Poul Anderson - Operation Chaos

I whined as I realized we’d left the broomstick outside. There could be no escape now, not even for Ginny. The protest became a snarl when I heard glass breaking and rifles blowing off locks. That Svartalf was a smart cat. He found the tommy gun again and somehow, clumsy though paws are, managed to shoot out the lights. He and I retreated to the stairway. They came at us in the dark, blind as most men are. I let them fumble around, and the first one who groped to the stairs was killed quietly. The second had time to yell. The whole gang of them crowded after him. They couldn’t shoot in the gloom and press without potting their own people. Excited to mindlessness, they attacked me with scimitars, which I didn’t object 3 to. Svartalf raked their legs and I tore them apart—whick, snap, clash, Allah-Akbar and teeth in the night!! The stair was narrow enough for me to hold, and their own casualties hampered them, but the sheer weight of a hundred brave men forced me back a tread at a time. Otherwise one could have tackled me and a dozen more have piled on top. As things were, we gave the houris a few fresh customers for every foot we lost.

I have no clear memory of the fight. You seldom do. But it must have been about twenty minutes before they fell back at an angry growl. The emir himself stood at the foot of the stairs, lashing his tail and rippling his gorgeously striped hide.

I shook myself wearily and braced my feet for the last round. The one-eyed tiger climbed slowly towards us. Svartalf spat. Suddenly he zipped down the banister past the larger cat and disappeared in the gloom. Well, he had his own neck to think about—

We were almost nose to nose when the emir lifted paw full of swords and brought it down. I dodged somehow and flew for his throat. All I got was a mouthful of baggy skin, but I hung on and tried to work my way inward.

He roared and shook his head till I swung like a bell clapper. I shut my eyes and clamped on tight. He raked my ribs with those long claws. I skipped away but kept my teeth where they were. Lunging, he fell on me. His jaws clashed shut. Pain jagged through my tail. I let go to howl.

He pinned me down with one paw, raising the other to break my spine. Somehow, crazed with the hurt, I writhed free and struck upward. His remaining eye was glaring at me, and I bit it out of his head.

He screamed! A sweep of one paw sent me kiting up to slam against the banister. I lay with the wind knocked from me while the blind tiger rolled over in his agony. The beast drowned the man, and he went down the stairs and wrought havoc among his own soldiers.

A broomstick whizzed above the melee. Good old Svartalf! He’d only gone to fetch our transportation. I saw him ride toward the door of the afreet, and rose groggily to meet the next wave of Saracens.

They were still trying to control their boss. I gulped for breath and stood watching and smelling and listening. My tail seemed, ablaze. Half of it was gone.

A tommy gun began stuttering. I heard blood rattle in the emir’s lungs. He was hard to kill. That’s the end of you, Steve Matuchek, thought the man of me. They’ll do what they should have done in the first place, stand beneath you and sweep you with their fire, every tenth round argent .

The emir fell and lay gasping out his life. I waited for his men to collect their wits and remember me.

Ginny appeared on the landing, astride the broomstick. Her voice seemed to come from very far away. “Steve! Quick! Here!”

I shook my head dazedly, trying to understand. was too tired, too canine. She stuck her forgers in her, mouth and whistled. That fetched me.

She slung me across her lap and hung on tight as Svartalf piloted the stick. A gun fired blindly from below. We went out a second-story window and into the sky.

A carpet swooped near. Svartalf arched his back and poured on the Power. That Cadillac had legs! We left the enemy sitting there, and I passed out.

When I came to, I was prone on a cot in a hospital tent. Daylight was bright outside; the earth lay wet and steaming. A medic looked around as I groaned. “Hello, hero,” he said. “Better stay in that position for a while. How’re you feeling?”

I waited till full consciousness returned before I accepted a cup of bouillon. “How am I?” I whispered; they’d humanized me, of course.

“Not too bad, considering. You had some infection of your wounds—a staphylococcus that can switch species for a human or canine host—but we cleaned the bugs out with a new antibiotic technique. Otherwise, loss of blood, shock, and plain old exhaustion. You should be fine in a week or two.”

I lay thinking, my mind draggy, most of my attention on how delicious the bouillon tasted. A field hospital can’t lug around the equipment to stick pins in model bacteria. Often it doesn’t even have the enlarged anatomical dummies on which the surgeon can do a sympathetic operation. “What technique do you mean?” I asked.

“One of our boys has the Evil Eye. He looks at the germs through a microscope.”

I didn’t inquire further, knowing that Reader’s Big would be waxing lyrical about it in a few months Something else nagged at me. “The attack . . . have they begun?”

“The- Oh. That! That was two days ago, Rin-Tin Tin. You’ve been kept under asphodel. We mopped ’em up along the entire line. Last I heard, they we across the Washington border and still running.”

I sighed and went back to sleep. Even the noise as the medic dictated a report to his typewriter couldn’t hold me awake.

Ginny came in the next day, with Svartalf riding he shoulder. Sunlight striking through the tent flap turned her hair to hot copper. “Hello, Captain Matuchek, she said. “I came to see how you were, soon as I couldn’t get leave.”

I raised myself on my elbows, and whistled at the cigaret she offered. When it was between my lips, said slowly: “Come off it, Ginny. We didn’t exactly go on a date that night, but I think we’re properly introduced.”

“Yes.” She sat down on the cot and stroked my hair. That felt good. Svartalf purred at me, and I wished I could respond.

“How about the afreet?” I asked after a while.

“Still in his bottle.” She grinned. “I doubt if anybody ever be able to get him out again, assuming anybody would want to.”

“But what did you do?”

“A simple application of Papa Freud’s principles. it’s ever written up, I’ll have every Jungian in country on my neck, but it worked. I got him spinning out his memories and illusions, and found he had a hydrophobic complex—which is fear of water, Rover, not rabies—” y

“You can call me Rover,” I growled, “but if you call me Fido, gives a paddling.”

She didn’t ask why I assumed I’d be sufficiently close in future for such laying on of hands. That encouraged me. Indeed, she bushed, but went on: “Having gotten the key to his personality, I found it simple to play on his phobia. I pointed out how common a substance water is and how difficult total dehydration is. He got more and more scared. When I showed him that all animal tissue, including his own, is about eighty percent water, that was that. He crept back into his bottle and went catatonic.”

After a moment, she added thoughtfully: “I’d like to have him for my mantelpiece, but I suppose he’ll wind up in the Smithsonian. So I’ll simply write a little treatise on the military uses of psychiatry.”

“Aren’t bombs and dragons and elfshot gruesome enough?” I demanded with a shudder.

Poor simple elementals! They think they’re fiendish, but ought to take lessons from the human race.

As for me, I could imagine certain drawbacks to getting hitched with a witch, but “C’mere, youse.”