Poul Anderson - Operation Chaos

“Yes. I understand the salamander now.” She took a place at the end of the table. That was the last vacant chair, so I hovered miserably in the background wishing her coat had more buttons.

“Understand it sufficiently well to extinguish it?” asked Professor van Linden of Alchemy.

“No. But I know how it thinks.”

“We’re more interested in how it operates,” said’ van Linden. “How can we make it hold still for a dismissal?” He cleared his throat. “Obviously, we must first know by what process it shuttles around so fast ,

“Oh, that’s simple,” piped Griswold. He was drowned by van Linden’s fruity bass:

“—which is, of course, by the well-known affinity of Fire for Quicksilver. Since virtually every home these days has at least one thermometer—”

“With due respect, my good sir,” interrupted Vittorio of Astrology, “you are talking utter hogwash. It is simple matter of the conjunction of Mercury and Neptune in Scorpio—”

“You’re wrong, sir!” declared van Linden. “Dead wrong! Let me show you the Ars Thaumaturgica. ” He glare around after his copy, but it had been mislaid and he had to use an adaptation of the Dobu yamcalling chant to find it. Meanwhile Vittorio was screaming:

“No, no, no! The conjunction, with Uranus opposing in the ascendant ... as I can easily prove—” He went to the blackboard and started to draw a diagram.

“Oh, come now!” snorted jasper of Metaphysics. “I don’t understand how you can both be so wrong. As I showed in the paper I read at the last Triple-A-S meeting, the intrinsic nature of the matrix—”

“That was disproved ten years ago!” roared van Linden. “The affinity—”

“ Ding an sich —”

“—up Uranus—”

I sidled over and tugged at Griswold’s sleeve. He pattered into a corner with me. “Okay, how does the bloody thing work?” I asked.

“Oh ... merely a question of wave mechanics,” he whispered. “According to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, a photon has a finite probability of being at any point of space. The salamander uses a simple diffraction process to change the spatial coordinates of psi squared, in effect going from point to point without crossing the intervening distance, much like an electron making a quantum jump, although, to be sure, the analogy is not precise due to the modifying influence of—”

“Never mind,” I sighed. “This confab is becoming a riot. Wouldn’t we do better to—”

“-stick by the original purpose,” agreed Abercrombie, joining us. Ginny followed. Van Linden blacked Vittorio’s eye while Jasper threw chalk at both of them. Our rump group went over near the door.

“I’ve already found the answer to our problem,” said Abercrombie, “but I’ll need help. A transformation spell. We’ll turn the salamander into something we can handle more easily.”

“That’s dangerous,” said Ginny. “You’ll need a really strong T-spell, and that sort can backfire. What happens then is unpredictable.”

Abercrombie straightened himself with a look of pained nobility. “For you, my dear, no hazard is too—

She regarded him with admiration. It does take guts to use the ultimate runes. “Let’s go,” she said. “I’ll help.”

Griswold plucked at my arm. “I don’t like this, Mr. Matuchek,” he confided. “The Art is too unreliable. There ought to be some method grounded in nature and nature’s quantitative laws.”

“Yeah”, I said disconsolately. “But what?” I paddled after Ginny and Abercrombie, who had their heads together over the handbook. Griswold marched beside me and Svartalf made a gesture with his tail at the Trismegistus faculty. They were too embroiled to notice.

We went out past an enraged but well-cowed squad of cops. The Physical Sciences hall stood nearby, and its chemistry division held stuff that would be needed. We entered an echoing gloom.

The freshman lab, a long room full of workbenches; shelves, and silence, was our goal. Griswold switched on the lights and Abercrombie looked around. “But we’ll have to bring the salamander here,” he said. “We can’t do anything except in its actual presence.”

“Go ahead and make ready,” the girl told him. “I know how to fetch the beast. A minor transformation—” She laid out some test tubes, filled them with various powders, and sketched her symbols on the floor. Those ball-point wands are handy.

“What’s the idea?” I asked.

“Oh, get out of the way,” she snapped. I told myself she was only striking at her own weariness and despair, but it hurt. “We’ll use its vanity, of course. I’ll prepare some Roman candles and rockets and stuff ... shoot them off, and naturally it’ll come to show it can do more spectacular things.

Griswold and I withdrew into a corner. This was big-league play. I was frankly scared, and the little scientist’s bony knees were beating a tattoo in march time. Even Ginny-yes, sweat beaded that smooth forehead. If this didn’t work, we here were probably done for: either the salamander or the backlash of the spell could finish us. And we had no way of knowing whether the beast had grown too strong for a transformation.

The witch got her fireworks prepared, and went to an open window and leaned out. Hissing balls of blue and red, streamers of golden sparks, flew skyward and exploded.

Abercrombie had completed his diagrams. He turned to smile at us. “It’s all right,” he said. “Everything under control. I’m going to turn the salamander’s energy into matter. E equals m c squared, you know. Just fight me a Bunsen burner, Matuchek, and set a beaker of water over it. Griswold, you turn these lights off and the Polaroid bulbs on. We need polarized radiation.”

We obeyed, though I hated to see an old and distinguished man acting as lab assistant to this patronizing slick-paper adman’s dream. “You sure it’ll work?” I asked.

“Of course,” he smiled. “I’ve had experience. I was in the Quartermaster Corps during the war.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but turning dirt into K rations isn’t the same thing as transforming that monster. You and your experience!”

Suddenly and sickly, remembering how he had bungled with the Hydro, I realized the truth. Abercrombie was confident, unafraid-because he didn’t know enough!

For a minute I couldn’t unfreeze my muscles. Griswold fiddled unhappily with some metallic samples. He’d been using them the other day for freshman experiments, trying to teach us the chemical properties; Lord, it seemed a million years ago ...

“Ginny!” I stumbled toward her where she stood at the window throwing rainbows into the air. “My God, darling, stop—”

Crack! The salamander was in the room with us.

I lurched back from it, half-blinded. Grown hideously bigger, it filled the other end of the lab, and the bench tops smoked.

“Oh, So!” The voice of Fire blasted our eardrums. Svartalf shot to a shelf top and upset bottles of acid onto the varmint. It didn’t notice. “So, small moist pests, you would try to outdo Me!”

Abercrombie and Ginny lifted their wands and shouted the few brief words of transformation.

Crouched back into my corner, peering through a sulfurous reek of fumes, I saw Ginny lurch and then jump for safety. She must have sensed the backlash. There came a shattering explosion and the air was full of flying glass.

My body shielded Griswold, and the spell didn’t do more to me than turn me lupe me. Ginny was on her hands and knees behind a bench, half-unconscious ... but unhurt, unhurt, praise the good Powers forever. Svartalf—a Pekingese dog yapped on the shelf. Abercrombie was gone, but a chimpanzee in baggy tweeds stuttered wailing toward the door.