He didn’t waste time asking me if I had really volunteered.
II
I guided captain Graylock back to the tent I shared with two brother officers. Darkness was creeping across the long chill slant of rain. We plodded through the muck in silence until we were under canvas. My tentmates were out on picket duty, so we had the place to ourselves. I lit the saint-elmo and sat down on the sodden plank floor.
“Have a chair,” I said, pointing to our one camp stool. It was an animated job we’d bought in San Francisco: not especially bright, but it would carry our duffel and come when called. It shifted uneasily at the unfamiliar weight, then went back to sleep.
Graylock took out a pack of Wings and raised her brows. I nodded my thanks, and the cigaret flapped over to my mouth. Personally, I smoke Luckies in the field: self-striking tobacco is convenient when your matches may be wet. When I was a civilian and could afford it, my brand was Philip Morris, because the little red-coated smoke sprite can also mix you a drink.
We puffed for a bit in silence, listening to the rain. “Well,’ I said at last, “I suppose you have transportation.”
“My personal broomstick,” she said. “I don’t like this GI Willys. Give me a Cadillac anytime. I’ve souped it up, too.”
“And you have your grimoires and powders and whatnot?”
“Just some chalk. No material agency is much use against a powerful demon.”
“Yeah? What about the sealing wax on the Solly bottle?”
“It isn’t the wax that holds an afreet in, but the seal. The spells are symbolic; in fact, it’s believed their effect is purely psychosomatic.” She hollowed the flat planes of her cheeks, sucking in smoke, and I saw what a good bony structure she had. “We may have a chance to test that theory tonight.”
“Well, then, you’ll want a light pistol loaded with silver slugs; they have weres of their own, you know. I’ll take a grease gun and a forty-five and a few grenades.”
“How about a squirter?”
I frowned. The notion of using holy water as a weapon has always struck me as blasphemous, though the chaplain said it was permissible against Low World critters. “No good to us,” I said. “The Moslems don’t have that ritual, so of course they don’t use any beings that can be controlled by it. Let’s see, I’ll want my Polaroid flash too. And that’s about it.”
Ike Abrams stuck his big nose in the tent flap. “Would you and the lady captain like some eats, sir?” he asked.
“Why, sure,” I said. Inwardly, I thought: Hate to spend my last night on Midgard standing in a chow line. When he had gone, I explained to the girclass="underline" “Ike’s only a private, but we were friends in Hollywood he was a prop man when I played in Call of the Wild and Silver Chief—and he’s kind of appointed himself my orderly. Hell bring us some food here.”
“You know,” she remarked, “that’s one good thing about the technological age. Did you know there used to be widespread anti-Semitism in this country? Not just among a few Johannine cranks; no, among ordinary respectable citizens.”
“Fact?”
“Fact. Especially a false belief that Jews were cowards and never found in the front lines. Now, when religion forbids most of them to originate spells, and the Orthodox don’t use goetics at all, the proportion of them who serve as dogfaces and Rangers is simply too high to ignore.”
I myself had gotten tired of comic-strip supermen and pulp-magazine heroes having such monotonously Yiddish names-don’t Anglo-Saxons belong to our culture too? but she’d made a good point. And it showed she was a trifle more than a money machine. A bare trifle.
“What’d you do in civilian life?” I asked, chiefly to drown out the incessant noise of the rain.
“I told you,” she snapped, irritable again. “I was with the Arcane Agency. Advertising, public relations, and so on.”
“Oh, well,” I said. “Hollywood is at least as phony, so I shouldn’t sneer.”
I couldn’t help it, however. Those Madison Avenue characters gave me a pain in the rear end. Using the good Art to puff some self-important nobody, or to sell a product whose main virtue is its total similarity to other brands of the same. The SPCA has cracked down on training nixies to make fountains spell out words, or cramming young salamanders into glass tubes to light up Broadway, but I can still think of better uses for slick paper than trumpeting Ma Chere perfume. Which is actually a love potion anyway, though you know what postal regulations are.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “It’s part of our economy-part of our whole society. Do you think the average backyard warlock is capable of repairing, oh, say a lawn sprinkler? Hell, no! He’d probably let loose the water elementals and flood half a township if it weren’t for the inhibitory spells. And we, Arcane, undertook the campaign to convince the Hydros they had to respect our symbols. I told you it’s psychosomatic when you’re dealing with these really potent beings. For that job, I had to go down in an aqualung!”
I stared at her with more respect. Ever since mankind found how to degauss the ruinous effects of cold iron, and the goetic age began, the world has needed some pretty bold people. Apparently she was one of them.
Abrams brought in two plates of rations. He looked wistful, and I would have invited him to join us except that our mission was secret and we had to thresh out the details.
Captain Graylock `chanted the coffee into martinis—not quite dry enough—and the dog food into steaks—a turn too well done; but you can’t expect the finer sensibilities in a woman, and it was the best chow I’d had in a month. She relaxed a bit over the brandy, and I learned that her repellent crispness was simply armor against the slick types she dealt with, and we found out that our first names were Steven and Virginia. But then dusk had become dark outside, and we must be going.
III
You may think—it was sheer lunacy, sending two people, one of them a woman, into an enemy division on a task like this. It would seem to call for a Ranger brigade, at least. But present-day science has transformed war as well as industry, medicine, and ordinary life. Our mission was desperate in any event, and we wouldn’t have gained enough by numbers to make reinforcements worthwhile.
You see, while practically anyone can learn a few simple cantrips, to operate a presensitized broomstick or vacuum cleaner or turret lathe or whatever, only a small minority of the human race can qualify as adepts. Besides years of study and practice, that takes inborn talent. It’s kind of like therianthropy: if you’re one of the rare persons with chromosomes for that, you can change into your characteristic animal almost by instinct; otherwise you need a transformation performed on you by powerful outside forces.
My scientific friends tell me that the Art involves regarding the universe as a set of Cantorian infinities. Within any given class, the part is equal to the whole and so on. One good witch could do all the runing we were likely to need; a larger party would simply be more liable to detection, and would risk valuable personnel. So Vanbrugh had very rightly sent us two alone.
The trouble with sound military principles is that sometimes you personally get caught in them.
Virginia and I turned our backs on each other while we changed clothes. She got into an outfit of slacks and combat jacket, I into the elastic knit garment which would fit me as well in wolf-shape. We put on our helmets, hung our equipment around us, and turned about. Even in the baggy green battle garb she looked good.
“Well,” I said tonelessly, “shall we go?”
I wasn’t afraid, of course. Every recruit is immunized against fear when they put the geas on him. But I didn’t like the prospect.
“The sooner the better, I suppose,” she answered. Stepping to the entrance, she whistled.