Operation Chaos

The hair rose stiff on my neck and I felt the blind instinctive tug of Skinturning. Barely in time I hauled myself back toward human and sat in a cold sweat. The air was suddenly rotten with danger. Couldn’t anyone else smell it?

I focused my crystal on the cheering squad, looking for the source, only dimly aware of the yell—

“Aleph, beth, gimel, daleth, he, vau,

“Hey, what’s wrong, mister?” The coed shrank from me, and I realized I was snarling.

“Oh . . . nothing . . . I hope.” With an effort I composed my face and kept it from sprouting a snout.

The fattish blond kid down among the rooters didn’t look harmful, but a sense of lightning-shot blackness swirled about his future. I’d dealt with him before, and—

Though I didn’t snitch on him at the time, he was the one who had almost destroyed Griswold’s chemistry class. Premed freshman, rich boy, not a bad guy at heart but with an unfortunate combination of natural aptitude for the Art and total irresponsibility. Medical students are notorious for merry pranks such as waltzing an animated skeleton through the girls’ dorm, and he wanted to start early.

Griswold had been demonstrating the action of a catalyst, and MacIlwraith had muttered a pun-spell to make a cat boil out of the test tube. However, he slipped quantitatively and got a saber-toothed tiger. Because of the pun, it listed to starboard, but it was nonetheless a vicious, panic-raising thing. I ducked into a closet, used my pocket moonflash, and transformed. As a wolf I chased Pussy out the window and into a tree till somebody could call the Exorcism Department.

Having seen MacIlwraith do it, I took him aside an warned him that if he disrupted the class again I’d chew him out in the most literal sense. Fun is fun, but not at the expense of students who really want to learn and a pleasant elderly anachronism who’s trying to teach them.

“TEAM!”

The cheerleader waved his hands and a spurt of many-colored fire jumped out of nothingness. Taller than a man it lifted, a leaping glory of red, blue, yellow, haloed with a wheel of sparks. Slitting my eyes, I could just discern the lizardlike form, white- , hot and supple, within the aura.

The coed squealed. “Thrice-blessed Hermes,” choked the Old Grad. “What is that? A demon?”

“No, a fire elemental,” I muttered. “Salamander. Hell of a dangerous thing to fool around with.”

My gaze ran about the field as the burning shape began to do its tricks, bouncing, tumbling, spelling out words in long flame-bands. Yes, they had a fireman close by in full canonicals, making the passes that kept the creature harmless. The situation ought to be okay. I lit a cigaret, shakily. It is not well to raise Loki’s pets, and the stink of menace to come was acrid in my nostrils.

A good show, but—The crystal revealed Abercrombie clapping. Ginny, though, sat with a worried frown between the long green eyes. She didn’t like this any better than I. Switch the ball back to MacIlwraith, fun loving MacIlwraith.

I was perhaps the single member of the audience who saw what happened. The boy gestured at his baton. It sprouted wings. The fat fireman, swaying back and forth with his gestures, was a natural target for a good healthy goose.

“Yeowp!”

He rocketed heavenward. The salamander wavered. All at once it sprang on high, thinning out till it towered over the walls. We glimpsed a spinning, dazzling blur, and the thing was gone.

My cigaret burst luridly into flame. I tossed it from me. Hardly thinking, I jettisoned my hip flask. It exploded from a touch of incandescence and the alcohol burned blue. The crowd howled, hurling away their smokes, slapping at pockets where matches had kindled, getting rid of bottles. The Campus Queen shrieked as her thin dress caught fire. She got it off in time to prevent serious injury and went wailing across the field. Under different circumstances, I would have been interested.

The salamander stopped its lunatic shuttling and materialized between goalposts that began to smoke: an intolerable blaze, which scorched the grass and roared. The fireman dashed toward it, shouting the spell of extinguishment. From the salamander’s mouth licked a tongue of fire, I heard a distinct Bronx cheer, then it was gone again.

The announcer, who should have been calming the spectators, screeched as it flickered before his booth. That touched off the panic! In one heartbeat, five thousand people were clawing and trampling, choking each other in the gates, blind with the maniac need to escape.

I vaulted across benches and an occasional head, down to the field. There was death on those jammed tiers. “Ginny! Ginny, come here where it’s safe!”

She couldn’t have heard me above the din, but came of herself, dragging a terrified Abercrombie by one wrist. We faced each other in a ring of ruin. She drew the telescoping wand from her purse.

The Gryphons came boiling out of their locker room. Boiling is the right word: the salamander had materialized down there and playfully wrapped itself around the shower pipes.

Sirens hooted under the moon and police broomsticks shot above us, trying to curb the stampede. The elemental flashed for a moment across one besom. The rider dove it till he could jump off, and the burning stick crashed on the grass.

“God!” exclaimed Abercrombie. “The salamander’s loose!”

“Tell me more,” I snorted. “Ginny, you’re a witch. Can you do anything about this?”

“I can extinguish the brute if it’ll hold still long enough for me to recite the spell,” she said. Disordered ruddy hair had tumbled past her pale, high-boned face to the fur-clad shoulders. “That’s our one chance—the binding charm is broken, and it knows that!”

I whirled, remembering friend MacIlwraith and collared him. “Were you possessed?” I shouted.

“I didn’t do anything,” he gasped. His teeth rattle as I shook him.

“Don’t hand me that guff. I saw!”

He collapsed on the ground. “It was only for fu he whimpered. “I didn’t know—”

Well, I thought grimly, that was doubtless true.

There’s the trouble with the Art: with every blindingly powerful force man uses, fire or dynamite or atomic energy or goetics. Any meathead can learn how to begin something; these days, they start them in the third grade with spelling bees. But it’s not always as easy to halt the something.

Student pranks were a standing problem at Trismegistus, as at all colleges. They were usually harmless, like sneaking into the dorms after curfew with Tarnkappen, or chanting female lingerie out through the windows. Sometimes they could be rather amusing, like the time the statue of a revered and dignified former president was animated and marched down town singing bawdy songs. Often they fell quite flat, as when the boys turned Dean Hornsby into stone and it wasn’t noticed for three days.

This one had gotten out of hand. The salamander could ignite this entire city.

I turned to the fireman, who was jittering about trying to flag down a police broom. In the dim shifty light, none of the riders saw him. “What’d you figure to do?” I asked.

“I gotta report back for duty,” he said harshly. “And we’ll need a water elemental, I guess.”

“I have experience with the Hydros,” offered tinny. “I’ll come along.”

“Me too,” I said at once.

Abercrombie glowered. “What can you do?”

“I’m were,” I snapped. “In wolf shape I can’t easily be harmed by fire. That might turn out useful.”

“Wonderful, Steve!” Ginny smiled at me, the old smile which had so often gone between us. Impulsively, I grabbed her to me and kissed her.

She didn’t waste energy on a slap. I collected an uppercut that tumbled me on my stern. “Not allowed,” she clipped. That double-damned geas! I could see misery caged within her eyes, but her mind was compelled to obey Malzius’ rules.