The Complete Compleat Enchanter (2 page)

But he was too good a psychologist to deceive himself long or completely. He did care. He wanted to make a big impression, but he was one of those unfortunates who adopt a method that produces the effect opposite to the one they want.

Hell, he thought, no use introspecting myself into the dumps. Chalmers says it’ll work. The old bore misses fire once in a while, like the time he tried to psychoanalyze the cleaning woman and she thought he was proposing marriage. But that was an error of technique, not of general theory. Chalmers was sound enough on theory, and he had already warned of dangers in the practical application in this case.

Yes. If he said that one could transport oneself to a different place and time by formula, it could be done. The complete escape from—well, from insignificance, Shea confessed to himself. He would be the Columbus of a new kind of journey!

Harold Shea got up and began to pace the floor, excited by the trend of his own thoughts. To explore—say the world of the
Iliad.
Danger: one might not be able to get back. Especially not, Shea told himself grimly, if one turned out to be one of those serf soldiers who died by thousands under the gleaming walls of Troy.

Not the
Iliad.
The Slavic twilight? No; too full of man-eating witches and werewolves. Ireland! That was it—the Ireland of Cuchulinn and Queen Maev. Blood there, too, but what the hell, you can’t have adventure without some danger. At least, the dangers were reasonable open-eye stuff you could handle. And the girls of that world—they were something pretty slick by all description.

###

It is doubtful whether Shea’s colleagues noticed any change in his somewhat irregular methods of working. They would hardly have suspected him of dropping Havelock Ellis for the Ulster and Fenian legendary cycles with which he was conditioning his mind for the attempted “trip.” If any of them, entering his room suddenly, had come on a list with many erasures, which included a flashlight, a gun, and mercurochrome, they would merely have supposed that Shea intended to make a rather queer sort of camping expedition.

And Shea was too secretive about his intentions to let anyone see the equipment he selected: A Colt .38 revolver with plenty of ammunition, a stainless-steel hunting knife—they ought to be able to appreciate metal like that, he told himself—a flashlight, a box of matches to give him a reputation as a wonder worker, a notebook, a Gaelic dictionary, and, finally, the
Boy Scout Handbook,
edition of 1926, as the easiest source of ready reference for one who expected to live in the open air and in primitive society.

Shea went home after a weary day of asking questions of neurotics, and had a good dinner. He put on the almost-new riding clothes and strapped over his polo coat a shoulder pack to hold his kit. He put on the hat with the green feather, and sat down at his desk. There, on sheets of paper spread before him, were the logical equations, with their little horseshoes, upside-down Ts, and identity signs.

His scalp prickled a trifle as he gazed at them. But what the hell! Stand by for adventure and romance! He bent over, giving his whole attention to the formulas, trying not to focus on one spot, but to apprehend the whole:

“If P equals not-Q, Q implies not-P, which is equivalent to saying either P or Q or neither, but not both.
But
if not-P is not implied by not-Q, the counter-implicative form of the proposition—”

There was nothing but six sheets of paper. Just that, lying in two neat rows of three sheets, with perhaps half an inch between them. There should be strips of table showing between them. But there was nothing—nothing.

“The full argument thus consists in an epicheirematic syllogism in Barbara, the major premise of which is
not
the conclusion of an enthymeme, though the minor premise of which may or may not be the conclusion of a non-Aristotelian sorites—”

The papers were still there, but overlaying the picture of those six white rectangles was a whirl of faint spots of color. All the colors of the spectrum were represented, he noted with the back of his mind, but there was a strong tendency toward violet. Round and round they went—round—and round—

“If either P or Q is true or (Q or R) is true then either Q is true or (P or R) is false—”

Round and round—He could hear nothing at all. He had no sense of heat or cold, or of the pressure of the chair seat against him. There was nothing but millions of whirling spots of color.

Yes, he could feel temperature now. He was cold. There was sound, too, a distant whistling sound, like that of a wind in a chimney. The spots were fading into a general grayness. There was a sense of pressure, also, on the soles of his feet. He straightened his legs—yes, standing on something. But everything around him was gray—and bitter cold, with a wind whipping the skirts of his coat around him.

He looked down. His feet were there all right—hello, feet, pleased to meet you. But they were fixed in grayish-yellow mud which had squelched up in little ridges around them. The mud belonged to a track, only two feet wide. On both sides of it the gray-green of dying grass began. On the grass large flakes of snow were scattered, dandruffwise. More were coming, visible as dots of darker gray against the background of whirling mist, swooping down long parallel inclines, growing and striking the path with the tiniest
t
s
.
Now and then one spattered against Shea’s face.

He had done it. The formula worked!

Two

“Welcome to Ireland!” Harold Shea murmured to himself. He thanked heaven that his syllogismobile had brought his clothes and equipment along with his person. It would never have done to have been dumped naked onto this freezing landscape. The snow was not alone responsible for the grayness. There was also a cold, clinging mist that cut off vision at a hundred yards or so. Ahead of him the track edged leftward around a little mammary of a hill, on whose flank a tree rocked under the melancholy wind. The tree’s arms all reached one direction, as though the wind were habitual; its branches bore a few leaves as gray and discouraged as the landscape itself. The tree was the only object visible in that wilderness of mud, grass and fog. Shea stepped toward it. The serrated leaves bore the indentations of the Northern scrub oak.

But that grows only in the Arctic Circle, he thought. He was bending closer for another look when he heard the
clop-squash
of a horse’s hoofs on the muddy track behind him.

He turned. The horse was very small, hardly more than a pony, and shaggy, with a luxuriant tail blowing round its withers. On its back sat a man who might have been tall had he been upright, for his feet nearly touched the ground. But he was hunched before the icy wind driving in behind. From saddle to eyes he was enveloped in a faded blue cloak. A formless slouch hat was pulled tight over his face, yet not so tight as to conceal the fact that he was full-bearded and gray.

Shea took half a dozen quick steps to the roadside. He addressed the man with the phrase he had composed in advance for his first human contact in the world of Irish myth:

“The top of the morning to you my good man, and would it be fare to the nearest hostel?”

He had meant to say more, but paused uncertainly as the man on the horse lifted his head to reveal a proud, unsmiling face in which the left eye socket was unpleasantly vacant. Shea smiled weakly, then gathered his courage and plunged on: “It’s a rare bitter December you do be having in Ireland.”

The stranger looked at him with much of the same clinical detachment he himself would have given to an interesting case of schizophrenia, and spoke in slow, deep tones: “I have no knowledge of hostels, nor of Ireland; but the month is not December. We are in May, and this is the Fimbulwinter.”

A little prickle of horror filled Harold Shea, though the last word was meaningless to him. Faint and far, his ear caught a sound that might be the howling of a dog—or a wolf. As he sought for words there was a flutter of movement. Two big black birds, like oversize crows, slid down the wind past him and came to rest on the dry grass, looked at him for a second or two with bright, intelligent eyes, then took the air again.

“Well, where
am
I?”

“At the wings of the world, by Midgard’s border.”

“Where in hell is that?”

The deep voice took on an edge of annoyance. “For all things there is a time, a place, and a person. There is none of the three for ill-judged questions and empty jokes.” He showed Shea a blue-clad shoulder, clucked to his pony and began to move wearily ahead.

“Hey!” cried Shea. He was feeling good and sore. The wind made his fingers and jaw muscles ache. He was lost in this arctic wasteland, and this old goat was about to trot off and leave him stranded. He leaned forward, planting himself squarely in front of the pony. “What land of a runaround is this, anyway? When I ask someone a civil question—”

The pony had halted, its muzzle almost touching Shea’s coat. The man on the animal’s back straightened suddenly so that Shea could see he was very tall indeed, a perfect giant. But before he had time to note anything more he felt himself caught and held with an almost physical force by that single eye. A stab of intense, burning cold seemed to run through him, inside his head, as though his brain had been pierced by an icicle. He felt rather than heard a voice which demanded, “Are you trying to stop
me,
niggeling?”

For his life, Shea could not have moved anything but his lips. “N-no,” he stammered. “That is, I just wondered if you could tell me how I could get somewhere where it’s warm—”

The single eye held him unblinkingly for a few seconds. Shea felt that it was examining his inmost thoughts. Then the man slumped a trifle so that the brim of his hat shut out the glare and the deep voice was muffled. “I will be tonight at the house of the bonder Sverre, which is the Crossroads of the World. You may follow.” The wind whipped a fold of his blue cloak, and as it did so there came, apparently from within the cloak itself, a little swirl of leaves. One clung for a moment to the front of Shea’s coat. He caught it with numbed fingers, and saw it was an ash leaf, fresh and tender with the bright green of spring—in the midst of this howling wilderness, where only arctic scrub oak grew!

Shea let the pony pass and fell in behind, head down, collar up, hands deep in pockets, squinting against the snowflakes. He was too frozen to think clearly, but he tried. The logical formulas had certainly thrown him into another world. But he hardly needed the word of Old Whiskers that it was not Ireland. Something must have gone haywire in his calculations. Could he go back and recheck them? No—he had not the slightest idea at present what might have been on those six sheets of paper. He would have to make the best of his situation.

But what world had he tumbled into? A cold, bleak one, inhabited by small, shaggy ponies and grim, old, blue-clad men with remarkable eyes. It might be the world of Scandinavian mythology. Shea knew very little about such a world, except that its No. 1 guy was someone named Odinn, or Woden, or Wotan, and there was another god named Thor who threw a sledge hammer at people he disliked.

Shea’s scientific training made him doubt whether he would actually find these gods operating as gods, with more-than-human powers; or, for that matter, whether he would see any fabulous monsters. Still, that stab of cold through his head and that handful of ash leaves needed explaining. Of course, the pain in his head might be an indication of incipient pneumonia, and Old Whiskers might make a habit of carrying ash leaves in his pockets. But still—

The big black birds were keeping up with them. They didn’t seem afraid, nor did they seem to mind the ghastly weather.

It was getting darker, though in this landscape of damp blotting paper Shea could not tell whether the sun had set. The wind pushed at him violently, forcing him to lean into it; the mud on the path was freezing, but not quite gelid. It had collected in yellow gobs on his boots. He could have sworn the boots weighed thirty pounds apiece, and they had taken in water around the seams, adding clammy socks to his discomfort. A clicking sound, like a long roll of castanets, made him wonder until he realized it was caused by his own teeth.

He seemed to have been walking for days, though he knew it could hardly be a matter of hours. Reluctantly he took one hand from his pocket and gazed at his wrist watch. It read 9:56; certainly wrong. When he held the watch to a numbed ear he discovered it had stopped. Neither shaking nor winding could make it start.

He thought of asking his companion the time, but realized that the rider would have no more accurate idea than himself. He thought of asking how much farther they had to go. But he would have to make himself heard over the wind, and the old boy’s manner did not encourage questions.

They plodded on. The snow was coming thickly through the murky twilight. Shea could barely make out the figure before him. The path had become the same neutral gray as everything else. The weather was turning colder. The snowflakes were dry and hard, stinging and bouncing where they struck. Now and then an extra puff of wind would snatch a cloud of them from the moor, whirling it into Shea’s face. He would shut his eyes to the impact, and when he opened them find he had blundered off the path and have to scurry after his guide.

Light. He pulled the pack around in front of him and fumbled in it till he felt the icy touch of the flashlight’s metal. He pulled it out from under the other articles and pressed the switch button. Nothing happened, nor would shaking, slapping, or repeated snappings of the switch produce any result.

In a few minutes it would be too dark for him to follow the man on the pony by sight alone. Whether the old boy liked it or not, Shea would have to ask the privilege of holding a corner of his cloak as a guide.

It was just as he reached this determination that something in the gait of the pony conveyed a sense of arrival. A moment more and the little animal was trotting, with Shea stumbling and skidding along the fresh snow behind as he strove to keep pace. The pack weighed tons, and he found himself gasping for breath as though he were running up a forty-five-degree angle instead of on an almost-level path.