Smart Dragons, Foolish Elves
Page 34
Then he climbed once more into his car, where he could talk with his pipe in peace. “Now,” he asked as he drove home, “what was the rush?”
“He’d stop payment.”
“You mean when he found out about the merry-go-round? But I didn’t promise him anything. I just sold him tomorrow’s paper. I didn’t guarantee he’d make a fortune of it.”
“That’s all right. But—”
“Sure, you warned me. But where’s the hitch? R. C.’s a bandit, but he’s honest. He wouldn’t stop payment.”
“Wouldn’t he?”
The car was waiting for a stop signal. The newsboy in the intersection was yelling “Uxtruh!” Bill glanced casually at the headline, did a double take, and instantly thrust out a nickel and seized a paper.
He turned into a side street, stopped the car, and went through this paper. Front page:
MAYORASSASSINATED.
Sports page: Alhazred at twenty to one. Obituaries: The same list he’d read at noon. He turned back to the date line. August 22. Tomorrow.
“I warned you,” Snulbug was explaining. “I told you I wasn’t strong enough to go far into the future. I’m not a well demon, I’m not. And an itch in the memory is something fierce. I just went far enough ahead to get a paper with tomorrow’s date on it. And any dope knows that a Tuesday paper comes out Monday afternoon.”
For a moment Bill was dazed. His magic paper, his fifteen-thousand-dollar paper, was being hawked by newsies on every corner. Small wonder R. C. might have stopped payment! And then he saw the other side. He started to laugh. He couldn’t stop.
“Look out!” Snulbug shrilled. “You’ll drop my pipe. And what’s so funny?”
Bill wiped tears from his eyes. “I was right. Don’t you see, Snulbug? Man can’t be licked. My magic was lousy. All it could call up was you. You brought me what was practically a fake, and I got caught on the merry-go-round of time trying to use it. You were right enough there; no good could come of that magic.
“But without the magic, just using human psychology, knowing a man’s weaknesses, playing on them, I made a syrup-voiced old bandit endow the very research he’d ta-booed, and do more good for humanity than he’s done in all the rest of his life. I was right, Snulbug. You can’t lick Man.”
Snulbug’s snakes writhed into knots of scorn. “People!” he snorted. “You’ll find out.” And he shook his head with dismal satisfaction.
Afterword
It’s not merely fun to laugh: it’s vitally necessary. Ask your doctor; he’ll tell you so. It’s critical to good health and long life. Fortunately, it goes down easy. Not everyone agrees on what’s funny, of course. People have been trying to analyze humor and reduce it to easily quantifiable component parts since Grog made the first mammoth joke. I delight in their failure.
With two, you get eggroll. With Smart Dragons, Foolish Elves, you get smiles and stories, two for one, no extra charge, you should be so glad I’m not dunning you now. And if between the grins a story or two should happen to make you think a little, ponder then the meaning of life and what a sorry existence it would be devoid of laughter.
We memorialize the great writers, even deify them, but we hold closer to us those who make us laugh.