She regarded him with admiration. It does take guts to use the ultimate runes. “Let’s go,” she said. “I’ll help.”
Griswold plucked at my arm. “I don’t like this, Mr. Matuchek,” he confided. “The Art is too unreliable. There ought to be some method grounded in nature and nature’s quantitative laws.”
“Yeah”, I said disconsolately. “But what?” I paddled after Ginny and Abercrombie, who had their heads together over the handbook. Griswold marched beside me and Svartalf made a gesture with his tail at the Trismegistus faculty. They were too embroiled to notice.
We went out past an enraged but well-cowed squad of cops. The Physical Sciences hall stood nearby, and its chemistry division held stuff that would be needed. We entered an echoing gloom.
The freshman lab, a long room full of workbenches; shelves, and silence, was our goal. Griswold switched on the lights and Abercrombie looked around. “But we’ll have to bring the salamander here,” he said. “We can’t do anything except in its actual presence.”
“Go ahead and make ready,” the girl told him. “I know how to fetch the beast. A minor transformation—” She laid out some test tubes, filled them with various powders, and sketched her symbols on the floor. Those ball-point wands are handy.
“What’s the idea?” I asked.
“Oh, get out of the way,” she snapped. I told myself she was only striking at her own weariness and despair, but it hurt. “We’ll use its vanity, of course. I’ll prepare some Roman candles and rockets and stuff ... shoot them off, and naturally it’ll come to show it can do more spectacular things.
Griswold and I withdrew into a corner. This was big-league play. I was frankly scared, and the little scientist’s bony knees were beating a tattoo in march time. Even Ginny-yes, sweat beaded that smooth forehead. If this didn’t work, we here were probably done for: either the salamander or the backlash of the spell could finish us. And we had no way of knowing whether the beast had grown too strong for a transformation.
The witch got her fireworks prepared, and went to an open window and leaned out. Hissing balls of blue and red, streamers of golden sparks, flew skyward and exploded.
Abercrombie had completed his diagrams. He turned to smile at us. “It’s all right,” he said. “Everything under control. I’m going to turn the salamander’s energy into matter. E equals m c squared, you know. Just fight me a Bunsen burner, Matuchek, and set a beaker of water over it. Griswold, you turn these lights off and the Polaroid bulbs on. We need polarized radiation.”
We obeyed, though I hated to see an old and distinguished man acting as lab assistant to this patronizing slick-paper adman’s dream. “You sure it’ll work?” I asked.
“Of course,” he smiled. “I’ve had experience. I was in the Quartermaster Corps during the war.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but turning dirt into K rations isn’t the same thing as transforming that monster. You and your experience!”
Suddenly and sickly, remembering how he had bungled with the Hydro, I realized the truth. Abercrombie was confident, unafraid-because he didn’t know enough!
For a minute I couldn’t unfreeze my muscles. Griswold fiddled unhappily with some metallic samples. He’d been using them the other day for freshman experiments, trying to teach us the chemical properties; Lord, it seemed a million years ago ...
“Ginny!” I stumbled toward her where she stood at the window throwing rainbows into the air. “My God, darling, stop—”
Crack! The salamander was in the room with us.
I lurched back from it, half-blinded. Grown hideously bigger, it filled the other end of the lab, and the bench tops smoked.
“Oh, So!” The voice of Fire blasted our eardrums. Svartalf shot to a shelf top and upset bottles of acid onto the varmint. It didn’t notice. “So, small moist pests, you would try to outdo Me!”
Abercrombie and Ginny lifted their wands and shouted the few brief words of transformation.
Crouched back into my corner, peering through a sulfurous reek of fumes, I saw Ginny lurch and then jump for safety. She must have sensed the backlash. There came a shattering explosion and the air was full of flying glass.
My body shielded Griswold, and the spell didn’t do more to me than turn me lupe me. Ginny was on her hands and knees behind a bench, half-unconscious ... but unhurt, unhurt, praise the good Powers forever. Svartalf—a Pekingese dog yapped on the shelf. Abercrombie was gone, but a chimpanzee in baggy tweeds stuttered wailing toward the door.
A fire-blast rushed before the ape. He whirled, screamed, and shinnied up a steam pipe. The salamander arched its back and howled with laughter.
“You would use your tricks on Me? Almighty Me, terrible Me, beautiful Me? Ha, they bounce off like water from a hot skillet! And I, I, I am the skillet which is going to fry you!”
Somehow, the low-grade melodrama of its speech was not in the least ridiculous. For this was the childish, vainglorious, senselessly consuming thing which was loose on earth to make ashes of men and the homes of men.
Under the Polaroids, I switched back to human and rose to my feet behind a bench. Griswold turned on a water faucet and squirted a jet with his finger. The salamander hissed in annoyance-yes, water still hurt, but we had too little liquid here to quench it, you’d need a whole lake by this time—It swung its head, gape-mouthed, aimed at Griswold, and drew a long breath.
All is vanity....
I reeled over to the Bunsen burner that was heating a futile beaker of water. Ginny looked at me through scorched bangs. The room roiled with heat, sweat rivered off me. I didn’t have any flash of genius, I acted on raw instinct and tumbled memories.
“Kill us,” I croaked. “Kill us if you dare. Our servant is more powerful than you. He’ll hound you to the ends of creation.”
“Your servant?” Flame wreathed the words.
“Yeah ... I mean yes . . . our servant, that Fire which fears not water!”
The salamander stepped back a pace, snarling. It was not yet so strong that the very name of water didn’t make it flinch. “Show me!” it chattered. “Show me! I dare you!”
“Our servant ... small, but powerful,” I rasped. “Brighter and more beautiful than you, and above harm from the Wet Element.” I staggered to the jars of metal samples and grabbed a pair of tongs.
“Have you the courage to look on him?”
The salamander bristled. “Have I the courage? Ask rather, does it dare confront Me?”
I flicked a glance from the corner of my eye. Ginny had risen and was gripping her wand. She scarcely breathed, but her eyes were narrowed.
There was a silence. It hung like a world’s weight in that room, smothering what noises remained: the crackle of fire, Abercrombie’s simian gibber, Svartalf s indignant yapping. I took a strip of magnesium in the tongs and held it to the burner flame.
It burst into a blue-white actinic radiance from which I turned dazzled eyes. The salamander was less viciously brilliant. I saw the brute accomplish the feat of simultaneously puffing itself up and shrinking back.
“Behold!” I lifted the burning strip. Behind me, Ginny’s rapid mutter came: “O Indra, Abaddon, Lucifer—
The child mind, incapable of considering more than one thing at a time . . . but for how long a time? I had to hold its full attention for the hundred and twenty seconds required.
“Fire,” said the salamander feverishly. “Only another fire, one tiny piece of that Force from which I came.”
“Can you do this, buster?”
I plunged the strip into the beaker. Steam puffed from the water, it boiled and bubbled—and the metal went on burning!
“—abire ex orbis terrestris—”
“Mg plus H20 yields Mg0 plus H2,” whispered Griswold reverently.
“It’s a trick!” screamed the salamander. “It’s impossible! If even I cannot—No!”