Waldo said, at large, “Told ya he w’s a troublemaker.” Then, bringing his long, rough, red face next to Newes, he said, “Listen, Indyin, you and all y’r stinkin relatives are through. If Jenkins is damn fool enough ta hire ya, that’s his lookout. But if be don’t, you better stay far, far away, Y’cause nobody likes ya, nobody wants ya, and now that the Guvermint in Worsbermon is finely come ta their sentces, nobody is goin ta protect ya-you and y’r mangy cows and y’r smutty-nosed sheep and y’r blankets—”
Newt’s face showed his feelings, but before be could voice them, Billy Cottonwood broke in. “Mr. Scott,” he said, “we sent a telegram to Washington, asking to halt the breakup of the Reservation.”
Scott smiled his sucaryl smile. “Well, that’s your privilege as a citizen.”
Cottonwood spoke on. He mentioned the provisions of the bill passed by Congress, authorizing the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to liquidate, at his discretion, all reservations including less than one hundred residents, and to divide the land among them.
“Mr. Scott, when the Treaty of juniper Butte was made between the United States and the Tickisalls,” Cottonwood said, “there were thousands of us. That treaty was to be kept ‘as long as the sun shall rise or the grasses grow.’ The government pledged itself to send us doctors-it didn’t and We died like flies.
It pledged to send us seed and cattle; it sent us no seed, and we had to eat the few hundred bead of Stockyard castoffs they did send us, to keep from starving. The government was to keep our land safe for us forever, in a sacred trust-and in every generation they’ve taken away more and more. Mr.
Scott-Mr. Jenkins, Mr. Waldo, and all you other gentlemen-you knew, didn’t you, when you were kind enough to loan us money-or rather, to give us credit at the stores-when this drought started-you knew that this bill was up before Congress, didn’t you?”
No one answered him. “You knew that it would pass, and that turning our lands over to us wouldn’t mean a darned thing, didn’t you? That we already owed so much money we couldn’t pay that our creditors would take all our land? Mr.
Scott, how can the government let this happen to us? It made a treaty with us to keep our lands safe for us ‘as long as the sun rises or the grasses grow.’
Has the sun stopped rising? Has the grass stopped growing? We believed in you-we kept our part of the treaty. Mr. Scott, won’t you wire Washington-won’t you other gentlemen do the same? To stop this thing that’s being done to us?
It’s almost a hundred years now since we made treaty, and we’ve always hoped.
Now we’ve only got till midnight to hope. Unless-?”
But the Superintendent said, No, be couldn’t do that. And Jenkins shook his head, and said, Corry-it was really all for the best. Waldo shrugged, produced a packet of legal papers. “I’ve been deppatized ta serve all these,” be said.
“Soons the land’s all passed over ta individi’l ownership-which is 12 p.m. tonight. But if you give me y’r word (whatever that’s worth) not ta make no trouble, why, guess it c’n wait till morning. You go back ta y’r shacks and I’ll be round, come morning. We’ll sleep over with Scott f’r tanight.”
Sam Quarter-horse said, “We won’t make any trouble, no. Not much use in that.
But we’ll wait right here. It’s still possible we’ll bear from Washington before midnight.”
The Superintendent’s house was quite comfortable. Logs (cut by Indian labor from the last of the Reservation’s trees) blazed in the big fireplace (built by Indian labor). A wealth of rugs (woven by Indians in the Reservation school) decorated wall and floor. The card game bad been on for some time when they heard the first woman start to wail. Waldo looked up nervously. Jenkins glanced at the clock. “Twelve midnight,” he said. “Well, that’s it. All over but the details. Took almost a hundred years, but it’ll be worth it.”
Another woman took up the keening. It swelled to a chorus of heartbreak, then died away. Waldo picked up his cards, then put them down again. An old man’s voice bad -begun a chant. Someone took it up-then another. Drums joined in, and rattles. Scott said, “It was old FoxHead who started that just now.
They’re singing the death song. They’ll go on till morning.”
Waldo swore. Then he laughed. “Let’m,” he said. “It’s their last morning.”
Jenkins woke up first. Waldo stirred to wakefulness as he beard the other dressing. “What time is it?” he asked.
“Don’t know,” Jenkins said. “But it feels to me like gettin-up time … You bear them go just awhile back? No? Don’t know how you could miss it. Singing got real loud -seemed like a whole lot of new voices joined in. Then they got up and moved off. Wonder where they went … I’m going to have a look around outside.” He switched on his flashlight and left the house. In another minute Waldo joined him, knocking on Scott’s door as he passed.
The ashes of the fire still smoldered, making a dull red glow. It was very cold. Jenkins said, “Look here, Waldo look.” Waldo followed the flashlight’s beam, said he didn’t see anything. “It’s the grass … it was green last night. It’s all dead and brown now. Look at it…”
Waldo shivered. “Makes no difference. We’ll get it green again. The land’s ours now.”
Scott joined them, his overcoat hugging his ears. “Why is it so cold?” he asked. “What’s happened to the clock? Who was tinkering with the clock? It’s past eight by clock it ought to be light by now. Where did all the Tickisalls go to? What’s happening? There’s something in the air-I don’t like the feel of it. I’m sorry I ever agreed to work with you, no matter what you paid me—”
Waldo said, roughly, nervously, “Shut up. Some damned Indyin sneaked in and must of fiddled with the clock. Hell with um. Govermint’s on our side now.
Soon’s it’s daylight we’ll clear um all out of here f’r good.”
Shivering in the bitter cold, uneasy for reasons they only dimly perceived, the three white men huddled together by the dying fire and waited for the sun to rise.
And waited… And waited… And waited…
Like every successful form of fiction, fantasy is full of memorable characters. Harold Shea and Bilbo Baggins, Scheherazade and Sinbad stick in our minds long after the rest of the fictional fireworks may have faded. Usually they do so because they’re strong personalities; great rugged heroes or utterly despicable villainesses. They move, they motivate, they thrust the story forward and keep us reading.
This is by way of suggesting that there are not many memorable failures in the lexicon of fantasy. Those who can’t perform are usually accorded the same fate in our memories as a gigolo from Jersey afflicted with the same conundrum.
Which is what makes the occasional memorable failure all that more exceptional. So this anthology ends not with a bang, with a protagonist mighty-thewed (as E. Fudd might say), but with a whimper. More correctly, with a whimperer.
But a memorable one.
Snulbug
ANTHONY BOUCHER
“That’s a hell of a spell you’re using,” said the demon, “if I’m the best you can call up.”
He wasn’t much, Bill Hitchens had to admit. He looked lost in the center of that pentacle. His basic design was impressive enough—snakes for hair, curling tusks, a sharp tipped tail, all the works—but he was something under an inch tall.
Bill had chanted the words and lit the powder with the highest hopes. Even after the feeble flickering flash and the damp fizzling zzzt which had replaced the expected thunder and lightning, he had still had hopes. He had stared up at the space above the pentacle waiting to be awestruck until he had heard that plaintive little voice from the floor wailing, “Here I am.”
“Nobody’s wasted time and power on a misfit like me for years,” the demon went on. “Where’d you get the spell?”
“Just a little something I whipped up,” said Bill modestly. The demon grunted and muttered something about people that thought they were magicians.
“But I’m not
a magician,” Bill explained. “I’m a biochemist.”
The demon shuddered. “I land the damnedest cases,” he mourned. “Working for a psychiatrist wasn’t bad enough, I should draw a biochemist. Whatever that is.”
Bill couldn’t check his curiosity. “And what did you do for a psychiatrist?”
“He showed me to people who were followed by little men and told them I’d chase the little men away.” The demon pantomimed shooting motions.
“And did they go away?”
“Sure. Only then the people decided they’d sooner have little men than me. It didn’t work so good. Nothing ever does,” he added woefully. “Yours won’t either.”
Bill sat down and filled his pipe. Calling up demons wasn’t so terrifying after all. Something quiet and homey about it. “Oh, yes it will,” he said. “This is foolproof.”
“That’s what they all think. People—” The demon wistfully eyed the match as Bill lit his pipe.
“But we might as well get it over with. What do you want?”
“I want a laboratory for my embolism experiments. If this method works, it’s going to mean that a doctor can spot an embolus in the blood stream long before it’s dangerous and remove it safely. My ex-boss, that screwball old occultist Reuben Choatsby, said it wasn’t practical—meaning them wasn’t a fortune in it for him—and fired me. Everybody else thinks I’m whacky too, and I can’t get any backing. So I need ten thousand dollars.”
“There!” the demon sighed with satisfaction. “I told you it wouldn’t work. That’s out for me.
They can’t start fetching money on demand till three grades higher than me. I told you.”
“But you don’t,” Bill insisted, “appreciate all my fiendish subtlety. Look— Say, what is your name?”
The demon hesitated. “You haven’t got another of those things?”
“What things?”
“Matches.”
“Sure.”
“Light me one, please?”
Bill tossed the burning match into the center of the pentacle. The demon scrambled eagerly out of the now cold ashes of the powder and dived into the flame, rubbing himself with the brisk vigor of a man under a needle-shower. “There!” he gasped joyously. “That’s more like it.”
“And now what’s your name?”
The demon’s face fell again. “My name? You really want to know?”
“I’ve got to call you something.”
“Oh, no you don’t. I’m going home. No money games for me.”
“But I haven’t explained yet what you are to do. What’s your name?”
“Snulbug.” The demon’s voice dropped almost too low to be heard.
“Snulbug?” Bill laughed.
“Uh-huh. I’ve got a cavity in one tusk, my snakes are falling out, I haven’t got enough troubles, I should be named Snulbug.”
“All right. Now listen, Snulbug, can you travel into the future?”
“A little. I don’t like it much, though. It makes you itch in the memory.”
“Look, my fine snake-haired friend. It isn’t a question of what you like. How would you like to be left there in that pentacle with nobody to throw matches at you?” Snulbug shuddered. “I thought so.
Now, you can travel into the future?”
“I said a little.”
“And,” Bill leaned forward and puffed hard at his corncob as he asked the vital question, “can you bring back material objects?” If the answer was no, all the fine febrile fertility of his spell-making was useless. And if that was useless, heaven alone knew how the Hitchens Embolus Diagnosis would ever succeed in ringing down the halls of history, and incidentally saving a few thousand lives annually.
Snulbug seemed more interested in the warm clouds of pipe smoke than in the question. “Sure,”
he said. “Within reason I can—” He broke off and stared up piteously. “You don’t mean—You can’t be going to pull that old gag again?”
“Look, baby. You do what I tell you and leave the worry-ing to me. You can bring back material objects?”
“Sure. But I warn you—”
Bill cut him off short. “Then as soon as I release you from that pentacle, you’re to bring me tomorrow’s newspaper.”
Snulbug sat down on the burned match and tapped his forehead sorrowfully with his tail tip. “I knew it,” he wailed. “I knew it. Three times already this happens to me. I’ve got limited powers, I’m a runt, I’ve got a funny name, so I should run foolish errands.”
“Foolish errands?” Bill rose and began to pace about the bare attic. “Sir, if I may call you that, I resent such an imputation. I’ve spent weeks on this idea. Think of the limitless power in knowing the future. Think of what could be done with it: swaying the course of empire, dominating mankind.
All I want is to take this stream of unlimited power, turn it into the simple channel of humanitarian research, and get me $10,000; and you call that a foolish errand!”
“That Spaniard,” Snulbug moaned. “He was a nice guy, even if his spell was lousy. Had a solid, comfortable brazier where an imp could keep warm. Fine fellow. And he had to ask to see tomorrow’s newspaper. I’m warning you—”
“I know,” said Bill hastily. “I’ve been over in my mind all the things that can go wrong. And that’s why I’m laying three conditions on you before you get out of that pentacle. I’m not falling for the easy snares.”
“All right.” Snulbug sounded almost resigned. “Let’s hear ‘em. Not that they’ll do any good.”
“First: This newspaper must not contain a notice of my own death or of any other disaster that would frustrate what I can do with it.”
“But shucks,” Snulbug protested. “I can’t guarantee that. If you’re slated to die between now and tomorrow, what can I do about it? Not that I guess you’re important enough to crash the paper.”
“Courtesy, Snulbug. Courtesy to your master. But I tell you what: When you go into the future, you’ll know then if I’m going to die? Right. Well, if I am, come back and tell me and we’ll work out other plans. This errand will be off.”
“People,” Snulbug observed, “make such an effort to make trouble for themselves. Go on.”
“Second: The newspaper must be of this city and in English. I can just imagine you and your little friends presenting some dope with the Omsk and Tomsk Daily Vuskutsukt.”
“We should take so much trouble,” said Snulbug.
“And third: The newspaper must belong to this space-time continuum, to this spiral of the serial universe, to this Wheel of If. However you want to put it. It must be a newspaper of the tomorrow that I myself shall experience, not of some other, to me hypothetical, tomorrow.”
“Throw me another match,” said Snulbug.
“Those three conditions should cover it, I think. There’s not a loophole there, and the Hitchens Laboratory is guaranteed.”
Snulbug grunted. “You’ll find out.”
Bill took a sharp blade and duly cut a line of the pentacle with cold steel. But Snulbug simply dived in and out of the flame of his second match, twitching his tail happily, and seemed not to give a rap that the way to freedom was now open.
“Come on!” Bill snapped impatiently. “Or I’ll take the match away.”
Snulbug got as far as the opening and hesitated. “Twenty-four hours is a long way.”
“You can make it.”
“I don’t know. Look.” He shook his head, and a microscopic dead snake fell to the floor. “I’m not at my best. I’m shot to pieces lately, I am. Tap my tail.”
“Do what?”
“Go on. Tap it with your fingernail right there where it joins on.”
Bill grinned and obeyed. “Nothing happens.”
“Sure nothing happens. My reflexes are all haywire. I don’t know as I can make twenty-four hours.” He brooded, and his snakes curled up into a concentrated clump. “Look. All you want is tomorrow’s newspaper, huh? Just tomorrow’s, not the edition that’ll be out e
xactly twenty-four hours from now?”
“It’s noon now,” Bill reflected. “Sure, I guess tomorrow morning’s paper’ll do.”
“OK. What’s the date today?”
“August 21.”
“Fine. I’ll bring you a paper for August 22. Only I’m warning you: It won’t do any good. But here goes nothing. Good-bye now. Hello again. Here you are.” There was a string in Snulbug’s horny hand, and on the end of the string was a newspaper.
“But hey!” Bill protested. “You haven’t been gone.”
“People,” said Snulbug feelingly, “are dopes. Why should it take any time out of the present to go into the future? I leave this point, I come back to this point. I spent two hours hunt-ing for this damned paper, but that doesn’t mean two hours of your time here. People—” he snorted.
Bill scratched his head. “I guess it’s all right. Let’s see the paper. And I know: You’re warning me”
He turned quickly to the obituaries to check. No Hitchens. “And I wasn’t dead in the time you were in?”
“No,” Snulbug admitted. “Not dead,” he added, with the most pessimistic implications possible.
“What was I, then? Was I”
“I had salamander blood,” Snulbug complained. “They thought I was an undine like my mother and they put me in the cold-water incubator when any dope knows salamandery is a dominant. So I’m a runt and good for nothing but to run errands, and now I should make prophecies! You read your paper and see how much good it does you.”
Bill laid down his pipe and folded the paper back from the obituaries to the front page. He had not expected to find anything useful there—what advantage could he gain from knowing who won the next naval engagement or which cities were bombed?—but he was scientifically methodical. And this time method was rewarded. There it was, streaming across the front page in vast black blocks:
MAYOR ASSASSINATED
FIFTH COLUMN KILLS CRUSADER
Smart Dragons, Foolish Elves Page 32
