Finally the King grew aware of his presence.
“My sister,” he said. “She is dead.”
“You have our deepest sympathies, Your Majesty,” Gene said, bowing.
“Thank you.” Incarnadine collected himself and looked the lab over. “Hell of a mess. Are you people all right?”
“Fine, sir,” Linda said. “Jamin is dead. His demon friend did him in.”
Incarnadine nodded as if such an event were implicit in the scheme of things. “And so it ends.” He frowned. “But you have friends still missing.”
“Yes, sir,” Gene said. “Snowclaw, Sheila, and, we think, your brother.”
“Trent, yes. I have a feeling, which I will corroborate shortly, that my brother is fine, and that Sheila is with him. We’d best concern ourselves with your friend the Hyperborean.”
Gene said, “Beg your pardon? Is that what he is?”
“Hyperborea happens to be the name of the world he comes from.”
“Oh. He never told me.”
“It’s castle nomenclature only. I have no idea what the aboriginals call their world. Actually —” Incarnadine interrupted himself and gave a laugh. “Here I am babbling. Gene, how the hell did you contrive to get yourself inside this contraption at the exact moment when I plucked it out of the great gossamer nothingness of the Never-Never? You must have one hell of a story.”
Gene let out a long breath. “It’s a novel. You’ll all get a copy, hot off the press. But for now, I’d like to see about finding Snowy. Linda tells me he was with Trent and Sheila when they disappeared.”
“He might have gone his separate way. I did manage to establish partial contact with Trent, and I got the impression that Sheila was with him, whereas Snowclaw was not.”
“Hell, that means he could be anywhere.”
Linda said, “He could be on Earth.”
Gene smacked his forehead. “He’ll be on the evening news!”
“Sheila changed him, Gene. He had a human form.”
“Really? Well, that would help, of course. But Snowy? Running loose in Long Island? Ye gods.”
“Your Majesty!”
They turned to see Osmirik come running into the lab.
“I have the spell!” he yelled. “I have it! All I need is the young man with the calculating device —”
Jeremy looked up from rooting through the wreckage of the mainframe. “Over here, Ozzie.”
But Osmirik had stopped in his tracks at the sight of Gene.
“I see that Sir Gene has returned,” he said, “and I am uselessly tardy once again.”
Incarnadine said, “Not necessarily, old fellow. What spell are you talking about?”
The librarian held up a battered grimoire. “The Earth locator spell. I found one that might work, with a bit of updating and the use of that young man’s …” He became suddenly cognizant of the general destruction around him. “Oh, dear.”
Then he was struck by the sight of the tall, nude woman standing next to Gene. Her beauty took his breath away.
“My word,” he said. “I do have to get away from the library more often.”
Forty
Westmoreland County, PA.
Dawn was breaking and Snowclaw was tired. He had been hiking all night, and his feet were sore from treading on sharp twigs and hidden stones. Rough country around here, not like the clean, bare tundra he was used to. There was so much vegetation about. Positively tropical. Why, it even got above freezing in the winter!
He was homesick, and not only for the castle. He wanted six or seven layers of good packed snow under him, and a fathom of permafrost below that. Made your feet feel nice and cool.
He strode along the narrow trail he had been following for the last hour. Lots of game about. He had seen white-tailed critters bounding away, and tiny things had chittered at him, hiding among stalks of brown weeds. Nothing he could eat, even if he had taken the trouble to chase them down. Besides, he didn’t like land game. Seafood was his first love. Spikefish, fried in rendered blubber. Four-clawed crab, boiled and served with clarified blubber. Plain blubber in tasty, glistening chunks, served up fresh. Now you were talking food.
Great White Stuff, was he hungry! He had to stop thinking about it or he would go crazy.
He tried not thinking about it.
Nah. Didn’t work. He was hungry, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He was outdoors, that’s what the problem was. The air was sweet, fresh, if a little strange. But during his stay on Earth he had grown used to the native environment. The smell of the forest set his juices to flowing, and all he could think about was stuffing his maw with endless quantities of …
Food. He licked his chops. He was really losing it now. If he didn’t get food soon … well, there was no telling what he’d do.
He swiped at a tree and came away with his claws full of bark. He sampled that, spat it out. Too dry. He tried some weeds. Not bad, but like eating air.
There was nothing around to eat! But what did he expect? It was winter. He tore off a fresh branch and gnawed at it, spitting out the bark and biting into the fresh green wood underneath.
No taste. No taste at all. Nothing in this world had any taste.
He howled once, then came to a halt, astonished at himself.
“I’m going crazy,” he muttered.
He stalked on, increasing his pace. The trail bore downhill, then leveled off. A narrow brook crossed his path, which he took in one hop. The trail went up again, crested, then twined down the side of a steep hill.
There was a structure sitting on the gentle slope of the field below. A human dwelling.
He approached, hiding behind an outbuilding. Peering around a corner, he checked the place out. It was quiet. The house was dark. Fine. He went to the back door and tried it. It was a sturdy door, locked good and tight, but the carpenters had never figured on a seven-foot-tall quasi-ursine alien with the strength of ten gorillas.
Snowy pushed hard, and the dead bolt tore out of its slot, ripping the doorjamb.
“Oops,” Snowy said. He felt guilty about this. He respected private property. After all, he wouldn’t take to someone breaking into his own shack out on the ice, humble as it was. But Snowy really didn’t have a choice.
He found himself in a dark basement. He knew there was a light somewhere, but couldn’t find it. His eyes adjusted to the dark quickly, though, and the first thing he saw was a possible food substance.
Whatever it was, it was packed into glass jars lined up on wooden shelves. He looked at the stuff. It was red. He unscrewed the top off one jar and stuck his finger in, licked it. Tangy, not bad. He upended the jar into his mouth.
Not bad at all. It was what they called tomatoes. He had eaten them in salads and other things. Salads! Now, talk about eating air. How could humans live off a bunch of leaves? Nothing to it.
He unscrewed another jar, then tossed it disdainfully over his shoulder. Nothing to this stuff, either.
There were other foodstuffs available. Metal cans of junk. Forget that. Other things, hanging from the overhead beams. Meat! Spiced meat, too. Sausage, it looked like. And a big hank of raw rump, cured with salt and having a smoky flavor. Hey, this was more like it. Idly munching a haunch of ham, he went up the creaking wooden stairs.
His appetite was getting stronger, despite an overpowering human smell to the place that ordinarily would have put him off his food. Enticing smells turned him to the right, toward the kitchen.
He rifled the cabinets, finding dry and dusty cereals, more cans, spices, packages of unidentifiable whatever, still more cans, more boxes of dry and dusty stuff….
The refrigerator held leftovers that hadn’t been good ideas in the first place, along with ice cubes, three trays of which he crunched up with relish. There were various liquids to drink. He glugged those. There was fruit and some greens. Ptui.