"But with my own eyes I did see his armor, fair knight."
"That's right--you saw his armor. But you didn't see him. A certain
character by the name of Perfidion was residing behind that
hardware--not the good Sir Launcelot."
"Perfidion?"
Mallory grinned. "Sir Jason Perfidion--a knight errant ye wit not of.
But the tournament's not over yet, and this time _I've_ got the
rabbit: he thinks I'm dead."
"He ... he left ye for dead, fair sir?"
"That he did, and if that little brain-buster of his had struck just
one inch to the right, I'd have been just that." He shoved his empty
vacuum tin away and stood up. "Excuse me a minute--I've got to visit
the sorcerer's tower again."
In the control room, he took the _Yore_ back to 7:20 p.m. of the same
day and re-materialized it half a mile farther down the valley.
Turning, he saw that Rowena had followed him and was watching him from
the doorway. "Whereabouts may I find oats that I may feed thy horse,
fair knight?" she asked.
"Easy Money doesn't eat. He--" Mallory paused astonished as two of the
largest tears he had ever seen coalesced in her eyes and went tumbling
down her cheeks. "Oh, it's not that he's sick," he rushed on. "It's
just that horses like him don't require food to keep them going. Why,
Easy Money's guaranteed for ... he'll live another thirty years."
The sun came up beyond the plum-blue horizons of her eyes. "It
pleaseth me mickle to hear ye speak thus, fair knight. I ... I have
great joy of him."
Back in the rec-hall, Mallory pulled on his gauntlets, reset his
timepiece, and donned his helmet. The left audio-amplifier was shot,
but otherwise the piece was in good condition--aside from the dent, of
course. He encephalopathed Easy Money to his side, hung his shield
around his neck, and mounted. "Hand me my spear, will you, Rowena?" he
asked.
She did so. "Ye be a most noble knight indeed, fair sir," she said,
"for to set so little store by thine own life in the service of a
damosel the which is undeserving of thy deeds. I ... I would lever
that ye forsook the Sangraal than that ye be fordone."
Her concern touched him, and he removed his helmet and leaned down and
kissed her on the forehead. "Keep the home fires burning," he said;
then, setting his helmet back in place, he activated the lock, rode
across the mirage-moat, and set forth into the forest once again.
V
This time when he reached the crest of the ridge that separated the
two valleys, Mallory took an azimuth on the towers of Carbonek,
encephalo-fed the direction to Easy Money, and programmed the "animal"
to proceed in as straight a course as possible.
In the east, the moon was just beginning to rise; in the west, traces
of the sunset lingered blood-red just above the horizon. On the
highway below, a knight sitting astride a brown rohorse and bearing a
white shield with a red cross in the center was riding toward Carbonek
to challenge a twenty-second century "felon paynim" in imitation
Age-of-Chivalry armor. In the valley Mallory had just left behind him
there were two castles named _Yore_, and soon, a third would pop into
existence and yet another Mallory come riding out. Mallory grinned. It
was a little bit like playing chess.
The forest which Easy Money presently entered was parklike in places,
and sometimes the trees thinned out into wide, moonlit meadows.
Crossing one of the meadows, Mallory saw the first star, and when at
length Easy Money emerged on the highway, the heavens were decked out
in typical midsummer panoply. The rohorse had followed its programming
almost perfectly and had emerged at a point just south of the lane
leading to the castle of Carbonek. All Mallory had to do was to
encephalo-guide it farther down the highway to a point beyond the site
of the forthcoming joust. While doing so, he kept well within the
concealing shadows of the bordering oaks and beeches where the ground
was soft and could give forth no telltale _clip-clop_ of hoofbeats.
His circumspection proved wise--as in one sense, of course, it already
had--and when the false Sir Launcelot came riding by on his way to the
castle and the chamber of the Sangraal, he was no more aware of
Mallory III's presence by the roadside than he would presently be
aware of Mallory II's presence in the shadows of the trees that
bordered the lane.
Mallory III grinned again and brought Easy Money to a halt just beyond
the next bend. "Wit ye well, Sir Jason, that thy hours be numbered,"
he said.
He remained seated in the saddle, feeling pretty good about the
world. In no time at all, if his one-man ambuscade came off, he would
be on his way back to the _Yore_, and thence to the twenty-second
century and a haircut. Selling the Sangraal without the aid of a
professional time-fence like Perfidion would be difficult, of course,
but it could be done, and once it was done, he, Mallory, could take
his place on Get-Rich-Quick Street with the best of them, and no
questions would be asked. There was, to be sure, the problem of what
to do about a certain damosel that hight Rowena, but he would face
that when he came to it. Maybe he could drop her off a dozen years in
the future in a region far enough removed from Carbonek to ensure her
safety. He would see.
[Illustration]
At this point in his reflections he was jolted into alertness by the
sound of approaching hoofbeats. A moment later he heard a second set
of hoofbeats and knew that Mallory II had made his presence known.
Presently both sets crescendoed into staccato thunder as the two
"knights" came pounding toward each other, and not long afterward
there was a clank and a clatter as Mallory II went tumbling out of his
saddle and into the roadside weeds. Finally the single set of
hoofbeats took over again, and Mallory III saw a horse and rider
coming around the bend in the highway. He braced himself.
Before making his play, he waited till horse and rider were directly
opposite him; then he encephalopathed Easy Money to charge. "Sir
Launcelot" managed to get his shield up in time, but the maneuver did
him no good. Mallory's spearhead struck the shield dead center, and
"Sir Launcelot" went sailing out of his saddle to land with an awesome
clatter flat on his back on the highway. He did not get up.
Dismounting, Mallory removed the man's helmet. It was Perfidion all
right. There was a large bruise on the side of his head and he was out
cold, but he was still breathing. Next, Mallory looked for the
Sangraal. Perfidion had concealed it somewhere, and apparently he had
done the job well. Since the armor could not have accommodated an
object of that size, the hiding place had to be somewhere on the body
of his horse. The horse was standing quietly beside Easy Money in the
middle of the highway. It was jet-black and its fetlock-length
trappings were blue, threaded with silver; otherwise, the two steeds
were identical. Mallory tumbled to the truth then, went over to where
the black "horse" was standing, raised its trappings, found the tiny
activator button, and depressed it. The croup-hood rose up, and there
in the secret compartment, wrapped in red samite, lay the cause of the
mounting absentee-rate in King Arthur's court.
Always the skeptic, Mallory raised a corner of the samite in order to
make certain that he was not being cheated. Instantly, a reflected ray
of moonlight stabbed upward into his eyes, and for a moment he was
blinded. Exorcising the thought that sneaked into his mind, he closed
the croup-hood, rearranged the trappings, and returned to Perfidion's
side. Dragging the armor-encumbered man over to the black rohorse and
slinging him over the saddle was no easy matter, but Mallory managed;
then he picked up Perfidion's helmet and spear and set the former on
the pommel and wedged the latter in one of the stirrups. Finally he
mounted Easy Money and, encephalopathing the black rohorse to follow,
set out down the highway away from the castle of Carbonek.
Make-believe castles could fool the hadbeens, but they couldn't fool a
professional. He spotted the phony towers of Perfidion's TSB rising
above the trees before he had proceeded half a mile. After raising the
"portcullis", he got the man down from the black rohorse, dragged him
inside, and propped him against the rec-hall bar. Then he got the
man's helmet and spear and laid them beside him. After considerable
reflection, he went into the control room, set the time-dial for June
10, 1964, the space-dial for a busy intersection in downtown Los
Angeles, and punched out H-O-T-D-O-G S-T-A-N-D on the lumillusion
panel. Satisfied, he went into the generator room and short-circuited
the automatic throw-out unit so that when rematerialization took
place, the generator would burn up. Finding a ball of heavy-duty
twine, he returned to the control room, tied one end to the master
switch, and began backing out of the TSB, unwinding the twine as he
went.
In the rec-hall, he paused, and grinned down at the still-unconscious
Perfidion. "It's a better break than you meant to give me, Jason," he
said. "And don't worry--once you explain to the authorities what
you're doing in a suit of sixth-century armor and how you happened to
open a giant hot-dog stand in the middle of a traffic-clogged
crossroads, you'll be all right. As a matter of fact, with your
knowledge of things to come, you'll probably wind up a richer man than
you are now--if the smog doesn't get you first." He stepped through
the lock, jerked the twine, and the "castle" vanished into thin air.
Remounting Easy Money and encephalopathing the black rohorse to
follow, he started back toward the _Yore_, taking a direct route
through the forest. He was halfway to his destination and had just
emerged into a wide meadow when he saw the knight with the white
shield riding toward him in the bright moonlight. In the center of the
shield there was a vivid blood-red cross.
When the knight saw Mallory, he brought his steed to a halt. Moonlight
glimmered eerily on his shield, turned his helmet to silver. His armor
seemed to emit an unearthly light--a light that was at once terrifying
and transcendent. The hilt of his sword was as blood-red as the cross
on his shield; so was the pommel of his spear. Here was righteousness
incarnate. Here in the form of an armored man on horseback was the
quintessence of the Age of Chivalry--not the Age of Chivalry as
exemplified by the vain and boasting nobles who had constituted
nine-tenths of the knight-errantry profession and who had used the
quest of the Holy Grail as an excuse to seek after mead and maidens,
but the Age of Chivalry as it might have been if the ideal behind it
had been shared by the many instead of by the few; the Age of
Chivalry, in short, as it had come down to posterity through the pages
of Malory's _Le Morte d'Arthur_.