much to accept at once, and Dave's mind was a treadmill. He'd agreed to
admit anything, but some of this was such complete nonsense that his
mind rejected it automatically. Yet he was sure Ser Perth was serious;
there was no humor on the face of the prissy thin-mustached man before
him. Nor had the Sather Karf considered it a joke, he was sure. He had a
sudden vision of the latter strangling two men from a distance of thirty
feet without touching them. That couldn't happen in a sane world,
either.
Dave asked weakly, "Could I have a drink?"
"With a sylph around?" Ser Perth grimaced. "You wouldn't have a chance.
Now, is all clear to you, Dave Hanson?"
"Sure. Except for one thing. What am I supposed to do?"
"Repair our sky. It should not be too difficult for a man of your
reputation. You built a wall across a continent high and strong enough
to change the air currents and affect all your weather--and that in the
coldest, meanest country in your world. You come down to us as one of
the greatest engineers of history, Dave Hanson, so great that your fame
has penetrated even to our world, through the viewing pools of our
wisest historians. There is a shrine and monument in your world. 'Dave
Hanson, to whom nothing was impossible.' Well, we have a nearly
impossible task: a task of engineering and building. If our Science of
Magic could be relied upon--but it cannot; it never can be, until the
sky is fixed. We have the word of history: no task is impossible to Dave
Hanson."
Dave looked at the smug face and a slow grin crept over his own, in
spite of himself. "Ser Perth, I'm afraid you've made a slight mistake."
"We don't make mistakes in such matters. You're Dave Hanson," Ser Perth
said flatly. "Of all the powers of the Science, the greatest lies in the
true name. We evoked you by the name of Dave Hanson. You _are_ Dave
Hanson, therefore."
"Don't try to deceive us," Nema suggested. Her voice was troubled. "Pray
rather that we never have reason to doubt you. Otherwise the wisest of
the Satheri would spend their remaining time in planning something
unthinkable for you."
Ser Perth nodded vigorous assent. Then he motioned to the office. "Nema
will show you to your quarters later. Use this until you leave. I have
to report back."
Dave stared after him until he was gone, and then around at the office.
He went to the window and stared upwards at the crazy patchwork of the
sky. For all he knew, in such a sky there might be cracks. In fact, as
he looked, he could make out a rift, and beyond that a ... hole ... a
small patch where there was no color, and yet the sky there was not
black. There were no stars there, though points of light were clustered
around the edges, apparently retreating.
All he had to do was to repair the sky. Shades of Chicken Little!
Maybe to David Arnold Hanson, the famed engineer, no task was
impossible. But quite a few things were impossible to that engineer's
obscure and unimportant nephew, the computer technician and generally
undistinguished man who had been christened Dave. They'd gotten the
right man for the name, all right. But the wrong man for the job.
Dave Hanson could repair anything that contained electrical circuits or
ran on tiny jeweled bearings, but he could handle almost nothing else.
It wasn't stupidity or incapacity to learn, but simply that he had never
been subjected to the discipline of construction engineering. Even on
the project, while working with his uncle, he had seen little of what
went on, and hadn't really understood that, except when it produced data
that he could feed into his computer. He couldn't drive a nail in the
wall to hang a picture or patch a hole in the plaster.
But it seemed that he'd better put on a good show of trying if he wanted
to continue enjoying good health.
"I suppose you've got a sample of the sky that's fallen?" he asked Nema.
"And what the heck are you doing here, anyhow? I thought you were a
nurse."
She frowned at him, but went to a corner where a small ball of some
clear crystalline substance stood. She muttered into it, while a surly
face stared out. Then she turned back to him, nodding. "They are sending
some of the sky to you. As to my being a nurse, of course I am. All
student magicians take up the Medical Art for a time. Surely one so
skilled can also be a secretary, even to the great Dave Hanson? As to
why I'm here--" She dropped her eyes, frowning, while a touch of added
color reached her cheeks. "In the sleep spell I used, I invoked that you
should be well and true. But I'm only a bachelor in magic, not even a
master, and I slipped. I phrased it that I wanted you well and true.
Hence, well and truly do I want you."
"Huh?" He stared at her, watching the blush deepen. "You mean--?"
"Take care! First you should know that I am proscribed as a duly
registered virgin. And in this time of need, the magic of my blood must
not be profaned." She twisted sidewise, and then turned toward the door,
avoiding him. Before she reached it, the door opened to show a dull
clod, entirely naked, holding up a heavy weight of nothing.
"Your sample of sky," she said as the clod labored over to the desk and
dropped nothing with a dull clank. The desk top dented slightly.
Dave could clearly see that nothing was on the desk. But if nothing was
a vacuum, this was an extremely hard and heavy one. It seemed to be
about twelve inches on a side, in its rough shape, and must have weighed
two hundred pounds. He tapped it, and it rang. Inside it, a tiny point
of light danced frantically back and forth.
"A star," she said sadly.
"I'm going to need some place to experiment with this," he suggested. He
expected to be sent to the deepest, dankest cave of all the world as a
laboratory, and to find it equipped with pedigreed bats, dried unicorn
horns and whole rows of alembics that he couldn't use.
Nema smiled brightly. "Of course. We've already prepared a construction
camp for you. You'll find most of the tools you used in your world
waiting there and all the engineers we could get or make for you."
He'd been considering stalling while he demanded exactly such things. He
was reasonably sure by now that they had no transistors, signal
generators, frequency meters or whatever else he could demand. He could
make quite an issue out of the need to determine the characteristic
impedance of their sky. That might even be interesting, at that; would
it be anywhere near 300 ohms here? But it seemed that stalling wasn't
going to work. They'd given him what they expected him to need, and he'd
have to be careful to need only what they expected, or they might just
decide he wasn't Dave Hanson.
"I can't work on this stuff here," he said.
"Then why didn't you say so?" she asked sharply. She let out a cry and a
raven came flying in. She whispered something to it, frowned, and then
ordered it off. "There's no surface transportation available, and all
the local rocs are in use. Well, we'll have to make do with what we
have."
She darted for the outer office, rummaged in a cabinet, and came back
with a medium-sized rug of worn but gaudy design. Bad imitation Sarouk,
Dave guessed. She tossed it onto the largest cleared space, gobbled
some outlandish noises, and dropped onto it, squatting near one end.
Behind her, the dull clod picked up the sample of sky and fell to his
face on the rug. At her vehement signal, Dave squatted down beside her,
not daring to believe what he was beginning to guess.
The carpet lifted uncertainly. It seemed to protest at the unbalanced
weight of the sky piece. She made the sounds again, and it rose
reluctantly, curling up at the front, like a crazy toboggan. It moved
slowly, but with increasing speed, sailed out of the office through the
window and began gaining altitude. They went soaring over the city at
about thirty miles an hour, heading toward what seemed to be barren land
beyond. "Sometimes they fail now," she told him. "But so far, only if
the words are improperly pronounced."
He gulped and looked gingerly over at the city below. As he did, she
gasped. He heard a great tearing sound of thunder. In the sky, a small
hole appeared. There was a scream of displaced air, and something went
zipping downwards in front of them, setting up a wind that bounced the
carpet about crazily. Dave glanced over the edge again to see one of the
tall buildings crumple under the impact. The three top stories were
ripped to shreds. Then the whole building began to change. It slowly
blossomed into a huge cloud of pink gas that rifted away, to show people
and objects dropping like stones to the ground below. Nema sighed and
turned her eyes away.
"But--it's ridiculous!" Dave protested. "We heard the rip and less than
five seconds later, that piece fell. If your sky is even twenty miles
above us, it would take longer than that to fall."
"It's a thousand miles up," she told him. "And sky has no inertia until
it is contaminated by contact with the ground. It took longer than
usual for that piece to fall." She sighed. "It gets worse. Look at the
signs. That break has disturbed the planets. We're moving retrograde,
back to our previous position, out of Sagittarius! Now we'll go back to
the character we had before--and just when I was getting used to the
change."
He jerked his eyes off the raw patch of emptiness in the sky, where a
few stars seemed to be vanishing. "Your character? Isn't anything stable
here?"
"Of course not. Naturally, in each House we have a differing of
character, as does the world itself. Why else should astrology be the
greatest of the sciences?"
It was a nice world, he decided. And yet the new factor explained some
things. He'd been vaguely worried about the apparent change in Ser
Perth, who'd turned from a serious and helpful doctor into a
supercilious, high-handed fop. But--what about his recovery, if that was
supposed to be determined by the signs of the zodiac?
He had no time to ask. The carpet bucked, and the girl began speaking to
it urgently. It wavered, then righted itself, to begin sliding
downwards.
"There is a ring of protection around your camp," Nema explained. "It is
set to make entry impossible to one who does not have the words or who
is unfriendly. The carpet could not go through that, anyway. The ring
negates all other magic trying to pass it. And of course we have
basilisks mounted on posts around the grounds. They're trained to hood
their eyes, except when they sense anyone trying to enter who should
not. You can't be turned to stone looking at one, you know--only by
having one look at you."
"You're cheering me up no end," he assured her.
She smiled pleasantly and began setting the carpet down. Below, he
could see a camp that looked much like the camps he had seen in the same
movies from which all his clothes had been copied. There were well
laid-out rows of sheds, beautiful lines of construction equipment and
everything in order, as it could never be in a real camp. As he began
walking with the girl toward a huge tent that should have belonged to a
circus, he could see other discrepancies. The tractors were designed for
work in mud flats and the haulers had the narrow wheels used on rocky
ground. Nothing seemed quite as it should be. He spotted a big generator
working busily--and then saw a gang of about fifty men, or mandrakes,
turning a big capstan that kept it going. Here and there were neat racks
of miscellaneous tools. Some were museum pieces. There was even a gandy
cart, though no rails for it to run on.
They were almost at the main tent when a crow flew down and yelled
something in Nema's ear. She scowled, and nodded. "I'm needed back," she
said. "Most of the men here--" She pointed to the gangs that moved about
busily doing nothing, all in costumes similar to his, except for the
boots and hat. "They're mandrakes, conjured into existence, but without
souls. The engineers we have are snatched from Duality just after dying
and revived here while their brains still retain their knowledge. They
have no true souls either, of course, but they don't know it. Ah. The
short man there--he's Garm. Sersa Garm, an apprentice to Ser Perth. He's
to be your foreman, and he's real."
She headed back to the outskirts, then turned to shout back. "Sather
Karf says you may have ten days to fix the sky," she called. Her hand
waved toward him in friendly good-bye. "Don't worry, Dave Hanson. I have
faith in you."
Then she was running toward her reluctant carpet.
Dave stared up at the mottled dome above him and at the dull
clod--certainly a mandrake--who was still carrying the sample. With all
this preparation and a time limit, he couldn't even afford to stall.
He'd never fully understood why some plastics melted and others turned
hard when heated, but he had to find what was wrong with the dome above
and how to fix it. And maybe the time limit could be stretched a little,
once he came up with the answer. Maybe. He'd worry about that after he
worried about the first steps.
Sersa Garm proved to be a glum, fat young man, overly aware of his
importance in training for serhood. He led Dave through the big tent,
taking pride in the large drafting section--under the obvious belief
that it was used for designing spells. Maybe it could have been useful
for that if there had been a single man who knew anything about
draftsmanship. There were four engineers, supposedly. One, who had died
falling off a bridge while drunk, was curing himself of the shock by
remaining dead drunk. One had been a chemical engineer specializing in
making yeast and dried soya meal into breakfast cereals. Another knew
all about dredging canals and the last one was an electronics
engineer--a field in which Dave was far more competent.
He dismissed them. Whatever had been done to them--or perhaps the
absence of a true soul, whatever that was--left them rigidly bound to
their past ideas and totally incapable of doing more than following
orders by routine now. Even Sersa Garm was more useful.
That young man could offer little information, however. The sky, he
explained pompously, was a great mystery that only an adept might
communicate to another. He meant that he didn't know about it, Dave
gathered. Everything, it turned out, was either a mystery or a rumor.
He also had a habit of sucking his thumb when pressed too hard for
details.
"But you must have heard some guesses about what started the cracks in
the sky?" Dave suggested.
"Oh, indeed, that is common knowledge," Sersa Garm admitted. He changed
thumbs while he considered. "'Twas an experiment most noble, but through
mischance going sadly awry. A great Sather made the sun remain in one
place too long, and the heat became too great. It was like the Classic
experiment--"
"How hot is your sun?"
There was a long pause. Then Sather Germ shrugged. "'Tis a great
mystery. Suffice to say it has no true heat, but does send forth an
activating principle against the phlogiston layer, which being excited
grows vengeful against the air ... but you have not the training to
understand."
"Okay, so they didn't tell you, if they knew." Dave stared up at the
sun, trying to guess. The light looked about like what he was used to,
where the sky was still whole. North light still was like what a color
photographer would consider 5500° Kelvin, so the sun must be pretty hot.
Hot enough to melt anything he knew about. "What's the melting point of
this sky material?"
He never did manage to make Sather Garm understand what a melting point
was. But he found that one of the solutions tried had been the bleeding
of eleven certified virgins for seven days. When the blood was mixed
with dragonfeathers and frogsdown and melded with a genuine
philosopher's stone, they had used it to ink in the right path of the
planets of a diagram. It had failed. The sky had cracked and a piece had
fallen into the vessel of blood, killing a Sather who was less than two
thousand years old.
"Two thousand?" Dave asked. "How old is Sather Karf?"
"None remembers truly. He has always been the Sather Karf--at least ten
thousand years or more. To attain the art of a Sather is the work of a
score of centuries, usually."
That Sather had been in sad shape, it seemed. No one had been able to
revive him, though bringing the dead back to life when the body was
reasonably intact was routine magic that even a sersa could perform. It
was after that they'd begun conjuring back to Dave's world for all the
other experts.
"All whose true names they could find, that is," Garm amended. "The
Egyptian pyramid builder, the man who discovered your greatest science,
dianetics, the great Cagliostro--and what a time we had finding his true
name! I was assigned to the helping of one who had discovered the
secrets of gravity and some strange magic which he termed
relativity--though indeed it had little to do with kinship, but was a
private mystery. But when he was persuaded by divers means to help us,
he gave up after one week, declaring it beyond his powers. They were
even planning what might best be done to chastise him when he discovered
in some manner a book of elementary conjuration and did then devise some
strange new formula from the elements with which magic he disappeared."
It was nice to know that Einstein had given up on the problem, Dave
thought bitterly. As nice as the discovery that there was no fuel for
the equipment here. He spent an hour rigging up a portable saw to use in
attempting to cut off a smaller piece of the sky, and then saw the
motor burn out when he switched it on. It turned out that all
electricity here was d.c., conjured up by commanding the electrons in a
wire to move in one direction, and completely useless with a.c. motors.
It might have been useful for welding, but there was no electric torch.
"'Tis obviously not a thing of reason," Garm told him severely. "If the
current in such a form moves first in one direction and then in the
other, then it cancels out and is useless. No, you must be wrong."
As Dave remembered it, Tesla had been plagued by similar doubts from
such men as Edison. He gave up and settled finally for one of the native
welding torches, filled with a dozen angry salamanders. The flame or
whatever it was had enough heat, but it was hard to control. By the time
he learned to use it, night had fallen, and he was too tired to try
anything more. He ate a solitary supper and went to sleep.
During the next three days he learned a few things the hard way,
however. In spite of Garm's assurance that nothing could melt the sky,
he found that his sample would melt slowly under the heat of the torch.
In the liquid state, it was jet black, though it cooled back to complete
transparency. It was also without weight when in liquid form--a fact he
discovered when it began rising through the air and spattering over
everything, including his bare skin. The burns were nasty, but somehow
seemed to heal with remarkable speed. Sersa Garm was impressed by the
discoveries, and went off to suck his thumbs and brood over the new
knowledge, much to Dave's relief.
More work established the fact that welding bits of the sky together was
not particularly difficult. The liquid sky was perfectly willing to bond
onto anything, including other bits of itself.
Now, if he could get a gang up the thousand miles to the sky with enough
torches to melt the cracks, it might recongeal as a perfect sphere. The
stuff was strong, but somewhat brittle. He still had no idea of how to
get the stars and planets back in the right places.
"The mathematician thought of such an idea," Sersa Garm said sourly.
"But 'twould never work. Even with much heat, it could not be done. For
see you, the upper air is filled with phlogiston, which no man can
breathe. Also, the phlogiston has negative weight, as every school child
must know. Your liquid sky would sink through it, since negative weight
must in truth be lighter than no weight, while nothing else would rise
through the layer. And phlogiston will quench the flame of a rocket, as
your expert von Braun discovered."
The man was a gold mine of information, all bad. The only remaining
solution, apparently, was to raise a scaffolding over the whole planet
to the sky, and send up mandrakes to weld back the broken pieces. They
wouldn't need to breathe, anyhow. With material of infinite
strength--and an infinite supply of it--and with infinite time and
patience, it might have been worth considering.
Nema came out the next day with more cheering information. Her
multi-times great grandfather, Sather Karf, regretted it, but he must
have good news to release at once; the populace was starving because the
food multipliers couldn't produce reliable supplies. Otherwise, Dave
would find venom being transported into his blood in increasing amounts
until the pain drove him mad. And, just incidentally, the Sons of the
Egg who'd attacked him in the hospital had tried to reach the camp twice
already, once by interpenetrating into a shipment of mandrakes, which
indicated to what measures they would resort. They meant to kill him
somehow, and the defense of him was growing too costly unless there were
positive results.
Dave hinted at having nearly reached the solution, giving her only a bit
of his wild idea of welding the sky. She took off with that, but he was
sure it wouldn't satisfy the Sather. In that, he was right. By
nightfall, when she came back from the city, he was groaning in pain.
The venom had arrived ahead of her, and his blood seemed to be on fire.
She laid a cool hand on his forehead. "Poor Dave," she said. "If I were
not registered and certified, sometimes I feel that I might ... but no
more of that. Ser Perth sends you this unguent which will hold back the
venom for a time, cautioning you not to reveal his softness." Ser Perth,
it seemed, had reverted to his pre-Sagittarian character as expected.
"And Sather Karf wants the full plans at once. He is losing patience."
He began rubbing on the ointment, which helped slightly. She peeled back
his shirt and began helping, apparently delighted with the hair which
he'd sprouted on his chest since his reincarnation. The unguent helped,
but it wasn't enough.
"He never had any patience to lose. What the hell does he expect me to
do?" Dave asked hotly. "Snap my fingers thus, yell _abracadabra_ and
give him egg in his beer?"
He stopped to stare at his hand, where a can of beer had suddenly
materialized!
Nema squealed in delight. "What a novel way to conjure, Dave. Let me try
it." She began snapping her fingers and saying the word eagerly, but
nothing happened. Finally she turned back to him. "Show me again."
He was sure it wouldn't work twice, and he hesitated, not too willing to
have his stock go down with her. Then he gave in.
"_Abracadabra!_" he said, and snapped his fingers.
There were results at once. This time an egg appeared in his hand, to
the delighted cry of Nema. He bent to look at it uncertainly. It was a
strange looking egg--more like one of the china eggs used to make hens
think they were nesting when their eggs were still being taken from
them.
Abruptly Nema sprang back. But she was too late. The egg was growing. It
swelled to the size of a football, then was man-sized, and growing to
the size of a huge tank that filled most of the tent. Suddenly it split
open along one side and a group of men in dull robes and masks came
spilling out of it.
"Die!" the one in front yelled. He lifted a double-bladed knife, charged
for Dave, and brought the knife down.
The blades went through clothing, skin, flesh and bones, straight for
Dave's heart.
V
The knife had pierced Dave's chest until the hilt pressed against his
rib cage. He stared down at it, seeing it rise with the heaving of his
lungs. Yet he was still alive!
Then the numbness of shock wore off and the pain nerves carried their
messages to his brain. He still lived, but there was unholy agony
where the blade lay. Coughing and choking on what must be his own
blood, he scrabbled at the knife and ripped it out. Blood jetted from
the gaping rent in his clothing. It gushed forth--and slowed; it
frothed--trickled--and stopped entirely.
As he ripped his shirt back to look, the wound was closed already. But
there was no easing of the pain that threatened to make him black out at
any second.
He heard shouting, quarreling voices, but nothing made sense through the
haze of his agony. He felt someone grab at him--more than one
person--and they were dragging him willy-nilly across the ground.
Something was clutched around his throat, almost choking him. He opened
his eyes just as something clicked behind him.