Gritting his teeth, he tore the aluminum rod from his shoulder and drove its sharpened end into the creature's middle.
Something touched the back of his neck, and there was darkness and he lay still for a long time.
When he could move again, he saw the dark figure and he tried to tackle it.
He missed, and there was pain across his back and something wet.
When he stood once again, he bellowed, "You can't do this to me! I'm a man! Not a bull!"
There came a sound of applause.
He raced toward the dark thing six times, trying to grapple with it, hold it, hurt it. Each time, he hurt himself.
Then he stood, panting and gasping, and his shoulders ached and his back ached, and his mind cleared a moment and he said, "You're God, aren't you? And this is the way You play the game..."
The creature did not answer him and he lunged.
He stopped short, then dropped to one knee and dove against its legs.
He felt a fiery pain within his sides as he brought the dark one to earth. He struck at it twice with his fist, then the pain entered his breast and he felt himself grow numb.
"Or are you?" he asked, thick-lipped. "No, you're not...Where am I?"
His last memory was of something cutting away at his ears.
Love Is an Imaginary Number
They should have known that they could not keep me bound forever. Probably they did, which is why there was always Stella.
I lay there staring over at her, arm outstretched above her head, masses of messed blond hair framing her sleeping face. She was more than wife to me: she was warden. How blind of me not to have realized it sooner!
But then, what else had they done to me?
They had made me to forget what I was.
Because I was like them but not of them they had bound me to this time and this place.
They had made me to forget. They had nailed me with love.
I stood up and the last chains fell away.
A single bar of moonlight lay upon the floor of the bedchamber. I passed through it to where my clothing was hung.
There was a faint music playing in the distance. That was what had done it. It had been so long since I had heard that music...
How had they trapped me?
That little kingdom, ages ago, some Other, where I had introduced gunpowder-- Yes! That was the place! They had trapped me there with my Other-made monk's hood and my classical Latin.
Then brainsmash and binding to this Otherwhen.
I chuckled softly as I finished dressing. How long had I lived in this place? Forty-five years of memory--but how much of it counterfeit?
The hall mirror showed me a middle-aged man, slightly obese, hair thinning, wearing a red sport shirt and black slacks.
The music was growing louder, the music only I could hear: guitars, and the steady _thump_ of a leather drum.
My different drummer, aye! Mate me with an angel and you still do not make me a saint, my comrades!
I made myself young and strong again.
Then I descended the stair to the living room, moved to the bar, poured out a glass of wine, sipped it until the music reached its fullest intensity, then gulped the remainder and dashed the glass to the floor. I was free!
I turned to go, and there was a sound overhead.
Stella had awakened.
The telephone rang. It hung there on the wall and rang and rang until I could stand it no longer.
"You have done it again," said that old, familiar voice.
"Do not go hard with the woman," said I. "She could not watch me always."
"It will be better if you stay right where you are," said the voice. "It will save us both much trouble."
"Good night," I said, and hung up.
The receiver snapped itself around my wrist and the cord became a chain fastened to a ring-bolt in the wall. How childish of them!
I heard Stella dressing upstairs. I moved eighteen steps sidewise from There, to the place where my scaled limb slid easily from out the vines looped about it.
Then, back again to the living room and out the front door. I needed a mount.
I backed the convertible out of the garage. It was the faster of the two cars. Then out onto the nighted highway, and then a sound of thunder overhead.
It was a Piper Cub, sweeping in low, out of control. I slammed on the brakes and it came on, shearing treetops and snapping telephone lines, to crash in the middle of the street half a block ahead of me. I took a sharp left turn into an alley, and then onto the next street paralleling my own.
If they wanted to play it that way, well--I am not exactly without resources along those lines myself. I was pleased that they had done it first, though.
I headed out into the country, to where I could build up a head of steam.
Lights appeared in my rearview mirror.
Them?
Too soon.
It was either just another car headed this way, or it was Stella.
Prudence, as the Greek Chorus says, is better than imprudence.
I shifted, not gears.
I was whipping along in a lower, more powerful car.
Again, I shifted.
I was driving from the wrong side of the vehicle and headed up the wrong side of the highway.
Again.
No wheels. My car sped forward on a cushion of air, above a beaten and dilapidated highway. All the buildings I passed were of metal. No wood or stone or brick had gone into the construction of anything I saw.
On the long curve behind me, a pair of headlights appeared.
I killed my own lights and shifted, again and again, and again.
I shot through the air, high above a great swampland, stringing sonic booms like beads along the thread of my trail. Then another shift, and I shot low over the steaming land where great reptiles raised their heads like beanstalks from out their wallows. The sun stood high in this world, like an acetylene torch in the heavens. I held the struggling vehicle together by an act of will and waited for pursuit. There was none.
I shifted again...
There was a black forest reaching almost to the foot of the high hill upon which the ancient castle stood. I was mounted on a hippogriff, flying, and garbed in the manner of a warrior-mage. I steered my mount to a landing within the forest.
"Become a horse," I ordered, giving the proper guide-word.
Then I was mounted upon a black stallion, trotting along the trail which twisted through the dark forest.
Should I remain here and fight them with magic, or move on and meet them in a world where science prevailed?
Or should I beat a circuitous route from here to some distant Other, hoping to elude them completely?
My questions answered themselves.
There came a clatter of hoofs at my back, and a knight appeared: he was mounted upon a tall, proud steed; he wore burnished armor; upon his shield was set a cross of red.
"You have come far enough," he said. "Draw rein!"
The blade he bore upraised was a wicked and gleaming weapon, until I transformed it into a serpent. He dropped it then, and it slithered off into the underbrush.
"You were saying...?"
"Why don't you give up?" he asked. "Join us, or quit trying?"
"Why don't _you_ give up? Quit them and join with me? We could change many times and places together. You have the ability, and the training..."
By then he was close enough to lunge, in an attempt to unhorse me with the edge of his shield.
I gestured and his horse stumbled, casting him to the ground.
"Everywhere you go, plagues and wars follow at your heels!" he gasped.
"All progress demands payment. These are the growing pains of which you speak, not the final results."
"Fool! There is no such thing as progress! Not as you see it! What good are all the machines and ideas you unloose in their cultures, if you do not change the men themselves?"
"Thought and mechanism advances; men follow slowly," I said, and I dismounted and moved to his side. "All that your kind seek is a perpetual Dark Age on all planes of existence. Still, I am sorry for what I must do."