She fetched her stick from the smoldering barroom and we lifted. “So far,” I said, “we’ve done nothing but waste time.”
“N-no, not entirely. I did get a line on its mind.” We cleared the rooftops and Ginny looked back around at me. “I wasn’t sure of the precise form into which it had been conjured. You can mold the elemental forces into almost anything. But apparently the cheerleader was satisfied to give it a knowledge of English and a rudimentary intelligence. Add to that the volatile nature of Fire, and what have you got? A child.”
“Some child,” I muttered, hugging her coat to me.
“No, no, Steve, this is important. It has all the child’s limiting traits. Improvidence, carelessness, thoughtlessness . . . A wise salamander would lie low, gathering strength slowly. It’d either realize it couldn’t burn the entire planet, or if it didn’t know, would never think of such a thing. Because what would it use for oxygen afterward?
“Remember, too, its fantastic vanity. It went into an insane rage when I said that fires existed more strong and beautiful than it, and crack about beauty hurt as much as the one about strength.
“Short span of attention. It could have destroyed either you first, or Svartalf and me first, before taking care of the minor nuisance the other provided. Instead, it let its efforts be split. And it could have gritted its teeth when you took that mouthful, standing, the pain for the short time needed to weight you down firmly again till you you were dead.” Her voice wavered at that, and she hastened on:
“At the same time, within that short span, if nothing distracts it, it focuses on issue only, to the exclusion of any parts of a larger whole. She nodded thoughtfully. The long blowing hair tickled my face. “I don’t know how, but some way its psychology may provide us with a lever.”
My own vanity is not small. “I wasn’t such a minor, nuisance,” I grumbled.
Ginny smiled and reached to pat my cheek. “Ally right, Steve, all right. I like you just the same, and; now I know you’d make a good husband.”
That left me in a comfortable glow until I wondered precisely what she was thinking of.
We spotted the salamander below us, igniting a theater, but it flicked away as I watched, and a mile off it appeared next to the medical research center. Glass brick doesn’t burn so well. As we neared, I saw it petulantly kick the wall and vanish again. Ignorant and impulsive . . . a child . . . a brat from hell!
Sweeping over the campus, we saw lights in the Administration Building. “Probably that’s become headquarters for our side, said Ginny. “We’d better report.” Svartalf landed us on the Mall in front of the place and strutted ahead up the stairs.
A squad of cops armed with fire extinguishers guarded the door. “Hey, there!” One of them barred our path. “Where you going?”
“To the meeting,” said Ginny, smoothing her tresses.
“Yeah?” The policeman’s eye fell on me. “Really dressed for it, too, aren’t you? Haw, haw, bawl”
I’d had about my limit for this night. I wered and peeled off his own trousers. As he lifted his billy, Ginny turned it into a small boa constrictor. I switched back to human; we left the squad to its problems and went down the hall.
The faculty meeting room was packed. Malzius had summoned every one of his professors. As we entered, I heard his orotund tones: “—disgraceful. The authorities won’t so much as listen to me. Gentlemen, it is for us to vindicate the honor of Gown against Town.” He blinked when Ginny and Svartalf came in, and turned a beautiful Tyrian purple as I followed in the full glory of mink coat and stubbly chin. “Mister Matuchek!”
“He’s with me,” said Ginny curtly. “We were out fighting the salamander while you sat here.”
“Possibly something other than brawn, even lupine brawn, is required,” smiled Dr. Alan Abercrombie. “I see that Mr. Matuchek lost his pants in a more than vernacular sense.”
Like Malzius, he had changed his wet clothes for the inevitable tweeds. Ginny gave him a cold look. “I thought you were directing the Hydro,” she said.
“Oh, we got enough adepts together to use three water elementals,” he said. “Mechanic’s work. I felt my job was here. We can readily control the fires—”
“If the salamander weren’t always lighting fresh ones,” clipped Ginny. “And each blaze it starts, it gets bigger and stronger, while you sit here looking beautiful.”
“Why, thank you, my dear,” he laughed.
I jammed my teeth together so they hurt. She had actually smiled back at him.
“Order, order!” boomed President Malzius. “Please be seated, Miss Graylock. Have you anything to contribute to the discussion?”
“Yes. I understand the salamander now.” She took a place at the end of the table. That was the last vacant chair, so I hovered miserably in the background wishing her coat had more buttons.
“Understand it sufficiently well to extinguish it?” asked Professor van Linden of Alchemy.
“No. But I know how it thinks.”
“We’re more interested in how it operates,” said’ van Linden. “How can we make it hold still for a dismissal?” He cleared his throat. “Obviously, we must first know by what process it shuttles around so fast ,
“Oh, that’s simple,” piped Griswold. He was drowned by van Linden’s fruity bass:
“—which is, of course, by the well-known affinity of Fire for Quicksilver. Since virtually every home these days has at least one thermometer—”
“With due respect, my good sir,” interrupted Vittorio of Astrology, “you are talking utter hogwash. It is simple matter of the conjunction of Mercury and Neptune in Scorpio—”
“You’re wrong, sir!” declared van Linden. “Dead wrong! Let me show you the Ars Thaumaturgica. ” He glare around after his copy, but it had been mislaid and he had to use an adaptation of the Dobu yamcalling chant to find it. Meanwhile Vittorio was screaming:
“No, no, no! The conjunction, with Uranus opposing in the ascendant ... as I can easily prove—” He went to the blackboard and started to draw a diagram.
“Oh, come now!” snorted jasper of Metaphysics. “I don’t understand how you can both be so wrong. As I showed in the paper I read at the last Triple-A-S meeting, the intrinsic nature of the matrix—”
“That was disproved ten years ago!” roared van Linden. “The affinity—”
“Ding an sich—”
“—up Uranus—”
I sidled over and tugged at Griswold’s sleeve. He pattered into a corner with me. “Okay, how does the bloody thing work?” I asked.
“Oh ... merely a question of wave mechanics,” he whispered. “According to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, a photon has a finite probability of being at any point of space. The salamander uses a simple diffraction process to change the spatial coordinates of psi squared, in effect going from point to point without crossing the intervening distance, much like an electron making a quantum jump, although, to be sure, the analogy is not precise due to the modifying influence of—”
“Never mind,” I sighed. “This confab is becoming a riot. Wouldn’t we do better to—”
“-stick by the original purpose,” agreed Abercrombie, joining us. Ginny followed. Van Linden blacked Vittorio’s eye while Jasper threw chalk at both of them. Our rump group went over near the door.
“I’ve already found the answer to our problem,” said Abercrombie, “but I’ll need help. A transformation spell. We’ll turn the salamander into something we can handle more easily.”
“That’s dangerous,” said Ginny. “You’ll need a really strong T-spell, and that sort can backfire. What happens then is unpredictable.”
Abercrombie straightened himself with a look of pained nobility. “For you, my dear, no hazard is too—