"Can we freely manipulate the physical extensions Earth?"
The sprite seemed amused. "You refer, so I assume, to the various aspects of space, tune, mass, energy, thought and recollections."
"Exactly."
The sprite -raised its green corn-silk eyebrows. "I might sensibly ask can you break an egg by striking it with a club. The response is on a similar level of seriousness."
Fair had expected a certain amount of condescension and impatience, and was not abashed. "How may I learn that techniques?"
"In the usual manner: through diligent study." "Ah, indeed-but where could I study? Who would teach me?"
The sprite made an easy gesture, and whorls of smoke trailed from his fingers to spin through the air. I could arrange the matter, but since I bear you no particular animosity, I'll do nothing of the sort. And now, I must gone."
"Where do you go?" Fair asked in wonder and longing. "May I go with you?"
The sprite, swirling a drape of bright green dust over its shoulders, shook his head. "You would be less than comfortable."
"Other men have explored the worlds of magic!"
"True: your uncle Gerald Mclntyre, for instance."
"My uncle Gerald learned green magic?"
To the limit of his capabilities. He found no pleasure in learning. You would do well to profit by his experience and modify your ambitions." The sprite turned and walked away.
Fair watched it depart. The sprite receded in space and direction, but never reached the wall of Fair's room. At a distance which might have been fifty yards, the sprite glanced back, as if to make sure that Fair was not following, then 'Stepped off at another angle and disappeared.
Fair's first impulse was to take heed and limit his explorations. He was an adept in white magic, and had mastered the black art - occasionally he evoked a demon to liven a social gathering which otherwise threatened to become dull -but he had by no means illuminated every mystery of purple magic, which is the realm of Incarnate Symbols.
Howard Fair might have turned away from the green cycle except for three factors.
First was his physical appearance. He stood rather under medium height, with a swarthy face, sparse black hair, a gnarled nose, a small heavy mouth. He felt no great sensitivity about his appearance, but realized that it might be improved. In his mind's eye he pictured the personified ideal of himself: he was taller by six inches, his nose thin and keen, his skin cleared of its muddy undertone. A striking figure, but still recognizable as Howard Fair. He wanted the love of women, but he wanted it without the interposition of his craft. Many times he had brought beautiful girls to his bed, lips wet and eyes shining; but purple magic had seduced them rather than Howard Fair, and he took limited satisfaction in such conquests.
Here was the first factor which drew Howard Fan back to the green lore; the second was his yearning for extended, perhaps eternal, life; the third was simple thirst for knowledge.
The fact of Gerald Mclntyre's death, or dissolution, or disappearance-whatever had happened to him-was naturally a matter of concern. If he had won to a goal so precious, why had he died so quickly? Was the "infinite reward" miraculous, so exquisite, that the mind failed under its session? (If such was the case, the reward was hardly a reward.)
Fair could not restrain himself, and by degrees returned to a study of green magic. Rather than again invoke the sprite, whose air of indulgent contempt he had found exasperating he decided to seek knowledge by an indirect method, employing the most advanced concepts of technical and cabalistil science.
He obtained a portable television transmitter which he loaded into his panel truck along with a receiver. On a Monday night in early May he drove to an abandoned graveyard far out in the wooded hills, and, there by the laight of the wandering moon, he buried the television camera in graveyard clay until only the television camera protruded from the soil.
With a sharp alder twig he scratched on the ground a monstrous outline. The television lens served for one eye, a beer bottle pushed neck-first into the soil the other.
During the middle hours, while the moon died behind wisps of pale cloud, he carved a word on the dark forehead then recited the activating incantation.
The ground rumbled and moaned, the golem heaved up to blot out the stars.
The glass eyes stared down at Fair, secure in his pentagon. "Speak!" called out Fair. "Enteresthes, Akmai Adonai! Bidemigir, Elohim, pa rahulli! Enteresthes, HVOI. Speak!"
"Return me to earth, return my clay to the quiet clay from whence you roused me."
"First you must serve."
The golem stumbled forward to crush Fair, but was halted by the pang of protective magic.
"Serve you I will, if serve you I must."
Fair stepped boldly forth from the pentagon, strung forty yards of green ribbon down the road in the" shape of a narrow V. "Go forth into the realm of green magic," he told the monster. "The ribbons reach forty miles, walk to the end, turn about, return, and then fall back, return to the earth from which you rose."
The golem turned, shuffled into the V of green ribbon shaking off clods of mold, jarring the ground with its ponderous tread.
Fair watched the squat shape dwindle, recede, yet never reach the angle of the magic V. He returned to his panel truck, tuned the receiver to the golem's eye and surveyed the fantastic vistas of the green realm.
Two elementals of the green realm met on a silver spun landscape. They were Jaadian and Misthemar, and they fell to discussing the earthen monster which had stalked forty miles through the region known as Cil; which then, turning in its tracks, had retraced its steps, gradually increasing its pace until at the end it moved in a shambling rush, leaving a trail of clods on the fragile moth-wing mosaics.
"Events, events, events," Misthemar fretted, "they crowd the chute of time till the bounds bulge. Or then again, the course is as lean and spare as a stretched tendon ... But in regard to this incursion ..." He paused for a period of reflection, and silver clouds moved over his head and under his feet.
Jaadian remarked, "You are aware that I conversed with Howard Fair; he is so obsessed to escape the squalor of his world that he acts with recklessness."
"The man Gerald Mclntyre was his uncle," mused Misthemar. "Mclntyre besought, we yielded; as perhaps now we must yield to Howard Fair."
Jaadian uneasily opened his hand; shook off a spray of emerald fire. "Events press, both in and out. I find myself unable to act in this regard."
"I likewise do not care to be the agent of tragedy."
A Meaning came fluttering up from below: "A disturbance among the spiral towers! A caterpillar of glass and metal has come clanking; it has thrust electric eyes into the Portinone and broke open the Egg of Innocence. Howard Fair is the fault."
Jaadian and Misthemar consulted each other with wry disinclination, "Very well, both of us will go; such a duty needs two souls in support."
They impinged upon Earth and found Howard Fair in a wall booth at a cocktail bar. He looked up at the two strangers and one of them asked, "May we join you?"
Fair examined the two men. Both wore conservative suits rand carried cashmere topcoats over their arms. Fair noticed that the left thumb-nail of each man glistened green.
Fair rose politely to his feet "Will you sit down?" The green sprites hung up their overcoats and slid into the booth. Fair looked from one to the other. He addressed Jaadian. "Aren't you he whom I interviewed several weeks ago?"
Jaadian assented. "You have not accepted my advice."
Fair shrugged. "You asked me to remain ignorant, to accept my stupidity and ineptitude."
"And why should you not?" asked Jaadian gently. "You are a primitive in a primitive realm; nevertheless not one man in a thousand can match your achievements."