One side of the pyramid furled open. A rod of light darted out, a rod of light with a knob at one end.
Dogs were barking, and some of the humans were out in their yards yelling. A police siren sounded in the distance.
Moving rapidly, the stick of light floated over the low cemetery wall and disappeared. One of the barking dogs gave a shrill yelp of terror and fell silent. Conrad stared at the scout ship, unsure whether to run or to keep watching. Just then he noticed a dark shape moving toward him through the gravestones.
A big dog, it looked like, in the light from the houses, a big black dog trotting toward Conrad with a frightening singleness of purpose. The alien had taken it over. It was coming to get Conrad.
Now the dog was only ten yards off. Something glowed at the back of its neck—a large parallelepiped crystal resembling the one Conrad held clutched like a sword hilt in his fist. Moving instinctively, Conrad raised his fist to the back of his neck and ... drew out a rod of light. Yes. Drew it out like a sword from a scabbard, pulled his flame-person self out of the human spine where it lived!
The dog charged now, and as it leaped, Conrad stepped sideways and slashed downward with his sword of light. It burned the dog in half; for a moment, Conrad thought the fight was already over.
But now alien energy came oozing out of the dog’s spine, energy that rejoined its crystal to form a sword-thing like Conrad’s. The glowing shape flung itself at Conrad; he hacked and parried as best he could.
It was strange-feeling, this battle—Conrad had double perspective on it. On the one hand,Conrad was the human being wielding the sword; on the other hand,Conrad was the stick of light in the human’s hand. He could feel it either way. Each time he touched the other flame-person, a tingling buzz rushed through him like an electric shock. The main thing was to keep the other from hurting his human body. If he lost his meat, he’d have to go back to the saucer. Thrust and slash, dodge and duck. It was all happening too fast to analyze.
Suddenly the other flame-person knotted itself into Conrad’s sword and began to pull. It was talking to him, Conrad realized—that buzzing was a kind of talk.
Come on, Conrad, it was saying,it’s time to get you out of here. People are going to recognize you from TV, and your next powers are going to use up so much of your crystal-energy that ...
Conrad braced himself and refused to budge. Just then, four or five spotlights focused on him and the scout ship pilot.
“DON’T MOVE OR WE’LL SHOOT!” Cops—squad cars full of cops.
Oh, #*!%, buzzed the other flame-person.I give up. It swooped back to the red-flashing spacecraft and, as suddenly as it had come, the UFO tumbled back up into the sky.
WOZZZZ.
Conrad’s bright sword flexed in exultation. Conrad’s human body sighed in relief. The big dog lay there on the ground before him, cut right in two. With the same automatic motion that he’d used before, Conrad raised up his stick of light and slid it down into his spine. Like a sword-swallower. Click. He felt whole again. Good and—
Fly, thought Conrad.Shrink! Nothing doing. He pocketed the crystal and raised both hands high as if to surrender. The cop cars were about twenty yards off—they couldn’t get any closer, with Conrad in here among the gravestones. Each gravestone cast a dark shadow. It was obvious what to do.
Conrad twitched his left hand and dived down to the right. In a shadow. Good. He scuttled backward, shifted to a new shadow, scuttled further. Further. Bright lights, dark shadows. Someone fired a shot, someone screamed not to. There were more cops, circling up on Conrad’s position from behind.
“WE HAVE YOU SURROUNDED!”
Cops in front of him, cops behind him. By now, they’d lost track of exactly where he was, here in a patch of shadow behind one of ten thousand identical gravestones.If only I looked like a cop.
The crystal twitched in his pocket, and then Conrad felt his clothes shifting, felt the flesh of his features crawl. All right!
“He’s not over here!” called cop-voiced Conrad, getting to his feet. He could change his face!Third Chinese brother!
“I’m going to check over by the wall!” His handcuffs jingled, and his pistol slapped against his leg. The other officers wandered this way and that.
There was a low stone wall around the cemetery. Conrad found a spot with no people close by and rolled himself over the wall.Mr. Bulber , he thought, as he dropped out of sight.I want to look like Mr.
Bulber.
When he got back to his feet, he was a nondescript guy in his early thirties—a carbon copy of his Swarthmore physics teacher, Mr. Bulber. Mr. Bulber had the virtue of being very normal-looking: prim mouth, neatly parted dark hair, horn-rimmed glasses, charcoal-gray suit ...
More and more people were coming to see what was up, but no one noticed “Mr. Bulber” walking off.
As he walked, Conrad drew out his wallet and took a peek. Money in there, good, and, even better, IDs withCharles Bulber on them.
Conrad started walking along Route 42. But where to? Probably the cops or someone had gotten footage of him dueling with the other flame-person—which meant that his old cover was thoroughly blown. Plenty of people in Louisville would recognize Conrad Bunger from the pictures. He wasn’t going to be able to look like his old self anymore at all. It was time to get out of town.
Some teenagers threw a beer can at him from a passing car. Of course. Whowouldn’t throw a beer can at Mr. Bulber, all neat and square in his charcoal-gray suit? He’d want to pick a new body-look before long; but, for now, this was good and innocuous.
Conrad could feel the crystal in his pants pocket. It was smaller than it had been just a few minutes ago.
Strange. He was going to have to get rid of the crystal. Holding it in the Z.T. for that long had somehow energized it—one of its functions seemed to be that of a radio beacon. It had to be the crystal that had enabled the flame-people to home in on him like that.
And what did they want from him anyway? Apparently they thought he wasn’t doing too good a job here—they wanted to abort his mission. But unless he was actually holding the crystal, it was too hard for them to find him.Well, fine , thought Conrad,I don’t want them to find me.
A battery.The crystal was like a battery. His stick of light, after all, had to be living offsomething . The power for his reality-altering wishes had to come fromsomewhere . Such magical power would involve a higher form of energy than anything that humble human meat could provide.
Conrad reached into his pocket and fingered the crystal anxiously. When he was a kid it had been as big as his fist—though, of course, childhood memories were always inaccurate about size. In any case, last night, the crystal had definitely been the size of a big, homemade ice cube. But now—now that he’d had flying, and shrinking, and face-changing—now that he was the third Chinese brother—now the crystal was only the size of a matchbox.
The crystal was Conrad’s energy source, but it was also a kind of transmitter to the flame-people. Unless he wanted them to come back and get him, he was going to have to get rid of it. But where would it be safe? Some cops sped past on Route 42. Conrad felt a big pulse of stress. If the pigs got hold of his crystal, it would be all over. If the flamers found him again, it would be all over. What to do?
Why not just take Mrs. Larsen’s advice? Why not give the crystal back to Mr. Skelton? Conrad began walking faster.
The highway traffic made a lot of noise, but he kept having a feeling he was hearing thatZZZZOW from before. He glanced anxiously up at the sky, looking for a tumbling pattern of five red lights. Maybe as long as he didn’t actuallyhold the crystal, the flame-people couldn’t find him. But maybe not. In any case, the sooner he got to Skelton’s, the better.