"Maybe we could collaborate ..." But even as he said it, Shea knew he was shying away from the responsibility.
"Desirable." Chalmers smiled. "But it would be too difficult for me to communicate on the steady basis collaboration would require. I do not plan any great stay in Ohio, Harold—only enough to supervise the organization of the experiment as a unified whole. Oh, yes, I am taking this very seriously, now! You will not, of course, publish the vital datum—the 'syllogismobile', as you have dubbed it, the ability to travel between universes—but in all other respects, the project is quite viable. Once the overall structure is in place, with methods established and research underway, I shall gladly return to the universe of the Orlando, and to Florimel."
"Thanks, Doc," Shea said, with feeling. "Not just for bailing me out—-but for straightening me out as concerns my goals."
"My pleasure," Chalmers said. "I believe the technical term for the process is maturation.' Tell me, though, Harold—who, in your opinion, should be on the research team, other than ourselves, Polacek, and, by correspondence, Bayard?"
Shea thought for a moment. "I suppose we really should bring in Pete Brodsky as an auxiliary investigator, so that we can have everyone who knows about inter-universe travel under the same roof."
Chalmers nodded. "That will have the additional advantage of keeping the knowledge contained until we have determined how to publish it safely, without causing a wholesale migration to other worlds."
"I'd like to make Belphebe an auxiliary, too," Shea said slowly.
"There, I am afraid the Board might raise its collective eyebrow," Chalmers said regretfully. "The implication of nepotism is too strong to be ignored, especially since she has no academic credentials in this universe. Besides, I am afraid American universities are not yet ready to have both husband and wife employed at the same institution. I shall feel rather guilty accepting the good lady's hospitality, now."
"Oh, she probably would have said 'no,' anyway," Shea sighed. "I suppose it doesn't matter—we know she's on our side."
With Chalmers ensconced in the guest room, Shea and Belphebe sat down to evaluate the situation.
"I was really amazed," Shea told her after summarizing the afternoon's events. "I never thought I'd begin to see the advantages of the settled life."
Belphebe smiled, and snuggled a little closer. "I, too, am amazed to find that my hunger for the chase has become only a fleeting notion. Yet in its place has grown a yearning for children."
"If I can support them." Shea nodded. "But Doc has me thinking that, if I succeed in setting up the experiment with his help, it will give me enough credit so that I just might stand a chance at the directorship, and a full professorship."
Belphebe looked up at him with glowing eyes. "Surely the professorship, even without being director!
And would you not then earn enough to feed and clothe children?"
"I guess so," Shea said slowly, marvelling. "I never particularly liked the little blighters before. Of course, I didn't dislike them, either—but since I married you, I've begun to think babies look downright cute."
Belphebe smiled. "I have always had a fondness for infants, myself."
She smiled up at him, her eyelids heavy, her lips close, so close. Shea couldn't resist a temptation like that, nor had she intended him to.
That night, as they were drifting off to sleep, Shea suddenly found himself wondering just why Florimel had been so willing to have Chalmers visit his home world, and the Sheas. But he dismissed the thought as unworthy, kissed the red hair in glorious disarray on the pillow beside him, and fell asleep.
-
SIR HAROLD AND THE GNOME KING
L. Sprague de Camp
"Darling," said Belphebe, "will you please stop worrying! The doctors all confirm that it be nought but a normal, healthy pregnancy."
"I know," said Harold Shea. "But I just can't help—"
"And you really must go off on your syllogismobile to fetch back Walter. If you do it not soon, he'll lose his tenure; the committee meets next month."
"What sort of husband goes off on some goofy quest when his wife's time is getting near?"
"Oh, cease your fussing and get along with you! Marry, I shall be just as pleased if, when you return, the babe's born and I have my wonted shape. Besides, the police are prey to ever-waxing suspicions—"
"Oh, all right," grumbled Shea. "But if anything goes wrong, I'll never forgive myself ..."
Thus it came to pass that Harold Shea, incomplete enchanter, sat on the floor of his study arrayed in boots and breeches for his journey through other space-time dimensions, with a feathered hat on his head and a saber by his side.
He had decided that the épée, which he had used on other journeys to mythological worlds, was too specialized a weapon. It had served him well against opponents afoot and unarmored; but even so, it was more by luck than by management that the slender blade had not been snapped in parrying the ferocious cuts of edge-men, nor bent to breaking against stout armor.
His present weapon was a nineteenth-century officer's saber, with the blade shortened by a few inches. The original thirty-six-inch blade, suitable for a horseman, was too unwieldy for combat on foot. The swordsman who swung it might swing himself right off his feet.
As a backup weapon, Shea wore a bowie knife in a sheath at his belt. Moreover, whereas he had formerly scorned protective devices, he now wore beneath his outer garments a shirt of fine mesh-mail.
The last he had seen of Walter Bayard before his recent brief visit to mythical Ireland, his fellow psychologist at the Garaden Institute, was in the hut wherein he, Bayard, Belphebe, and Detective Peter Brodsky had been imprisoned by the chiefs of the world of the Finnish Kalevala. Shea's spell, with help from Belphebe and the cop, transferred them all to the world of mythical Ireland, with Cuchulainn and Queen Maeve. But Bayard, if indeed he came through the dimensions, was nowhere to be seen. Shea thought that he had probably been dumped somewhere else in the same world of myth.
But should Shea go back to Cuchulainn's Eriu to look for his colleague? The search might take years, with no end in sight. Moreover, these quasi-Irishmen showed a disturbing fondness for collecting people's heads as trophies.
There was, however, a plausible shortcut: the Land of Oz, as chronicled by L. Frank Baum and later by Ruth Plumly Thompson. In Oz, a major magical artifact was the Gnome King's Magic Belt, confiscated by Dorothy Gale of Kansas alter the King had treacherously tried to imprison her. The Belt was effective as a tele-transporter. If Shea could enlist the help of the Belt's present custodians, he could fetch Bayard from mythical Eriu to Oz, whence the custodians could send the two of them back to Ohio.
Shea launched into the sorites that, he hoped, would bring him to the world of Oz: "If P equals not-Q, then Q implies not-P, which is the same as saving either P and Q or neither, but not both. But the counter-implicative form of the proposition ..."
On went the sorites, adjusting Shea's senses to the stimuli of the other world he sought.
At length the study around him dissolved into a whirl of spots of color. He seemed suspended in nothing, as if in free fall. Then things solidified.
Shea found himself standing on a pavement of onyx squares among several small buildings of boxy shape. Behind these structures rose towering crags, in which yawned large black openings. Paved paths led up to these aperatures. Up and down the paths walked figures in ankle-length gowns, with hoods drawn over their heads.