by James Blish
For a magician, Ware reflected, there were indeed distinct advantages in being able to practise ten centuries after Gerbert had ridden upon his demon eagle.
7
Transvection, too, has its hazards, Ware discovered. He crossed the Atlantic without incident in well under three hours – indeed, he suspected that in some aspect beyond the reach of his senses, the flight was taking place only partially in real time – and it began to look as though he would easily reach his goal before dawn. The candle affixed by its own tallow to the bundle of twigs and rushes before him (for only the foolhardy fly a broomstick with the brush trailing, no matter what is shown to the contrary in conventional Halloween cartoons) burned as steadily as though he were not in motion at all, casting a brilliant light ahead along his path; any ships at sea that might have seen him might have taken him to be an unusually brilliant meteor. As he approached the eastern United States, he wondered how he would show up on radar; the dropping of the bomb two days ago suggested that there might still be a number of functioning radomes there. In quieter times, he though, he might perhaps have touched off another flying saucer scare. Or was he visible at all? He discovered that he did not know, but he began to doubt it; the seaboard was hidden in an immense pall of smoke.
But once over land, he slowed himself down and lost altitude in order to get his bearings, and within what seemed to him, to be only a very few minutes, he was grounded head over heels by the sound of a church bell forlornly calling what faithful might remain to midnight Mass. He remembered belatedly, when he got his wind back, that in some parts of Germany during the seventeenth-century flowering of the popular Goetic cults, it had been the custom to toll church bells all night long as a protection against witches who might be passing overhead on the way to the Brocken; but the memory did him no good now – the besom had gone lifeless.
He had fallen in a rather mountainous, heavily timbered area, quite like the Harz Mountain section of Germany, but which he guessed to be somewhere in western Pennsylvania. Though it was now late April, which was doubtless warm in Positano, the night here was decidedly cold, especially for a thin man clad in nothing more than a light smear of unguent. He was instantly and violently all ashiver, for the sound of the bell had destroyed the protective as well as the transvective power of the flying ointment. He hastily undid the bundle of clothes, which was tied to the broomstick, but there were not going to be enough of them; after all, he had assembled them with Death Valley in mind. Also, he was beginning to feel drowzy and dizzy, and his pulse was blurred and banging with tachycardia. Among other things, the flying ointment contained both mandragora and belladonna, and now that the magic was gone out of it, these were exerting their inevitable side effects. He would have to wash the stuff off the minute he could find a stream, cold or no cold.
And not only because it was drugging him. Still other ingredients of the ointment were rather specifically organic in nature, and these gave it a characteristic smell which the heat of his body would gradually ripen. The chances were all too good that there would be some people in this country of the Amish – and not all of them old ones – who would know what that odour meant. Until he had had some kind of a bath, it would be dangerous even to ask for help.
Before dressing, he wiped off as much of it as he could with the towel in which the clothing had been tied. This he buried, together with the taper and the brush from the besom; and after making sure that the ruby talisman was still safely in his pocket, he set out, using the denuded broomstick as a staff.
The night-black, hilly, forested countryside would have made difficult going even for an experienced walker. Ware’s life, on the other hand, had been nearly inactive except intellectually, and he was on the very near side of his fiftieth birthday. To his advantage, on the other hand, stood the fact that he had always been small and wiry, and the combination of a slightly hyperthyroid metabolism and an ascetic calling – he did not even smoke – had kept him that way, so that he made fair progress; and an equally lifelong love of descriptive astronomy, plus the necessity of astrology to his art, helped to keep him going in the right direction, whenever he could see a few stars through the smoke.
Just before dawn, he stumbled upon a small, rocky-bedded stream, and through the gloom heard the sound of a nearby waterfall. He moved against the current and shortly found this to be a spillway of a small log dam. Promptly he stripped and bathed under it, pronouncing in a whisper as he did so all three of the accompanying prayers from the rite of lustration as prescribed for the preparatory triduum in the Grimorium Verum – though the water was neither warm nor exorcized, it was obviously pure, and that would have to do.
The ablution was every bit as cold as he had expected it to be, and even colder was the process of air-drying himself; but he endured it stoically, for he had to get rid of what remained of the ointment, and moreover he knew that to put on damp clothes would be almost as dangerous. While he waited, his teeth chattering, faint traces of light began to appear through the trees from the east.
In answer, massive grey rectangular shapes began to sketch themselves against the darkness downstream, and before long he was able to see that to the west – which was the way the stream was momentarily running – the aisle it cut through the trees opened out on to a substantial farm. As if in confirmation of help to come, a cock crowed in the distance, a traditionl ending for a night of magic.
But as the dawn continued to brighten, he saw that there would be no help for him here. Under the angle of the roof of the large barn nearest to him a circular diagram had been painted, like a formalized flower with an eye in it.
As Jack Ginsberg had taken the pains to find out long before he and his boss had even met the magician, Ware had been born and raised in the States and was still a citizen. As his name showed, his background was Methodist, but nevertheless he knew a hex sign when he saw one. And it gave him an idea.
He was not a witch, and he certainly had had no intention of laying a curse on this prosperous-looking farm ten seconds ago, but the opportunity to gather new data should not be missed.
Reaching into his shin pocket, he turned the ruby around so that the seal and characters on it faced outward. In a low voice, he said, THOMATOS. BENESSER, FLEANTER.’
Under proper circumstances these words of the Comte de Gabalis encompassed the operator with thirty-three several Intelligences, but since the circumstances were not proper, Ware was not surprised when nothing happened. For one thing, his lustration had been imperfect; for another, he was using the wrong talisman – the infernal spirits of the ceremony were not devils but salamanders or fire elements. Nevertheless he now added: ‘LITAN, ISER, OSNAS.’
A morning breeze sprang up, and a leaflike whispering ran around him, which might or might not have been the voices of many beings, individually saying, ‘NANTHER, NANTHERR NANTHER, NANTHER …’ Touching the talisman, Ware said. ‘GITAU, HURANDOS, RIDAS, TALIMOL.’ and then, pointing to the barn, ‘UUSUR, ITAR.’
The result should have been a highly localized but destructive earthquake, but there was not even a minor tremor, though he was pretty sure that he really heard the responsive voices of the fire spirits. The spell simply would not work under the eye of the hex sign – one more piece of evidence that the powers of evil were still under some kind of restraint. That was good to know, but in a way, too, Ware was quite disappointed; for had he gotten his earthquake, the further words SOUTRAM, UBARSINENS would have compelled the intelligences to carry him across the rest of his journey. He uttered them anyhow, but without result.
Neither in the Comte de Gabalis or its very late successor. The Black Pullet, did this ritual offer any word of dismissal, but nevertheless for safety’s sake he now added; ‘RABIAM.’ Had this worked, he would have found himself carried home again, where at least he could have started over again with more ointment and another broomstick; but it did not. There was no recourse now but to seek out the farmhouse and try to persuade the farmer to give him something to ea
t and drive him to the nearest railhead. It was too bad that the man could not be told that he had just been protected by Ware from a demonic onslaught but unfortunately the Amish did not believe that there was any such thing as white magic – and in the ultimate analysis they were quite right not to do so, whatever delusions about the point might be harboured by Father Domenico and his fellows.
Ware identified the farmhouse proper without any trouble. It looked every bit as clean, fat and prosperous as the rest, but it was suspiciously quiet; by this hour, everyone should be up and beginning the day’s chores. He approached with caution, alert for guns or dogs, but the silence continued.
The caution had been needless. Inside, the place was an outright slaughterhouse, resembling nothing so much as the last act of Webster’s The White Devil. Ware inspected it with clinical fascination. The family had been a large one – the parents, one grandparent, four daughters, three sons and the inevitable dog – and at some time during the preceding night they had suddenly fallen upon each other with teeth nails, pokers, a buggy whip, a bicycle chain, a cleaver, a pig knife and the butt end of a smoothbore musket, old enough to have been a relic of the Boer War. It was an obvious case of simultaneous mass possession, probably worked through the women, as these things almost always were. Doubtless they would infinitely have preferred a simple localized earthquake, but from an attack like this no conceivable peasant hex sign could have protected them.
Probably nothing could have, for as it had turned out, in their simple traditional religiosity they had chosen the wrong side. Like most of humankind, they had been bom victims; even a beginning study of the Problem of Evil would have suggested to them that their God had never played fair with them, as indeed He had caused to be written out in Job for all to read; and their primitive backwoods demonology had never honestly admitted that there really were two sides to the Great Game, let alone allowing them any inkling of who the players were.
While he considered what to do next he prowled around the kitchen and the woodshed, where the larder was, trying not to Slip or step on anybody. There were only two eggs – today’s had obviously not been harvested – but he found smoked, streaky rashers of bacon, a day-old loaf of bread just ripe for cutting, nearly a pound of country butter and a stone jug of cold milk. All in all it was a good deal more than he could eat, but he built a fire in the old wood-burning stove, cooked the eggs and the bacon, and did his best to put it all down. After all he had no idea when he would meet his next meal. He had already decided that he was not yet desperate enough to risk calling for an apport, but instead would keep walking generally westward until he met an opportunity to steal a car. (He would find none on the farm; the Amish still restricted themselves to horses.)
As he came out of the farmhouse into the bright morning, a sandwich in both hip pockets, he heard from the undestroyed barn a demanding lowing of cattle. Sorry, friends, he though; nobody’s going to milk you this morning.
8
Baines knew the structure and approaches of Strategic Air Command headquarters rather better than the Department of Defense would have thought right and proper even for a civilian with Q clearance, although there had been several people in DoD who would not have been at all surprised at it. The otherwise passengerless jet carrying him and Jack Ginsberg made no attempt to approach either Denver Airport or the US Air Force Academy field at Colorado Springs, both of which, he correctly assumed, would no longer be in existence anyhow. Instead, he directed the pilot to land at Limon, a small town which was the eastern-most vertex of a nearly equilateral triangle formed by these three points. Hidden there was one terminus of an underground rapid transit line which led directly into the heart of SAC’s fortress – and was now its only surviving means of physical access to the outside world.
Baines and his secretary had been there only once before, and the guards at the station now were not only new but thoroughly frightened. Hence, despite the possession of ID cards countersigned by General McKnight, they were subjected to over an hour of questioning, finger-printing, photographing of retinal blood-vessel patterns, frisking and fluoroscopy for hidden weapons or explosives, telephone calls into the interior and finally a closed-circuit television confrontation with McKnight himself before they were even allowed into the waiting room.
As if in partial compensation, the trip itself was rapid transit indeed. The line itself was a gravity-vacumm tube, bored in an exactly straight line under the curvature of the Earth, and kept as completely exhausted of air as out-gassing from its steel cladding would permit. The vacuum in the tube was in fact almost as hard as the atmosphere of the Moon, From the waiting room, Baines and Jack Ginsberg were passed through two airlocks into a seamlessly welded windowless metal capsule which was sealed behind them. Here their guards strapped them in securely, for their own protection, for the initial kick of compressed air behind the capsule, abetted by rings of electromagnets, gave it an acceleration of more than five miles per hour per second. Though this is not much more than they might have been subjected to in an electric streetcar of about 1940, it is a considerable jerk if you cannot see outside and have nothing to hold on to. Thereafter, the capsule was simply allowed to fall to the mathematical midpoint of its right of way, gaining speed at about twenty-eight feet per second; since the rest of the journey was uphill, the capsule was slowed in proportion by gravity, friction and the compression of the almost non-existent gases in the tube still ahead of it, which without any extra braking whatsoever brought it to a stop at the SAC terminus of the line so precisely that only a love pat from a fifteen horsepower engine was needed to line up its airlock with that of the station.
‘When you’re riding a thing like this, it makes it hard to believe that there’s any such thing as a devil, doesn’t it?’ Jack Ginsberg said. He had had a long, luxurious shower aboard the plane, and that, plus getting away from the demon-haunted ruins in Positano, and the subsequent finding in Zurich that money still worked, had brightened him perceptibly.
‘Maybe,’ Baines said. ‘A large part of the mystic tradition says that the possession and use of secular knowledge – or even the desire fork – is in itself evil, according to Ware. But here we are.’
But in the smooth-running, even temperatured caverns of the SAC, Baines himself felt rather reassured. There was no Goat grinning over his shoulder yet. McKnight was an old friend; he was pleased to see Buelg again, and honoured to meet Šatvje; and down here, at least, everything seemed to be under control. It was also helpful to find that both McKnight and his advisers not only already knew the real situation, but had very nearly accepted it. Only Buelg had remained a little sceptical at the beginning, and had seemed quite taken aback to find Baines, of all people, providing independent testimony to the same effect as had the computer. When the new facts Baines had brought had been fed into the machine, and the machine had produced in response a whole new batch of conclusions entirely consistent with the original hypothesis, Buelg seemed convinced, although it was plain that he still did not like it. Well, who did?
At long last they were comfortably settled in McKnights office, with three tumblers of Jack Daniel’s (Jack Ginsberg did not drink, and neither did Šatvje) and no one to interrupt them but an occasional runner from Chief Hay. Though the runner was a coolly pretty blonde girl, and the USAF’s women’s auxiliary had apparently adopted the miniskirt, Ginsberg did not seem to notice. Perhaps he was still in shock from his recent run-in with the succubus. To Baines’s eyes, the girl did look rather remarkably like Ware’s Greta, which should have captured Jack instantly; but then, in the long run, most women looked alike to Baines, especially in the line of business.
‘That bomb did you no good at all, I take it,’ he said.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that,’ McKnight said. ‘True, it didn’t destroy the city, or even hurt it visibly, but it certainly seemed to take them by surprise. For about an hour after the fireball went up, the sky above the target was full of them. It was like firing a
flashbulb in a cave full of sleeping bats – and we got pictures too.’
‘Any evidence that you, uh, destroyed any of them?’
‘Well, we saw a lot of them going back to the city under their own power – despite very bad design, they seem to fly pretty well – but we don’t have any count of how many went up. We didn’t see any falling, but that might have been because some of them had been vaporized.’
‘Not bloody likely. Their bodies may have been vaporized, but the bodies were borrowed in the first place. Like knocking down a radio-controlled aircraft: the craft may be a total loss, but the controlling Intelligence is unharmed, somewhere else, and can send another one against you whenever it likes.’
‘Excuse me,. Doctor Baines, but the analogy is inexact,’ Buelg said. ‘We know that because we did get a lot out of the bomb besides simply stirring up a flurry. High-speed movies of the column of the mushroom as it went up show a lot of the creatures trying to reform. One individual we were able to follow went through thirty-two changes in the first minute. The changes are all incredible and beyond any physical theory or model we can erect to account for them, but they do show, first, that the creature was seriously inconvenienced, and second, that it wanted and perhaps needed to hold on to some kind of physical form. That’s a start. It suggests to me that had we been able to confine them all in the firebal, where the temperatures are way higher still, no gamut of change they could have run through would have done them any good. Eventually they would have been stripped of the last form and utterly destroyed.’
