Harry Turtledove - The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

I gulped; I was sorry I’d asked. “Would it be—real blood?” I asked.

“In diaumaturgy, ‘real’ is a word almost witthout meaning,” Michael said sniffily. “It would look, feel, smell, and taste real. Whedier it could be successfully removed from the flayed human skin substitute and impplanted in the veins of someone who had suffered a loss from injury or vampirism… Truth to tell, I do not know. It might be worth determining. An interesting question. Yes.”

He pulled a pencil out of the pocket of his lab robe, peered around for something on which he could jot a note.

For one dreadful second, I feared he was going to scribble on the piece of flayed human skin substitute. I don’t think my stomach could have stood that. But at the last minute he fished out a parchment notebook instead, and did his jotting on that.

He spent the rest of the morning and the whole afternoon on tests of that sort. To my amazement and distress, he came up empty every time. No, I take that back: he did find one leak. After four in the afternoon, when both of us were fed up and frustrated enough to try something silly, he tested for stardust, and sure enough, the tip of the wand he was using glowed for a minute.

“Undoubtedly deposited here, along with more unsavory items, by one of the Hollywood light-and-magic outfits in search of a hit,” Michael said.

“But even if stardust is leaking, it’s not toxic,” I said. “The most it could possibly do would be to make somebody popular who doesn’t deserve to be.”

Michael Manstein looked at me as if I were a schoolboy who’d added two and two and come up with three. Not five, but definitely three—I’d fallen short of what was expected of me. Like a good schoolmaster, he set me straight: “The problem is not stardust outside the containment area, David. As you say, that is trivial in and of itself. The problem is that stardust could not possibly get out of the dump if it were not leaking. We have, therefore, established that the leak exists.

What we have not established is which serious contaminants are emerging from it.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling dumb. Odds were awfully good that he was right. Still, though—“You tested for all the dangerous Powers whose influences are likely to be in the dump, and came up with zip. Stardust is pretty elusive stuff; even the light-and-magic people don’t know for sure where it’ll stick. Maybe it did leak out by itself.”

“Indeed,” Michael said. “And maybe you could find a mineral able to create blasts to rival those of megasalamanders, yet I would not lose sleep fretting over the probability of either event. I will take oath upon any scripture you care to select that something—and something malevolent, at that—created the breach through which the stardust emerged. That is my professional judgment.”

You work with experts to get their professional judgment.

If, having got it, you then choose to ignore it, you’d better have a real good reason. I not only didn’t have a real good reason, I thought Michael was right. But if he was, what had gone wrong?

I said, “What bothers me most about detecting the stardust and nothing more serious is that the dump operators will be able to claim that the dust didn’t really come from inside, even though we know it was dumped there.”

“The neighborhood will make it hard for them to substantiate that.” Michael waved to show what he meant I had to nod. If ever a neighborhood remained conspicuously untouched by stardust, the one around the Devonshire dump was it “Why haven’t we found any nastier influences leaking, then?” I asked.

The most obvious reason is a failure in our testing technique,” Michael answered. “I must confess, however, that at this moment I cannot tell you where the flaw lies. All my procedures have in the past shown themselves to be more than satisfactory.”

I asked my watch what time it was. When I found out it was twenty to five, I said, “Let’s knock off for the day and see if we’re more brilliant in the morning.” I wanted to get back to my own carpet so I could go down to my place, pack an overnight case, and then head for Judy’s.

Most days, Michael Manstein’s impressive integrity wouldn’t have let him contemplate taking off early, let alone doing it. When he said, “Why not?” I confess I blinked. He added, “We certainly aren’t accomplishing anything here at the moment with the possible exception of entertaining the security guard.” Maybe he was trying to justify leaving to himself, or maybe to me. At that point I didn’t need any justifying; all I wanted to do was head south.

Michael must have talked himself into it, because he started sticking tools and substances back into his little black bag. I stood there waiting, hoping he wouldn’t get an attack of conscience. He didn’t. As soon as he was through, we walked across the street to his carpet and headed for Westwood.

Traffic was its usual ghastly self. So many carpets on so many flyways meant there was so much lint and dander in the air that the famous Angels City sunshine turned pale and washed-out; a lot of people were rubbing their eyes as they flew. That pollution usually seems worse in St. Ferdinand’s Valley than other parts of town, too; they don’t get the sea breeze there to clear it out What they’re going to have to do one of these days is design a flying carpet that isn’t woven from wool. People have been trying to do that for years; so far, they haven’t managed to come up with one the sylphs like. But if they don’t succeed before too long, Angels City isn’t going to be a place anybody in his right mind would want to live.

I breathed easier—literally and figuratively—when we got out of the Valley and back into Westwood. Michael pulled up beside my carpet in the parking lot. “Are you going to go back up to your office and see what awaits you?” he asked.

“Nope,” I said. “What’s that New Testament line? Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof? Something like that, anyhow. Tomorrow will have troubles of its own. I’m not really interested in finding out about them in advance.”

“As you will,” Michael said. Since it was nearer six than five, he didn’t have any trouble finding a parking space—most people who work at the Confederal Building had gone home. He headed on in anyhow; now that he was here, he’d do some more work. Maybe he was feeling bad about his fall from probity.

Me, I didn’t feel bad at all. Hungry, yes, but not bad. I jumped onto my carpet and headed home. I got off at Imperial instead of The Second, just in case more earth elementals with my name on them were waiting for me.

If they were, I evaded them—I got home unscathed. I stayed just long enough to use the plumbing and toss tomorrow’s outfit into an overnight case. Then I was out the door, down the stairs, back on my carpet, and on my way to Judy’s.

Going down St James’ Freeway into Long Beach in the evening is a gamble. When it’s bad, the carpets might as well be sitting on your living room floor. I could have got there at nine as easily as a little before eight But I was lucky, and so I pulled up in front of Judy’s place right on time.

I used the talisman to let her building’s Watcher know I belonged there, then went up the stairs two at a time to her flat. I knocked on the door. When she didn’t come right away, I figured she was using the plumbing herself or something, so I let myself in.

I took one step in the front room and then stopped, staring. For a second, I thought I’d gone into the wrong flat. It took me a while to realize Judy’s spare key wouldn’t have let me into any place but hers.

But Judy, as befits a copy editor, is scrupulously neat. The flat had been trashed. Books were scattered all over the floor, knickknacks strewn everywhere. Some of them were broken.