwear and gently sat on the egg, holding most of my weight with my arms.

  The jumping, squiggling, shivering stopped completely. So there was a Glak in there. And it was chilly, protesting. It wanted its due, namely body heat, and who could blame it?

  Look at me now, I said to my Hikhoff, a full-grown man warming eggs with his rear. Look what you did to me. Is it for this that you fed me and pissed and moaned about our feminized century? Finally you have put me into hatching position. Hikhoff, barrage balloon, how you must be laughing.

  Falling in with the folksy quality of Mrs. Fonkle’s, I had left my door half open. In thin PJ’s, holding a turkish towel, her hair covered with a cloth to hide curlers, her feet bare, wearing no makeup on her dear bony face, Myma came to check my health.

  “Are you OK, Harold?”

  “Fine,” I said. “A little over-exposed. I’m sorry. I should have closed my door. ”

  “Oh,” Myma said. She threw me her towel. I covered my kneecaps. “I could swear you made a sound, a kind of clucking.”

  “Chicken thoughts,” I said. “I was thinking out loud.”

  Her entrance and my surprise must have dropped my pressure and temperature because the egg began again, jumping under me. It had a lot of energy. I had to hold tight to keep myself in the chair.

  “You’re catching cold,” Myma said, coming into the room.

  “No, I’m fine.”

  The egg gave a bump. I flew up a little and could have squooshed it then and there except for a last-second flip.