The Dragon and the George

Gordon R. Dickson

START SCIENCE FICTION
An Imprint of Start Publishing LLC
New York, New York

THE DRAGON AND THE GEORGE
© 1976 by Gordon R. Dickson. © 2004 by Estate of Gordon R. Dickson.
First Start Science Fiction edition 2013.

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Start Science Fiction, 609 Greenwich Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10014.

All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Published by Start Science Fiction,
an imprint of Start Publishing LLC
New York, New York

Please visit us on the web at
www.start-media.com

ISBN: 978-1-62793-490-9

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

by David Drake

Shortly after my parents gave me a subscription to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in October 1959, the magazine offered back issues at the rate of fifteen for three dollars or twenty-five for five dollars. I sent three dollars; among the delights I found when the magazines arrived was "St. Dragon and the George." (There were many delights. I immediately scraped up another five dollars and sent it off. Thirteen of the twenty-five additional magazines were duplicates, but I didn't complain.)

Gordy Dickson at his peak was one of the best writers in the field. For my money (literally, in this case), "St. Dragon and the George" is the best thing he ever wrote. It's both funny and witty, but if those were its only virtues, I wouldn't have picked it for this anthology. The humor and wit overlie a series of very profound ideas:

There is evil;

It is the duty of human beings to stand firm against evil, even if evil most likely will destroy them;

And human beings come in all shapes and sizes.

If more people took those ideas to heart, the world would be a better place. Because I read "St. Dragon and the George," the world is at least slightly better than it might be if I hadn't.

At 10:30 a.m., sharp, James Eckert pulled up in front of Stoddard Hall on the Riveroak College campus, where Grottwold Weinar Hansen had his lab. Angie Farrell was not, however, ready and waiting at the curb. Of course.

It was a warm, bright September morning.

Jim sat in the car and tried to keep his temper under control. It would not be Angie's fault. That idiot of a Grottwold undoubtedly had dreamed up something to keep her working overtime in spite of—or perhaps because of—the fact he knew she and Jim were supposed to go home-hunting this morning. It was hard not to lose his temper with someone like Grottwold, who was not only one of the world's non-prizes but who had been very patently trying to take Angie away from Jim and get her for himself.

One of the two big doors on the front of the Stoddard Hall opened and a figure came out. But it was not Angie. It was a stocky young man with bushy reddish hair and mustache, carrying an overstuffed briefcase. Seeing Jim in the car, he came down the steps over to the car and leaned on the edge of the opened window on the curb side of the front seat.

"Waiting for Angie?" he asked.

"That's right, Danny," said Jim. "She was supposed to be out here to meet me, but evidently Grottwold's still hanging on to her."

"That's his style." Danny Cerdak was a teaching assistant in the Physics Department. He was the only other Class AA volleyball player on campus. "You're going out to see Cheryl's trailer?"

"If Angie ever gets loose in time," said Jim. "Oh, she'll probably be along any second now. Say, do the two of you want to drop over to my place after we play tomorrow night? Nothing special, just pizza and beer and a few other people from the team with their wives and so forth."

"Sounds fine," said Jim, glumly, "if I'm not stuck with some extra work for Shorles. Thanks, in any case, though; and we'll certainly be there if we can make it."

"Right." Danny straightened up. "See you tomorrow for the game, then."

He went off. Jim returned to his own thoughts. At the same time, he told himself, maturity dictated that he should not lose his emotional control over something like this—even though they only had two hours to get to the trailer court and return and have lunch before getting Angie back to her part-time job as Grottwold's lab assistant. He must remember that frustration was a part of life. He had to learn to live with the whole business of selfish department heads, inadequate salaries and an economy that was pinching Riveroak College here, like all other educational institutions, to the point where it seemed that about all you could do with a doctorate in medieval history was use the diploma to shine your shoes, before going to apply for a job as a grain shoveler—

Jim hauled himself up in his thoughts at this point, having noticed that, far from calming him down, this rehearsing of things to be endured had his fists white-knuckled and beginning to bend the ancient steering wheel of the Gorp. Nothing about the Gorp was strong enough to ignore that kind of treatment. For a ten-year-old Fiat, it was still a faithful little car, but no honest person could call it in good shape. On the other hand, Jim himself—like many Class AA volleyball players—was in shape with a vengeance. He stood a shade under six feet, but even professional weight-guessers usually underestimated by twenty or more his two hundred and ten pounds, which he carried mostly in bone and hard muscle. Unfortunately, that sort of physical engine, matched with an instinct for taking direct action when challenged—which was useful on the volleyball courts with the caliber of opponents Jim had been facing in tournament play for some years now, but not perhaps the best thing socially—gave Jim reason to consider that he had cause for concern about himself.

Thank heaven for Angie. The beautiful thing about her was that she could get results from people without becoming at all annoyed with them, in situations when Jim would have sworn that the other persons were deliberately looking for a fight. How she managed it, Jim had never been able to figure out. As far as he could see, all she did was to explain matters in a level, friendly voice. Whereupon, for some reason, the other people immediately stopped doing whatever they had been doing that was antagonistic and became friendly and helpful. Angie was really rather special; particularly for someone hardly bigger than a minute. Look at the way she handled Grottwold…

Jim woke to the fact that time had been sliding away as he had been sitting here thinking. He looked at his watch and scowled. Nearly a quarter to eleven. This was too much. If Grottwold didn't have the sense to let her go, Angie herself ought to have broken away by this time.

He pushed open the car door on his side, and was just getting out, when one of the two big front doors swung open again and Angie came running down the steps to the car, pulling on her light beige topcoat as she ran. Her brown eyes were bright and her cheeks pink with her hurry.

"Oh, there you are," said Jim, getting back in.

"I'm sorry." Angie got into the Gorp on her side and slammed the door behind her. "Grottwold's all excited. He thinks he's right on the verge of proving astral projection is possible—"

"Whichjection?"

Jim keyed the Gorp to life and pulled away from the curb.

"Astral projection. Setting the spirit free to wander outside the body. What with the results he's been getting using advanced input on biofeedback circuitry to duplicate certain forms of sleep states—"

"You aren't letting him experiment on you, are you? I thought we got that settled."

"Don't get all worked up, now," Angie said. "I'm not letting him experiment
on
me, I'm helping him with his experiments. Don't worry, he's not going to hypnotize me, or anything like that."

"He tried it once."

Jim pulled the Gorp out of the college grounds onto West Street and turned down on the ramp leading to Highway Five.

"He only tried.
You
were the one who hypnotized me, if you'll remember—after Grottwold taught you how."

"Anyway, you're not to let anyone hypnotize you again. Me or Hansen, or anybody."

"Of course," said Angie, softly.

There she went, doing it again—just what he had been thinking about, Jim told himself. Now
he
was the one she'd just handled. All of a sudden there was no more argument and he was wondering what he had gotten excited about in the first place. He was also feeling half guilty for making a fuss over something that probably had not been that important to begin with.

"Anyway," he said, heading out along Highway Five toward the trailer court Danny Cerdak had told him about, "if this trailer for rent turns out to be the deal Danny said it was, we can get married and maybe, living together, we can get by cheaply enough so you won't have to work for Grottwold as well as holding down your assistantship in English."

"Jim," said Angie, "you know better."

"We could."

"We could not. The only reason the co-op can get by charging us a hundred twenty apiece per month for food and board is that it makes slop food in quantity and beds us all down in double-decker bunks in dormitories. Any place we find for ourselves is going to put our living costs up, not down. I can't manage meals for us as cheaply as the co-op can. No, I can't quit my work with Grottwold. But at least having a place of our own will make it seem worth while to go on. We've got to have a place of our own—but let's not fool ourselves about the expense."

"We could sort of camp out in the new place, the first few months."

"How could we? To cook and eat, we've got to have utensils, and a table to eat on. We need another table so we can each have one to correct tests on and so forth for our jobs at the college. And chairs. We need at least a mattress to sleep on, and something like a dresser for the clothes that can't be hung up—"

"All right. I'll get an extra job, then."

"No, you won't. I had to stop work on
my
thesis. You're going to stick with writing papers for the academic journals until you publish something. Then see Shorles keep you out of that instructorship!"

"Oh, hell," said Jim. "I'll probably never get anything published anyway."

"You better not mean that!" For once Angie sounded almost angry.

"Well, actually, no," Jim said, a little shamefacedly. "Actually, this last paper was going pretty well this morning before I headed off for class."

Professor Thibault Shorles, head of the History Department, liked his assistants to sit in on all of his classes, in addition to doing the usual work of correcting tests, reserving reference books for the students in the course, and so forth. It was a neat little whim that added eight hours a week to the time Jim otherwise required to put in to earn his hundred and seventy-five dollars a month.

"How was he?" Angie asked. "Did you ask him about the instructorship again?"

"He wasn't in the mood."

"He wasn't? Or you weren't?" Jim winced internally. Shorles had interviewed Jim at the History Association meeting last year in Chicago; and as good as promised him a recently created instructorship just added to the history department Shorles headed at Riveroak. With this prospect, Angie had tried for, and to the happiness of both of them, got, a teaching assistantship in the English Department. She was still working for her doctorate in English literature, Jim having been three years ahead of her at Michigan State, where they met as graduate students. With both of them set for jobs at the same academic institution, it had looked as if they had the future taped. But then when they had gotten here, Shorles broke the news that because of last-minute budget problems, Jim could not be given his instructorship until the spring quarter at the earliest. Meanwhile, Shorles had a teaching assistantship open…

It had taken Jim less than a month to find out the real nature of the "budget problem." Like academic departments in many colleges and universities, the staff teaching history at Riveroak College was riddled with internal politics. Two established factions in the department opposed each other on almost every point. Shorles, independent of both, had gotten by for years by playing them against each other. But an additional instructor added at this time could cause a reshuffling of allegiances and a resultant upset in the neat balance of power. On the other hand, Professor Theodore N. Jellamine, the outspoken, motorcycle-riding vice-chairman of the department, was thinking of retiring this coming spring. His leaving would mean promotions for those under him; and by controlling these, Shorles could then absorb a new instructor into a fresh balance of power hand-tailored by himself.