UNWALLED UNIVERSITY

That’s What Fiends Are For

That’s What Fiends Are For
By
Li von Garske

Historical Note:
This happened in the early I980’s. There was NO INTERNET, NO WORLD WIDE WEB.  Home computers had 64k or I28K. NONE had megabytes, or higher. To reach another state, one had to use a special MODEM on the phone and pay for the long-distance call.

Something about the author:
The author was a fan of computer animation, and of video, and therefore despised such perversions of the art as MTV and The Simpsons.  This off-beat author was inclined to spend a good deal of time underwater along the Kona coast, hobnobbing with creatures far stronger than any you’d meet at the Star Wars Cantina.

I say WAS because while downloading some old language tapes, there was an accidental incantation and nothing has been the same since.  But read on, you’ll see what I mean.
Ed

CONTENTS

CHAPTER  I:            The Accidental Incantation

CHAPTER  2:            Pundit

CHAPTER  3:            Power Plays

CHAPTER 4 :             Bio of a Demon

CHAPTER  5:            Gateways

CHAPTER  6:            S. O. S.

CHAPTER  7:            Interruption

CHAPTER  8:            Cat and Mouse

CHAPTER  9:            Resolution

CHAPTER I0:             Solution?

One: The Accidental Incantation

The voice was definitely not human.  If it were speaking English instead of Ugro-Finnic, there would still be tones in it that were clearly not twentieth-century urban man; but it was worth what I’d paid to add it to my computer.  I wasn’t interested in Baltic dialect, but it made a good test of the voice-box.  The mechanical harmonics repeated a word for the third time and started on another.  I checked the modem connection the computer to the telephone to make sure that it would download Mike’s call when it came, then decided that I wouldn’t go out for pizza after all.  Mike had hinted at a special program and I didn’t want to take any chances.

While the Finno-Ugric (or whatever it was) droned on in the study area of my studio, I foraged in the kitchen corner.  I had my back turned to the computer when it happened, so I saw nothing but the bluish flash on the white frig.

It was preceded by a particularly guttural bit of Urdo-finnic, and followed by the penetrating odor of ozone.

“Oh no, oh no, oh no!“ I whimpered aloud.  My vox, my modem, my sid-chip I moaned mentally, skidding around the counter and over to the set.

There was no sign of smoke.  That was to the good.  The power buttons were still all lit, and the monitor screen was not blank, which was even better.  None of the garbage of a metal mind appeared there, and my pulse slowed down to a gallop.  Still what WAS on the screen was completely irrational.

If an abominable snowman had a face, this was it.  An especially abominable one at that, whose immediate ancestry included a djinn left over from the Arabian Nights.  The rest of the head consisted of white fur and horns.

It looked so real that I could swear the thing was staring back.  That’s not a glass window you’re looking through, I reminded myself, it’s a screenful of phosphors, that’s all. I shifted my attention from the image to the computer and its attachments.

There’s got to be some explanation of this.  It isn’t television because the computer-generated blue ground is there.  Is it one of Mike’s little built-in surprises?  He has the sense of humor for it, but this quality of image seems a bit beyond even his genius for tinkering. “Wait, waait, wait!“ I said triumphantly, “If it’s being received from the telephone through the modem, I should be able to tell by…”

As I reached for a connection, the figure on the screen also went into action.  It lifted a clawed digit and scrawled across the screen like a kid writing in the sand.

WAIT!

Then it dwindled back and down until I could see its full figure, (humanoid and all white fur), and continued shrinking until it was only the size of the cursor.  The quarter-inch figure dived into the center of the screen and blipped out.  From the place from where it had been, square ripples spread outward.  Soon diagrams and geometrics were rippling from the center to the edges in the same manner.  It made me think of the scene in TRON when the fellow went down into the guts of his computer. Of course!  That’s what I was looking at.  A simulation of a computer’s schematics.  Mike must have had help on this one, animation’s not his line.

I’m not a Dungeons and Dragons fan, but I really spin on graphics.  (My friends call me intellectual, my not-friends, nerd.)  So with anxiety for my equipment removed, I settled in my swivel chair, leaned on the desk, and waited for developments in the same frame of mind that I had used to wait for Santa when I was two instead of twenty-two.

The study desk fitted across a corner, with extensions that ran under the windows on either side.  The monitor, fitting well back into the corner, left plenty of work space in front.  I hastily cleared the miscellaneous books and papers to the side, careful not to uproot the tangle of extension cords that my equipment was plugged into, and got a pad and pen, just in case.  I was thinking of getting a drink, too, when the creature surfaced again.  This time it was in the square bubble which floats around the screen for a moment and then stopped in the upper right-hand corner, and became a post-card sized window.  The miniaturized monster seemed to have a keyboard in front of it, but where the monster was visually as realistic as I was, his equipment was made of tiny squares like low-res computer graphics, which seemed to work anyway.  It poked at its keys with a furry finger.  On my screen, the word INPUT? appeared.  I was reluctant to touch anything until I had figured out what this was, lest I should lose it, but decided to risk using the keyboard alphabet.

I typed: Hello.

After a pause, the creature typed:  Hello, load $ bitte.

This was a puzzle.  $ obviously referred to a disk directory, but was Bitte a Bit or Byte misspelled?  or the German word for Please?  Or?

I typed:  No “bitte.”  Will any other disk do?

(Afterwards, I thought how stupid that was, because most computers do not have an interactive vocabulary, but I got an answer.)

any other disk do.  Input please

I took out the disk, watching warily, but the screen remained the same, so I picked up the nearest  disk to hand, which was The Twelfth Night and some other excerpts from the Shakespeare that I had been working on for English, and put it in the disk drive.  Before I could the command to load the program into the computer, the drive started to whirr by itself. This was some program!  Was it an experiment in artificial intelligence?   Not likely with only sixty-four K.

The disk drive stopped and the screen said:  Prithee kind Sir wouldst grant us the boon of thine other works?  We crave thy most recent vintage, that we may be in the mode as well as in the modem.

A pun yet! Do I see the fine hand of David in here somewhere?  My pal David has a flair for puns and sight gags.  He is in Toledo, and I in Honolulu, but the modem connects anywhere the phone line reaches.  He and Mike could have worked things out long distance.  Curiouser and curiouser and most interesting.

I loaded my disk-library file.  When it appeared on the screen, the creature reduced itself to cursor size again and flickered about putting numbers on each entry.  It went back to the entry marked  ( I ) (for my thesaurus) and flickered for a moment before returning to its window.

I put the disk for the word processor in the disk drive.  It whirred as before and then number two choice printed itself on the screen even though the listing disk was long gone.

Wonder where it’s storing all the memory.  Sure is fast at loading. I booted up a tutorial on machine language and four more disks in rapid succession.  How much more can it hold?  It already has, lemme see, why…it can’t do that!  This is only a sixty-four K rig.  Something is very very wrong here. This can’t be possibly a computer program!

“Verily, it took you long enough to figure that out” a guttural voice said.  It was not the voice of the Vox box.

I didn’t look around for the owner of the voice. I knew that I was staring at him.

“I’m not at my wittiest talking to monitors” I snapped, automatically defensive because the hairs on my head were trying to crawl right off of it.

I was hearing the voice without using my ears.  I had never experienced telepathy before, but it was beyond questioning.  There was a slight reverberation to it, like feedback on a microphone and a “taste” like the smell of ozone.

“In ‘Sooth een at thy half-wittiest, ‘e must know that if thee chantest a demon’s name he will appear,” it said.

“I chanted nothing at all!  I was in the kitchen with my head in the frig.”

“Ah, hence the frig reception, I collect, but my name was spoken aloud three times, and here I am.  Believe me, ‘twas inconvenient to come on such short notice.  A first class warlock would have had the courtesy to make an incantation first.”

“Sorry, but my Vox doesn’t have the advantages of a higher education.  It was the computer’s voice that spoke your name.  Complain to it. AND GET OUTTA MY MIND!”

The feedback tone ceased, but the metal taste of ozone lingered.  Since the thing seemed more argumentative than dangerous, my hair reluctantly decided to remain on my scalp, but being scared spit-less always makes me nasty. I snarled, “A first class demon wouldn’t make such foul puns.”

He spoke aloud, and his voice was a gravely version of my own, “Would you say I had a fiendishly clever sense of humor?”  He made a noise like a fork stuck in a garbage grinder, but ending in a sort of huff chuff chuff.

After an uncertain moment, I realized that this was his equivalent of laughter.  It didn’t do a thing toward making him loveable.

“Fiendish, yes. Clever, no.  What happens now?  Do you offer my Vox three wishes, then take its soul in return?”

Dancing dinosaurs, I’m talking to a fiend straight out of Hell, and all I can  think to do is trade insults. Confronted with the utterly unbelievable, some people black out, some people run; I discovered a tendency to go schizoid.  I needed to get some information on the situation, but instead I babbled to myself.  All I knew was that wizards were supposed to study for years to be able to control the creatures they conjured up, and that demons were reputed to be extremely tricky.

“Thou knowest well, Warlock, that such as I deal only with the living.  The machine was merely a tool, an ingredient as it were in you incantation.  If any soul is forfeit, it is yours.  Let us proceed.  What is your wish?”

This is getting sticky. He’s supposed to obey me, isn’t he?

“Listen, and listen well,” I said.  “I DO NOT WANT ANYTHING FROM YOU.  You may go right back where you came from.  Although I wouldn’t mind talking a while with you,” I added truthfully, thinking that if there were no danger this thing could be as interesting as any extraterrestrial.

“Indeed, I have knowledge of many worlds, Warlock.  If you wish, you may know the entire history of your kind, or of mine, or of both since they are linked in several…”

Hold it! I didn’t say that was a wish or anything.  Just take yourself off to wherever you came from.  I’m not buying.  And, stop calling me Warlock!”  So much for the authoritative approach.

“Very well, Frig-face, as you wish.  But it used a good deal of inter-dimensional energy to bring me here, and I can’t return to my normal continuum without an equal amount of mass to balance it, meaning you.  Like it or not, you’re stuck with it, so you might as well relax and reap the benefits.”

“Don’t call me Frig-face!” I said, playing for time and hoping my brain would start functioning soon.

“Well, I must call you something,” he said not unreasonably.

“My name is . . . “  His eyes glowed light little green lasers and I recalled that those people who believe ion conjuring always invest special power in true names. “. . . is none of your business,” I finished.  “You may call me . . .”  The first name that crossed my mind was David, but I didn’t want to involve a friend in any possible trouble.  I needed a fictitious name.   I thought of Jervik, the hero of the current best seller, but knew that I would not remember to answer it.   “. . . Wizard,” I finished lamely.  It may have meant the same as Warlock, but I felt it a point in my favor not to use his term.  Also, if he didn’t know my name, that meant that he couldn’t read my mind, didn’t it?  Even so, adaptation to my slang argued a swift mind.  I’m theorizing!  There’s a real live DEMON in my computer and I’m theorizing about his I.Q!  Dancing dinos!  Easy now, lets get a grip on ourself.  If you can’t think keep him talking.

He said, “Wizard comes from the old Norse viskr meaning one who is clever or knowing.  It was diluted in Middle English to wisard implying wise plus ard.  Warlock, on the other hand, from warloghe (Scots influence there), or warlawe in Middle English, means to cast spells or conjure by means of a pact with a devil.  You conjured me here, that makes you a conjuror.  Therefore Warlock, what are your needs?

How he could pronounce those smugly delivered definitions through those tusks without lisping, I couldn’t say, but he sounded remarkably like a certain misanthropic professor I’d once had.  It didn’t improve my confidence any to be corrected by him.  I decided to let it ride.  Trying to sound as I thought a warlock should sound, I said.

“What benefits can you offer?”

“Wellll,” he considered, “without an incantation you have no firm contract.  There is a certain minimum amount of energy to be displaced.  A certain maximum too.  If I remain as small as I am you could remain here longer since it takes almost no power to run this simulacrum.  If you want me to destroy an enemy or bring you fold from your king’s treasury, I would use up energy much faster.”

Wild fantasies flashed through my mind, but only for a split second.  I hadn’t even picked out their hair colors, when I noticed a sort of shift in his catlike eyes that I didn’t trust, so I said, “How can you destroy an enemy in there? “

“Don’t be sophomoric when you don’t have to.  I come out, of course.  But your climate makes me shed, so I’d just as soon stay here until I have to move. “

“How can it be any cooler inside that computer?” I asked enviously.  It was a hot, endless day, rare in Honolulu, and my over-garage studio was becoming oven-like in spite of a twenty-inch fan.

“Tro dur,  hard to explain without more background.  Input more data disks. Maybe I’ll find something.”  I suspected this was a ruse to learn more, or to use up time, but what choice did I have?  If you think I was less than brilliant in my reactions, YOU try formulating strategies with a djinn staring at you.  I fed him every disk I had, from my term papers to games and Christmas cards.  I wondered what he would make of them.

Two:  Pundit

“Not much good,” he rumbled when he finally finished.  He looked around.  “Your wind-maker,” indicating the fan, “where is the slave who pushes it?”

So, big fat intellectual, I told myself, explain electricity.  Go ahead.  Hydro-electric power maybe? I argued with myself.  Not sure it IS hydro-electric power. You’d rather explain combustion?  Or maybe demons find atomic theory more interesting?  Right. Hydro-electric it is.

That cord is a conduit, a channel which connects to a power source and, I think, the power source connects to a wheel with some paddles that are pushed by a stream of water.  That turns the shaft to generate the power.”  That was out of my fourth grade science, and I’d no idea whether it was still true, but it worked as an analogy.

He said, “Jah vell,” then corrected himself, “Yes, well, you might say I am also connected to my, ah, dimension? World? Homeland? Habitat?  By a sort of conduit, and can draw power along it to make my existence here, um, compatible?  Possible? Comfortable?  If I remain tiny, it takes less power. I could be as large as this dwelling, but the more energy I use, the sooner the return must be made.  I don’t have an unlimited budget you know.”  He generated a cube and sat on it.  It held without a creak.

“Can I use the computer to do my thesis with you in there?”  Perhaps I can trap it in there? What happens if I want to print out something, or use programs?”

“Nothing.  I’ve made a place for me that’s not being used by ROM, though I need to come into RAM to do this.  So, as long as you don’t poke into ROM, I’ll be O.K.  I’m subject to operational procedures when I’m in here.”

RAM stands for Random Access Memory, and it is the area of the computer used by people who program, something I don’t do much of.  The ROM (Read-Only Memory) is the part of the computer’s memory that is already programmed when you get it, to allow users to load in read-made programs.  Maybe someone like Mike or Dave could figure out how to get into the fixed memory, but it was beyond my abilities.

Possibly though, if, as he says, he is subject to the rules of the machine while in it and I could turn it off . . .  I reached for the off button as I was thinking, and got an electric shock that landed me on the carpet.

“You’re right, Whiz-kid, if you could turn me off while I’m in the circuit, I would be stuck.  But you’ll have to be quicker than that to catch me off-guard.”  He smiled, or sneered.  His saber-toothed canines made the distinction a moot point, and treated me to another “Gruarh haargh harrgh huff-chuff-chuff.”

I pushed myself up off of the floor without using the arm I’d touched the button with.  It felt as though it had been asleep.  “Well, if I’m stuck with you, I might as well learn something,” I said, hiding the pain of returning circulation.  “What is your name?”

“As I’m to dispense knowledge, you may call me Pundit.”  Another load of gravel rolled down the stairs.  He really fancied himself as a punster.  I wondered if the was his nature or if he picked it up from Shakespeare, but I didn’t ask.  I had more urgent matters at hand.

“First of all, I want your solemn promise that you will always tell the truth.”

“What shall I tell it?”  A noise like a tractor stuck in a rut followed this.  I waited, my most patient look on my face, ‘till he grumped “Oh very well, agreed!  Then I went on.

“You must keep me informed of how much time or energy, or whatever, is used up.”

“Yes, yes. Done.”  He was polishing his tusks in front of a simulated gold-framed boudoir mirror, using the whole screen.

“You must tell me what your limits are, and your true situation.”

“That’s entrapment, but it won’t do you any good anyway, so very well.”  He started brushing his fur with a currycomb.  His confidence was annoying, and a bit worrying.  I’m sure that he meant it to be.

Not knowing what to do next, I said, “I was about to get something to drink, excuse me.”  Before I could get up, a cold green bottle appeared on the desk beside me.  My knees suddenly refused to cooperate, so I remained where I was.  He was holding a bottle, too.  It was labeled “Demon Rum.”

“Here’s to friendship,” he toasted, lifting his drink, “Or should I make that Fiendship?”  Guzzling, and laughing at the same time, he sounded like water being sucked down a half-clogged drain.

“Forget it,” I retorted.  “You’re no fiend of mine. “

His appreciation of that reminded of the groan of a car with a dying battery.

“Why has my bottle got a well on it?”

“It’s wishing-well water.  If you don’t wish to drink it, it may be used for a wishy-washing as well.”

I dropped the bottle and made a stab at the off button.  I got knocked on my duff again.

It happened every time I tried.  I wondered how soon the shocks would produce permanent neurological damage.  Eventually, I figured out a way to retaliate.  I’d use him as a cursor to indicate my typing place on the screen.  I did need to finish a paper by Monday.   I really enjoyed watching him run madly one letter ahead of the line.  I even back-spaced some, just for the hell of it.  It was not using up much energy, either, according to the indicator set up in the lower left-hand corner.

In all the stories I’d ever read about djinns, demons and the like, the conjurer enjoys a mad spree and relies on outwitting the fiend at the last minute.  I did toy with the idea of having a banquet, since I hadn’t eaten, but it would have used a lot of energy, and I didn’t think I’d trust the food.   Would the wishing well water make me start wishing?  I also doubted my ability to outwit a fiend who had been doing his job for millennia.  There was another reason for my hurry to get rid of him.  I didn’t want civilization destroyed.

Three:  Problems

It was like this.  As the hours passed, I began to get a grip on the situation.  The first shock, at least, had worn off, the various meandering portions of what I fondly call my mind began to cooperate again, and it felt almost normal to be fencing verbally with a fiend from inner space.  It was while I was using him as a cursor that I’d had my first constructive idea.  “I may just use you as a cursor for the next fifty years, if you insist on hanging around,” I said casually.

“In that case, I might decide to take a trip.”  He sang a few bars of The Happy Wandered.  His singing voice was surprisingly good.  A rumbly bass-baritone.  He cocked a finger at the National Geographic World Atlas on the book-wall that ran from the door on my right back to the kitchen counter.  The atlas seemed to stretch out like rubber into an arc ending in a point on the screen.  Then it flowed down the arc leaving the spot on the bookcase bare, and appeared in a huge shaggy paw of the creature in the monitor.  Still humming, he flipped through it and then the process reversed itself, and the book was back on the shelf.  I found myself trying to climb the back of the wicker lounger up against the book-wall, without any memory of moving.   I slid down into the lounger, instead of returning to the desk.  I felt better with a yard, or two, between us.

He poked at his keyboard.  A general map of that section of Northern Europe where Scandinavia,  Poland and White Russia come together appeared on the screen with icons indicating the product of each area.  The screen homed in on one north of Kiev that showed a stylized atom.  I couldn’t read the name.  He translated it and it was still fairly unpronounceable.

“Hmm, interesting development there, right in the heart of Byelo-Russo.  Let’s just pop down for a look-see.  The icon expanded and was replaced by an aerial view of small villages and a modern installation with stacks that dwarfed the countryside.  That view also expanded, and homed in on the installation, then expanded again to a close up of the interior with a simulation of a bank of computers, then finally went into the interior circuits.  Now the cursor-sized Pundit traveled through the circuits as though playing a maze game.  If a switch blocked his path, he opened it and continued through.  I had that watching Tron-feeling again.  It didn’t last long.  The paths all converged at a blue glow.  He moved swiftly backward, reversing the stages until the original map was back, then cleared the screen.

“That should prove interesting, don’t you think?” he asked.  “What do you suppose would happen if I spent some time in one of those?”

“Probably nothing, “ I said.  “There’s no direct line to Europe from Honolulu.”  I had no idea whether that was true, and I was sweating ice water at the thought of him in control of an atomic reactor site.  If he can reach out to make a connection with places as he did with the atlas!  Can he reach something he can’t see?  I really should get out of his line of sight and test that. I was too shaken to think of a test other than going to the can, which was not really prompted by thought.  I walked to the far end of the room to the bathroom which was hidden in back of the kitchen area and was reached through a short hallway formed by the closet that filled the rest of the back wall.  Nothing happened that doesn’t usually happen in the can when I tried that, so I stalled some more.  “If you don’t like being a cursor, get on with the biography.”

Four:  Bio of a Demon

He was, he said, from several ice-ages back and didn’t like our climate at all.  He was stuck as a guardian on something he called a gate.  The Guardians of these gates were vulnerable, because people in our continuum sometimes learned their names and could summon them by using a principle similar to our use of sound waves through phone and radio.  In their case, the broadcast, the broadcast was through dimensions rather than air and the receiver was biological equipment inherent in Pundit’s race.  Once in our world, if the summoned could not bring the summoner back to correct the imbalance caused, he was stuck in our continuum.

I got up and fixed a snack while he talked, wondering how many scientists would give their government grants for an interview with this saber-toothed sophisticate.  There was one crust of bread and a half-made grape jelly sandwich.  I scraped off most of the jelly, covered both slices with mustard, and inserted a sliced micro-waved hot-dog.  It was edible, but I do not recommend the combination.  If Pundit was offended by my temporary defection, he gave no sign.

Actually, I found his stories fascinating.  It was like having a time machine or a window on the past in my own home.

“The exchange works both ways, “ he was saying.  “If someone from your dimension wanders through a gateway without preparation, it causes a vortex equivalent to the energy potential of the mass transferred.”  I must have looked confused or unconvinced, because he tacked on an example.

“ A few centuries ago, we had a lot of trouble with the vortex, or gateway, that is aligned with the Sargasso thermo-cline.  A whole shipload of humans climbed into it at sea level and upset the balance so badly that the gateway widened and has been a problem ever since.  It was my idea to raise the opening above the normal lane of your passages.  It took a lot of work to manage that, but once done it was a snap to maintain.

“The idea was mine, so I was rewarded with the sinecure of tending that gate.”  He didn’t seem to find his triumph a pleasant memory.

He was sitting at a simulated office desk with a section of the Atlantic referred to by the popular press as The Bermuda Triangle in full color on the wall behind him.  His chair was a photographic likeness of the one I was sitting in.  It even squeaked like mine when he swiveled around to look at the map.  The desk, on the other hand, was straight out of my clip-art collection.  A line drawing in black and white.  The effect was as though you had pasted on a photo of a polar bear in a chair, and then drawn a desk around it.  It supported him, though, when he traveled back to face me.

“A couple a’ thousand feet up,” he growled.  “You’d think that’d be high enough! But forty or fifty of your years ago and entire flight of aircraft zoomed straight through the gateway, machines and all!  The metal paralyzed the opening and a search plane went through, too, before I could shrive the gate.  What could I do?  All that hot metal!  But they said I was negligent and I’m now left with an impossible debt to make up for.”  The look he directed at me said that I and my kind were responsible for all of his troubles.

I wondered if a nuclear holocaust would make up that deficit or simply eliminate the civilization that made the gate a trouble spot, but I wasn’t going to ask in case he didn’t already have it in mind.

“They removed the safety blanket from my name, too.  I wasn’t worried about that because few people these days speak Bialo-Russo and even then my name is a curse word.”

“I can understand why,” I said, “and also why people groan at puns if you’ve been around that long.”

“You might say I have an ageless wit, hurk, hurk.”

“I might say, but I won’t.  I thought that was Finnic or something they were reading.”

“Most of it was, but my name is Bialo-Russo, now called Byelo or Bello-Russian.”

Something stirred at the back of my mind, something urgent, but it wouldn’t come clear.  It was something to do with language, so I asked, “How did you go from Middle English to slang so quickly?”

“Oh, I absorbed what was on your disks and extrapolated from your speech patterns.”

I looked around my dingy studio to reassure myself that I wasn’t dreaming.  The sunset streaming through the cat’s cradles of city wires, picked up and highlighted the scuff marks on the couch-bed between the windows opposite the bookshelves.  It lit the space mural over it, the various small tables with crooked stacks of books and papers, and the lint fluffs in undusted corners.  The shaggy monster casually inspecting the fur on the bottoms of his feet while explaining how he picked up a couple thousand years of English in a couple of hours was as real as anything else in that room.  They say that if you doubt your sanity you still have it.  Small comfort.

“Languages are my special field of interest,” Pundit was saying.  “I spent some time in 5I2 a.d. when they were trying to get rid of the hybrid, Grendel.  Some low jerk got it on with one of the few remaining Neanderthals and the offspring was capable of speaking Cro-mag, or I guess I should say Old Norse by then, just enough to lure fat Vikings into his larder.  They had taboos against cannibalism.  Though as Grendel wasn’t really of their race, he wasn’t technically a cannibal.  That’s’ where I got Bitte from.  It’s old, very old, English.  The same root as Gothic and Old German.  They’re all gone or evolved now, but some of Beowulf’s crowd came from the Byelo-Russo area and returned there.  They are the only tribe remaining that know my name today.”

His name!  Bello-Russo!  Would it be to his advantage to wipe out the only people who knew his name? A feeling twisted in my gut that turned my recent snack into so much lead.  I didn’t want him to know that I was running scared, so I kept up my side of the conversation.

“How do you live so long?” I asked by way of hiding my misgivings.

“Our time scale is different than yours, of course, but around the gateways time has very little effect anyway, so nothing ages in such an area.”

“Does your telepathy work both ways?  Can you read my mind?  Is that how you always beat me to the switch?”

“Oh well, your face is a dead give-away and you have slow reactions like most indoors-men.”

I resented the term ‘indoors-man’ so much that I didn’t notice that he hadn’t actually answered my question about the telepathy.  If not for this saber-toothed twit, I would be surfing on the north shore this weekend instead of sweltering in this studio.

He changed his background to a snow scene and tooled in it in a one-horse sleigh, humming Jingle Bells.  A frosty-blue evening light rolled over the scene and ice-covered bushes tinkled in the wind of the sleigh’s passing.   Trees glittered like glass fans in the moonlight.  The sleigh pulled up close, spurting a fan of snow, real snow, on the floor, and Pundit held out a paw.  A deliciously cool breeze flowed from  the monitor.

“Come for a ride. It’s fun!”

Fantastic!  Wouldn’t that be something to tell the gang.  But if I go with him I’ll never see the gang again.

Pundit sensed that he’d lost the gambit.  “Look,” he growled with an almost human irritation, “from all I can glean from the information I’ve gotten so far, you consider yourself a modern, enlightened person.  Are you still hung up on that old Devil and Hell idea?  You’re a science fiction fan.  Hasn’t it taught you anything about other planes of probability?  About dimensions co-existing?”

“But that’s all fantasy!  It’s fun to imagine, but it’s not real.  It’s just extrapolated from obscure and probably faulty theories.”

“Then what are you afraid of? Why not have some fun out of this fantasy?  You know, it isn’t necessarily a world of hellfire that you would have to go to.  My continuum is one of arctic cold, split off from yours during the last ice age.  It’s fine and brisk.  The perfect place for a hunter.”

The scene seemed to open out to splendid vistas of snow covered slopes.  On the nearest, a very large, tailless snow leopard was lying, back to us, watching a couple of rolly polly cubs cavort.  They slid, tumbled and cuffed each other in high spirits.  Then one of them came over to the adult leopard.  She took it into her arms and brushed its face with a fond paw.  It was a shock to realize the cub HAD a face, and so did the mother.  A face not unlike Pundit’s, but so scaled down as to be (even to me) beautiful and sexy.  She looked rather the size and shape of a human woman covered in ermine.

“Is that your family?”  I suddenly felt a twinge of guilt, though I hadn’t summoned him on purpose.

“No, as a guardian I am sort of out of the mating market.  He tried to look pathetic, but he didn’t have the kind of face that could do it.  “You might say that I’m limited to the occasional girlfiend.”  (The smothered snort of rutting warthogs accompanied that one.)

“If you don’t favor that world, there are others.  You wouldn’t be automatically killed or enslaved you know.  We wouldn’t know what to do with your soul if we could collect it.  There must be a mass/energy exchange to strike a balance.  For the most part, we don’t care what you do when you get through the gateway, or which place you go to, so long as you pass through the transformer.”

“Transformer?”

“Transformer, gateway, vortex.  Call it what you will.  When you pass through it, it acclimates you to the next continuum, and it will restore the balance so things stabilize.”

He explained about the nature of the phenomenon, but as it was well after midnight by that time, I missed it, only waking in time to hear him say, “I’ve no more magic than you.  I just know how to manipulate the natural laws.”

Five:  Gateways

I struggled out of the low-slung wicker lounge chair, saying, “hold on while I get some coffee.”  At least he didn’t do anything while I slept.  Maybe he does need my cooperation.  I wondered what he HAD done while I slept.  I was to wonder more as the day progressed, since his vocabulary now help some technical terms that I was not familiar with.  The library?  Maybe he could dial it through the modem?  Hope he didn’t make any long-distance calls.  I’ve got a demon after my soul, and I’m worrying about my phone bill.  Dancing dinosaurs! I gave up thinking and scrounged for breakfast.

I couldn’t prove Pundit was lying in any way, but I had no reason to trust him and every reason not to.

“If I were to let you,” I began, “Could you teach me that controlling nature thing?”

“If you became as sensitive to certain electromagnetic fluxes as I am,” he said, “but it would mean that, like me, you could be manipulated by anyone who knew your Bio-Psychic wavelength.  There are planes on which you could achieve it, if you want to.  You are already sensitized to a certain degree by our contact.  Consider trying one of those other worlds though.  You would find adapting much easier.

The whole screen glowed dimly white and opened to a glorious sunset, seen between interstices of some organic lace-like screen.  The cavern or jungle, whichever it was, looked rather like enlarged microscope slides of an exotic mold.  There was no telling where the ground began because the trees (or pillars) seemed to flow up out of it as tough carved from one mass, and to flow together again overhead to form a vaulted ceiling.  Most of the pillars/trees had randomly placed globular protuberances and were covered with a cream-colored suede-like surface.  Iridescent spots glowed wherever the light reached through to them.  Others looked like black opal, and when a shaft of sunset light touched them, the colors flared as though alive.

A lovely female appeared who looked perfectly human, except that her skin was pearly pink and her eyes deep pink.  Tiny glowing spheres showed now and again in her flowing white mane, and dangled from her belt.  She carried a tray with small depressions in it.  From a large, warty, tree-like trunk she pulled out a similar tray which was in a sort of slot in a pillar/tree and replaced it with the empty one.  She carried the filled tray to the sunlight and held it up to the brightest rays filtering through.  She swayed from one foot to the other in a rhythmic way, always keeping the tray in the sun’s rays while she sang the seconds.  Her chant echoed faintly through the arches like distant birdsong.  The sap-like mass in the tray hollows had turned hard and shiny when the girl returned to the softer light, and she then had a slightly tanned skin and light-blue eyes.  The little blobs were turned out on a shelf-like growth.  They looked like fine fire opals.  She walked over to a slender branching umbrella-like thing and pulled off a bulbous growth.  She nibbled at it as she continued out of sight down the passage.  A shower of tiny lights fell out of the umbrella plant.  The dusk filled with flashing sparks of red and blue and green.  It was so enchanting that I held my breath, lest I blow them away.

“Where is that?”  I breathed softy, “Is it a real place?”

“Could I send you there if it was not?  It is called Twilight.  It makes a figure eight orbit around two rather close suns.  Its speed of rotation makes it face its Alpha primary always with one side and Beta primary with the other.  The sunset line is the only stable area.  It is warm and misty because of the slow but constant shifting of the hot and cold sides of the planet. It was colonized by Refugee humans. A peace-loving albinoid race.  In the Registry of worlds, it says of it:

SUNSETS ARE IMMORTAL

ONE THE RIM OF THIS TWO-FACED WORLD

ONE SIDE IS NEARLY BOILING

THE OTHER BLIZZARD-SKIRLED

BUT FIREFLIES STAR ITS TWILIGHT ZONE

IN GORRTS OF GIANT MOLD

AND FUNGI FORRESTS PHOSPHORESCE

NOW RED, NOW GREEN, NOW GOLD.”

“You’d get along fine with your light-colored eyes and thin skin.  There are worlds where you would have to be changed a lot.  For instance on Hell…”

“So, there IS a Hell!”

“Well, you call it that.  Once a satellite of Venus, rather like the Moon is to the Earth, it was too big to hold and it spun it off a billion years back, moving inward to another orbit and world line.  Caused a terrific wobble in our orbit.  They say the poles flipped right over.”   He chewed thoughtfully on the empty cereal box, looked at it in disgust, and at me in pity, then arced it into the kitchen rubbish can.  “The Registry says…

THE SUNLIGHT FALLS FOREVER

ON THE FACE OF THIS HELLISH PLANET

WHERE SILICON AMOEBIDS SWIM

IN AN ATMOSPHERE OF GRANITE

YET ON THE DARK PERIMETER

THAT NEVER SEES ILLUMEN

STORM-TOSSED STRAYS ARE FROZEN

INTO SHAPES MOST STRANGELY HUMAN.”

“Actually, when they are summoned to your world, they take on human shape.   But they must maintain a leak-proof shield, or they freeze into rock.”

“My chemistry teacher said silicon life forms were impossible, because the stuff they’d have to breath instead of oxygen to make their metabolism work is solid, not a gas.”

“It isn’t solid there.  Nothing is.  Of course, YOU’D need adapting for that place.”

I looked at the turbidity flowing incandescent plain: denser portions heaving above it, spouting cascades of shining molten metals, as the sky roiled with clouds of glowing gasses.  I wondered how he could possibly think that I might like to live there.  I could swear that a hot-metal stench, like a blast furnace, was sweeping into the room.

“No, thanks.  That’s just the sort of thing I’m trying to avoid.”

“My mistake, but I assure you we’ve some alchemists seeking the way to turn metals into gold that were happy to try.  That cascade on the right is pure molten gold.”

“The one with the sparks at the bottom of the falls?”

“No, that’s only meted glass.  The high one behind it.”

King of the Golden River I thought, remembering a folktale from childhood.  Just looking at it made me thirsty.  Not trusting his drink, I got one from the fridge and returned to find him with one in his paw, too.

“To fiends and lovers,” he said.

“To absent fiends,” I corrected.  (The dying battery again, with just a touch of wart-hog snort.

I squinted at the screen.  “Say! There are scratches on the inside of the screen.  I can make them out when the light is right.  You scratched the phosphors when you wrote.  Wait.  Why don’t  you put it into graphics mode instead of ruining my monitor?”

“I hadn’t learned how to use the system then, but if you want a new one, just say the word.”

I didn’t say the word, because a thought that had escaped me when I slept came back again.  These scenes he is showing me are not simulations.  He is opening some sort of dimensional window, so we can look directly into real places.  Was that the real thing when he opened those safety switches in the Russian atomic reactor?

The lead-lunch feeling was worse this time.  I cursed myself for falling asleep and missing his technical lecture.  It didn’t occur to me then that he might have planned it that way.

I held my drink against my face.  The icy wetness was a shock, but felt good.  My guts knotted a little.  It was increasingly apparent that I was no match for an experienced djinn.  My attitude was reflected in my next question.

“Are there no places with space travel, so that I could move from planet to planet if I got bored?”  (If I couldn’t think my way out of this I might at least find a viable alternative.)  Sensing surrender, he became almost chummy.

“Oh sure.  Sure there are, but if we go too far ahead you will need a pretty technical education to rate a berth on a Spacer, or else a lot of credits to buy one.  Are you interested in exploration?  A good guesser can make his fortune figuring out the solutions to mysteries.  What do you think about this one?”  (A black  sphere on a midnight-blue field swam into view.  “Night world is the sole planet of an ageing red star.  It apparently had no fellow planets and no moons.  Speculation is that its population, with no possibility of developing space travel, protected itself against the creeping cold as its sun aged by encasing itself in an impervious skin.  No vibrations have been detected, no heat or cold, no sound.  Whether the covering was put there by the inhabitants or an enemy, or grew there, it is absolutely inert to anything discovered so far.  The Registry of worlds says:

NIGHTWORLD IS THIN OF ATMOSPHERE

NO GERM OF LIFE REMAINS

ONE SOLID SEAMLESS SURFACE

COVERS ALL ITS HILLS AND PLAINS

IMMORTAL MILE-HIGH MONOLITHS

PARADE ITS BLUE-BLACK SKY

WITHOUT A MARK OF ANY KIND

TO TELL US HOW OR WHY.”

“Do you think you could figure that one out?”

I looked at the view of a surrealistic plain, holding shapes like mile-high buildings covered with night-black rubberoid skin; or like a city carved out of volcanic rock.  There were shapes like a futuristic dream of skyscrapers, but they could as well be natural pinnacles and planes.  The sky was dark enough to show the stars even though it was technically daytime.  No planet formed impervious surfaces naturally though.   Whatever the surface was, it was perfectly smooth and non-reflecting, with not the slightest sign of weathering.  It could have been made yesterday.

“You think I’m some kind of genius?”

“With my help, you don’t need to be.  After all, what are fiends for?”

I felt like saying ‘With a fiend like you, I wouldn’t need an enemy,’ but I didn’t fancy hearing that dead battery laugh again, so I kept my thought to myself.  He snickered anyway, as if he had guessed it.

While we watched, a ship floated around the horizon and landed on the black surface.  The spacers formed a party and moved equipment a quarter mile from their ship.  They used things that I could not begin to put a name to, but it was clear that they were sources of tremendous power.  The weird instruments poked, flared, and thundered at the black plain, but when they stopped it was untouched as before.

While they worked, a second vessel landed.  It was all black, with gold trim.  From it, a procession of black-hooded and cloaked forms made their way silently to the central monolith.  It was shaped rather like the Washington Monument, but a full mile high.  Four of them threw of their cloaks, revealing four satin-black female centauroids trapped and shod in gold.  They shimmered their way to the four corners of the monolith in complete silence.  Were all were in position they held out fluorescent globes.  The globes chimed simultaneously as they touched the corners.  If they were expecting a reaction, they didn’t seem to get one.  There was a thirty-second pause, and then they donned their cloaks and the procession returned to its ship, as silently as it had come.  How many trillions of miles had they come for those thirty seconds?

The view drew back and up, and left me staring at a full sky of stars, not one of which was familiar.  I said, thoughtfully, “Could you send me under that shield, or whatever it is and then bring me out again?”

“Certainly, and you’d know what or who was there.  Good idea! Perhaps Homo-Sap hasn’t lost all his ability to think.”  His enthusiasm made me suspicious.

“You’re right, and I’m still thinking.  If there were no air, or something deadly, or just plain rock under there, I would come back in no shape to cash in on my knowledge.  Besides, why would you bring me back out?  Wouldn’t that upset your precious balance again?”

“Not if I didn’t bring you back here.  No one here would pay to know the answer to a puzzle that they don’t know exists, so why would you want to come back here anyway?”

There seemed no point in trying to tell him why I preferred my own world, especially when I wasn’t sure myself.  Inwardly I was drooling over the vision of myself as an interplanetary explorer, instead of a plodding student trying to find a new way of expressing the same old drivel.  Then I had an idea, “I order you to go there and bring back the answer!” I exclaimed.

I got no more reaction from Pundit than the Pilgrims had gotten from Night world.  “You can’t order me to that world.  You don’t know the proper incantation in my language, only in yours.”

I didn’t know the incantation in any language, unless the verses were one.  I asked him, “Why does your registry give its information in verse?  Or, is that your own translation?”

“No, it uses verse because cadence is most effective in aligning continuities and end-rhyme is easiest to memorize.”

“Meaning?”

“It works.  Anyway, with the known worlds numbering somewhere in the hundreds, mnemonic of some sort is vital.”

He produced a graphics spaceship and tooled around between cartoon-type planets, through a milky way (with real milk) and bumped the nose on the man in the Moon.  The podgy white figure stuffed into the toy spaceship with I9I8 helmet and flying scarf was laughable, but I didn’t laugh because it only pointed up the difference between the graphics and the dimensional window’s view.  He put a bandage on the Moon’s nose, faded it all to black and reappeared behind a desk that looked like it belonged in Star Wars.  Both desk and room seemed to be carved from glass, or maybe from the heart of an iceberg.  He leafed through a volume whose pages made a crinkling sound like thin metal when turned.

“There are a number of alternate earths available, if you fancy some period of the past or future.  Interested in being a knight of the round table?  Stage <8-E[dimension] is there now.  Or like to be a mighty hunter of mastodons? Stage 2-E^ is mankind at his physical and political best, and no technical training, just a finely-tuned body and a keen mind.”

Pundit’s sales pitch was wasted on me.  Forty-eight hours is the most that can come between me and my bed, and though I still didn’t trust him, I just couldn’t help myself.  I lay down on the couch and slept.  It wasn’t restful sleep, because I kept whirling through clouds of snow and smoke, where pink pixies sat on suede toadstools, while I tried to fend off a great black cape that was trying to cover us all.  I don’t remember how it turned out.

Six:  S.O.S.

The incessant tone of the telephone woke me.  I stumbled over to it, noticed the monitor was lit and remembered that not all of my problems were dreams.  The screen held my code name and number and an inquiry as to why there wasn’t an empty disk waiting in the disk drive.  I hastily inserted the disk I had prepared Friday for Mike’s call.  The transmission started and I woke sufficiently to think about the off switch.  It glowed and sizzles slightly.  I hit it anyway and it zapped me again.  Picking myself up, now wide awake, I found Pundit in his post-card sized window in the upper right-hand corner looking as though asleep with what was probably a pleased expression on his almost-face.  I ground my teeth in frustration.

“I suppose you won’t let me use my keyboard to talk to a friend?” I growled.

“Any key but that one is tours,” he growled back, “and, that one you can have too, if you don’t mind being electrocuted.”  He settled back and pretended to snore.  He didn’t fool me.

“Quieter please, your over-acting is shaking the set.”  He gave up and leaned forward to watch.  I turned to the screen.  When the program transmission had finished there was a personal message from Mike and Dave.

SORRY TO SEND AT THIS HOUR BUT COULD NOT GET THROUGH BEFORE.  IS ALL OKAY?

I typed, BIG PROBLEM HERE.  PLEASE DO NOT – REPEAT – DO NOT USE MY GIVEN NAME IN OUR CONVERSATION.

I GLANCED AT Pundit.  His reactions were those of a furry, white hearth rug, so I continued.

TESTED VOX BOX WITH LANGUAGE DISK.  IT CONJURED UP DEMON INTO MY SET.  NOW HAVE NO CONTROL.  SUGGESTIONS?

I should have expected it, I suppose. My friends know I spin off on sci/fi and fantasy and have a warped sense of humor.  Mike proffered a cure for diarrhea.  Dave, a good brand of plastic diapers.  I sent:

DEAD SIRIUS.  HOW GET FIEND OUT OF ROM?

Dead Sirius was a code among us that cancelled any possibility of a joke.  Mike sent back:

STATE CASE MOST CLEAR

I glanced at Pundit and he was still imitating a hearth rug, but his natural sneer/grin seemed a bit wider.  I tried anyway:

STAND BY FOR SCREEN DUMP TRANSMISSION

I dumped the entire screen including the image of Pundit.  I didn’t know how well it would transmit, as telephone lines were not good for graphics, but Mike’s receiver was pretty sophisticated.

NEATO!   IS THIS YOUR LATEST?  DAVE

DEAD SIRIUS.  THATT’S HIM.  WITHOUT A PENTAGRAM>   YOU DIG?  HELP?

YOU’LL FEEL BETTER WHEN THE SMOKE CLEARS PAL>  SORRY WE WOKE YOU.  GOTTA GO.  THIS CALL BREAKING THE BUDGET.

The connection broke.  They were gone.  They probably think I’m gone too.  Gone out of my mind.  They should know I don’t go for chemical highs.  Now I understand the look on Pundit’s ugly puss.  He knew what I’d sound like to other people.  He’d been through this before, maybe thousands of times.  It must have been easier in the old days when people believed in possession.  Although, maybe it was that kind of thinking that led to witch burnings.  I laid down on the couch-bed along the window-wall and stared at the book-wall, then at the kitchen opposite, trying to think of an approach that would convince someone, anyone, that I had a problem with a real demon.  I fell asleep before I found one.

Seven:  Interruption

When I woke, I bumbled through my wake-up routine like a bear just out of hibernation, but without bumping into more than my usual quota of cupboard doors.  Then I raided the tiny freezer for something edible.  Pundit offered to fix my breakfast, but I told him not to bother.

“Hey,” he said jovially, “No bother.  What are fiends for?”  We night persons loath people who are cheery when we’re only half-awake.  I came close to ordering him to do something that was not possible, even with his anatomy, and more than slightly indecent if it had been.

I gave with a snarl that would have done credit to a polar bear, and pried a poorly packaged plate of leftovers out of the accumulated frost.  It was from an ethnic potluck I’d been to six months ago.  Freezer burn had eliminated any possible clues to its original ingredients, but I micro-waved it, covered it with catsup, and wolfed it down.  If you think you’ve tried everything, try catsup on chicken curry and candied yams.  To make matters worse, Pundit was just finishing a platter of bacon and eggs with crisp hash browns.  The smell of it lingered maddeningly in the air.  I pretended not to notice.

If I managed to survive the weekend, I’d have a paper due Monday.  I decided to work on it while I tried to think of a way out of this mess.  Pundit’s account of history was rather different from ours, but I thought it might make a fresh angle for a thesis, if I could garner enough support references.  It doesn’t matter much what is in a thesis, so long as it is couched in properly erudite and obscure terminology and purports to be a new thought which paradoxically must be documents by a minimum of thirteen footnotes per page referring to old to old theories and writings.  Since the paper had been my excuse for using the keyboard, I had to work at it now and then.

At the back of my mind was the thought that perhaps it would provide sufficient distraction so that I could beat him to the switch.  So, I encourage him to talk.

“Cro-Magnon came to Europe across the ice from America during the last ice age.  They were hunters following the mammoths.  They could do forty miles a day.  Men, women and children made the migration every couple of years because the mammoths did.”

“Hold it!”  Forty miles a day still doesn’t cross the Atlantic overnight.  What did they live on while on that glacier?”

“Glaciers that last for 25,000 years gather a lot of soil and livestock,” he sneered.  “Most places, you couldn’t tell them from the land which was glaciated too.  In fact, there were glaciers here in Hawai’i.  Ask your professors.”

“Just asking.  I need to make this sound plausible. Err, ah, technical, I mean,” I said placatingly.  I felt cross as three polar bears myself, but not enough to risk getting him in an aggressive mood.  “Why didn’t the Cro-Magnons stay in Europe all the time?”

They followed the game, and they didn’t care for the low-browed punks living in Europe at the time.  I didn’t blame them.  Neanderthals, huh!  When the ice-shelf (and age) was destroyed by a cataclysm, those who were on the European side had to stay there.  The lemmings, unconvinced, still try to get back.  The mammoths were stuck in mid-migration with their males on one side of the Atlantic and their females, two months behind, on the other.  They became extinct in Europe, so the Cro-Magnon switched to hunting bison.”

I was interested, in spite of myself, but I knew that I should be thinking of a way to get rid of, or away from him.  Pundit was looking to make up his mass-deficit with my own, and maybe a lot of innocent humans.  I couldn’t afford to view him as an amusement.  While I was worrying at the problem, a diversion was created for me.  There was a call from the outside.

I had almost forgotten there was a world outside that room.  We’d been at it since Friday night, and this was early Sunday.

“Yo! Just a minute,” I sang out.  “The mailman,” I explained hastily, “he’s got a special delivery or he wouldn’t be here on Sunday.  Urgent business.”

I opened the door and scrambled down the outside stairway.  It WAS the postman, but I hit ground level running and tore right down the street and around the corner.  I the lee of a three-story brick building, I stopped to catch my breath, look, and listen.  There seemed to be no sign of a pursuing fiend, but I spun out of there anyway.  Dodging open places and slinking around corners until I was all the way down to the big shopping center.  I felt safer in the crowd.

Eight:  Cat and  Mouse

The Sun was shining, the trade winds ruffles the palm leaves, bathers lined the beach.  Pigeons, industriously picking up crumbs, didn’t bother to scatter as I passed.  I looked into a bar.  It was cool and dark and had a good-sized screen showing a rodeo in progress.  I wasn’t interested in watching anymore screens, but I ordered a draft beer.  I needed time to think.

“When the cow pinchers have all gone back to the old punk-house, we will have a special guest today on FAZE THE NATION, so stay tuned!”

I looked at the TV just as the bartender brought my beer.  I reached for him instead of the beer.  “Tell me, is that announcer nine feet tall, shaggy and white?”

The bartender pried my fingers from his shirt front, none too gently, and hissed, “Beat it kid.  It don’t pay to mix that stuff wit booze.”

I opened my mouth to protest and closed it again at his look.  I backed off and left quietly.  The TV was singing, “I’m an old cowhand, on a baby Grande.”  It showed a hoof on a piano.  No one else paid any attention.

The rig that runs the big screen is probably hooked to a cable which is controlled by a computer.  He CAN use the hook-up to go anywhere it does.  I wonder if he can get into non-cable sets?  Can he really come out of that thing?  Even if he can’t, he can reach out.  I wish I knew how far he can reach.

It was mid-morning now and I was feeling the strain of being ill-fed and non-rested for two nights in a row.  I went into MacDonald’s to regain my cool.  With coffee and an egg mac-muffin holding my stomach in place, things seemed less impossible.  I went into the arcade next door.  I passed the TRON game with eyes averted and settled down at an ancient Pac-man.  I had been an expert at it as a kid, and it never failed to sooth me in times of stress.  My nerves stopped jumping as Packy gobbled, till he was super-sized.  Then, all the little blue critters turned white, grew horns and tusks, turned their eyes on me and said,

“You lose!  Start pac-ing. Gruarh harrgh harrg, huff chuff,”  So, he wasn’t limited to television.  I chucked my meal in the men’s room and wobbled down the street.

I wandered around, spotted some fellow students spending their free day slouching about, and joined them.  It was almost a pleasure to hear them talking about the Middle East situation, or the mysterious blow-up in Russia.  It felt normal and those problems were so distant.  I thought about asking for their help, of course, but I remembered Mike and Dave’s reaction.  If my friends wouldn’t believe me, what casual acquaintance would?  If I did get out of this, I didn’t want to be thrown into a padded cell.  Then, I had a really terrible thought.  Are they right?  How can I tell if I have gone mad?

I lured the group back to the Pac-Man game.  They were not interested in  the kid-stuff, but I promised a surprise.  Immediately after I promised, I wondered if Pundit would refuse to perform, so I actually ordered him to in a way that I hoped would seem a part of the game.

Depositing the coin, I began to play.  When the game was going well, I said, “Now watch the blue critters.  They are really little white Pundits, AREN’T THEY PUNDIT?,” and they turned into tiny editions of the demon! The fellows crowding around were impressed, so at least they saw them, too.

The manager of the place had been looking over our shoulders.

“Hey!  Wot you kids doin’ to my game?!,” he demanded, in a voice almost as unlovely as Pundit’s.  “If you broke em . . “  He barged forward and the group scattered to a safe distance.

“Why,” I said, “there’s nothing wrong with your game. . . “ (and instantly all was normal). . .”except your prices.”

This produced a laugh from the crowd and we walked away.  I got a lot of undeserved respect from my fellow students, who were trying to figure out how I had done the trick.  I knew that I could not convince them of the truth, but at least I had confirmed my sanity.  My problem was real, and bigger than I knew.

I had about decided to ask if I could bunker down on someone’s couch until I found another room and was concocting a story to explain my need when I saw the early morning edition.

The blow-up everyone had been talking about was in that unpronounceable installation in Bello-Russia, at the atomic reactor site.  Everyone knew how to pronounce it now, and I knew how far Pundit could reach.

Nine:  Resolution

There was no point in abandoning my studio.  I looked around ,e and imagined the people dying of radiation sickness or already rotting in broken buildings.  I couldn’t let a Chernobyl or worse happen here.  I had to destroy that fiend, or go with him.  I invented an appointment and dropped out of the group so I could concentrate.

How does he know where I am and how does he always beat me to the switch?  It’s as though he were reading my mind.  But if he could read my thoughts, he should know my name and he doesn’t, in spite of his wanting to very badly.  It must be something else.  But what?  Perhaps if I get drunk, he won’t be able to tune in on my vibes.  Or whatever he’s doing.  I need to get some sleep, so I can think clearly.

I didn’t have any more money with me, but I had my bank card in my wallet.  I went to the automatic teller and found that I didn’t have the nerve to operate the machine.

What can he do to me that he can’t do anyway? If using the automatic teller is a foul pun, I won’t die from it.

I put in my card and code.  The machine operated normally and disbursed both money and receipt.  The receipt read, “Well, you might die laughing.  Time’s running out, you know!”

I didn’t get drunk.  I got a fresh coffee and sat in the park and  thought.  I must have been thinking out loud, because an unshaven derelict, with rather pungent smelling clothes and a tattered backpack dragging by one strap from an elbow, sat down and said, “Problem, Sonny?”  His breath smelled like last week’s ash tray, marinated in booze.  If I couldn’t tell anyone the truth, maybe I could still get some input on my problem.

“Well, it’s a sort of riddle I’m trying to solve.  This fiend or genie is in a TV set, see?  I got to figure how to get rid of him or stop him from coming out or I lose.  Every time I try to turn the set off, he gets there first and gives me and electric shock.”  I gave such general details as I thought would help.  “He is subject to the electronic laws of the machine while he is in it.  He said so. How do I get to the switch first?”

“Shay, thash a new one.” He rubbed the grey stubble on his chin, blinked watery blue eyes set in the pink, puffy skin of an alcoholic, and said, “I’ve my problems m’self with things coming out of the walls.  Mostly li’l creepy crawlies.”  His fingers wiggled in demonstration.  “Don’t thin Id mind on nine feet tall.  He wouldn’t make me itch.  Hate crawly things.  They make me itch.  (He scratched as if to illustrate his point.  I wondered how he could reach his itch through all the grimy layers he wore.) “You spose if I got a bottle of gin I’d get one like him?”

“I don’t want one.  I want to get rid of one.”

“Zactly.  Gina come in bottles, and you jus’ get him back in the bottle.”

“Yes,” I said, doing it his way, “but first, I’ve got to get him out of my TV.”  This seemed reasonable to him, and he applied himself to the problem.

“Can you pull the plug, or, shay!  cut off the ‘lectric from the outshide?”  The old tramp had his own form of logic in spite of being half-soused.  I considered.

“The studio is on the second floor  over a garage.  I couldn’t reach the wires, even if I dared, and the meter’s in  the main house.  If I called the electric company, he’d know.  He has access to the phone,” I said regretfully.  “As for the plug, it’s on the same desk and he’d spot me as quick as he does on the switch.”

“Well, you’ve only got to distract him, so he’s too interested in something else to notice you.”

I thought of the marvels he had shown me and said, “Fat chance !He’s not interested in anything except winning the game, and making terrible puns.  The logical thing is to hit the off button, but he won’t let me do that.  How does he always get there first?”

That question kept thumping into my train of thought, the way one thumps away at a vending machine to make the coin drop.  Then suddenly, the coin did drop.

He can read my mind. At least some of it!  He answered my thought about dying from a pun.  I’m sure I didn’t say that aloud.  And, the taste of ozone is still there, even now!   All this time, lying   !  Playing me for a sucker!

I threw my drink into the trash so hard that it fountained.  The derelict held out a grimy hand and looked at the blameless sky.

I was so angry that I forgot to be afraid.  I tore homeward, in  a fighting mood.  The longer I thought, the shorter my temper got.  When I reached home, my fuse was touching gunpowder.

He was sitting in an animated snowfall from one of my Christmas cards.  As the flakes drifted down the screen, he sat at a patio table and poured a tall frosted drink from a bottle marked DJIN.  He wore a top hat and muffler and hummed to the faint background music of Frosty, the Snowman.

“Rum tum te tum tum . . . “

I made a dive for the off button and he didn’t even bother to move.  It didn’t stun me this time, but it didn’t work, either.  The key was dead.  It probably had been all along.  Absolute mindless rage took over.

“So!” I stormed up and down the room, “You CAN read my thoughts, you lied to me.  Probably everything you said was a lie.”  (I swept the stuff off of a small table and enjoyed the smash.)  “You infernal cheat!” (Crash, went the stuff off a bookshelf.) “You’ve been playing me, just for the hell of it!”  I kicked the magazine rack across the room.  Magazines hit the fan.  Pages flew in all directions.

When I had roared myself breathless, he shrugged contemptuously.

“But, of course I did, my fuming friend.  THAT’S what fiends are FOR!”

He laughed while he rolled on the snow,

“Gruarh harr harr haarge . . . “

And, that’s when I pulled the plug.

Ten:  Solution?

For a week, I didn’t even touch the computer set.  I rented a manual, non-electric typewriter, and did my homework on the kitchen counter.  Then, when a visitor nearly turned on the set, I locked it in a hall closet.  I don’t know whether he is still in there, or destroyed, or gone back to his own time frame, but I don’t intend to find out.

I admit there are nights when my dreams are invaded by worlds of fire and ice, of opal or obsidian.  Could they have been mine for the asking?  I guess I’ll always wonder.

There’s something else I wonder about.  IF he is trapped in the equipment and it got smashed, would he escape?

I know I should pack the computer, the modem, and the monitor in Styrofoam; but, whenever I open the closet, the light striking across the dusty screen picks out and highlights thin scratches that spell W A I T.  And I do.

Tags: 1980's, Li von Garske, no internet, no world wide web, Short Novel, That’s What Fiends Are For

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