brass tube firmly in both hands, he waved it over the smoldering rags and waited. He didn’t have to wait long.
There was a sudden popping sound and a small brown figure materialized in the middle of the room. His eyes were closed and he was swaying back and forth as he chanted:
From the land of sky blue waters
Comes the chieftain Whopping Water
Comes across the vasty darkness
Comes to speak to—
“Oh, no!” moaned Albert.
The little Indian slowly opened his eyes. “Great White Father has look on face like brave who dial wrong number on talking machine.”
Albert looked down at the black book and then back at Whooping Water.
The little Indian followed his glance and then snorted. “That thing! That’s a pirated edition. Both the editor and the compositor were illiterate idiots. You would be lucky to raise a ninth order elemental with anything in there. I wouldn’t be here myself if I weren’t bored still with just sitting around the office waiting for a call. The one from MacGruder was the first this week. What’s happened over on this side? The D.A. been closing up all the joints?”
Albert sat silent for a moment, trying to adjust to the new reality.
“Then none of this hocus-pocus really works?” he asked finally.
“Well,” said Whooping Water slowly, “you did open the gate. But that can be done in a dozen different ways.”
“What about this?” said Albert, picking up the blasting rod and jamming it suddenly into the smoldering rags of his little fire.
Whooping Water let out a sudden yell, and leaping to his feet, clapped both hands to his posterior.
Albert jerked the rod out of the fire. “Sorry,” he said. “I was just trying to find out if I had any control over you.”
“Next time you want to find out something, ask!” said the little Indian bitterly. “Now I’m here, what do you want?”
“Out,” said Albert briefly.
“How?” asked the Indian with equal brevity.
Albert thought for a moment.
“I suppose the easiest way would be for you to transport Priscilla and me to the nearest police station.”
Whooping Water shook his head. “Wish I could, old man, but I’m just not up to it. The only person I can directly affect is the one who calls me up—and even then my powers are extremely limited.”
Albert took a quick look at his watch. He didn’t have too much time left.
“Then what can you do?”
“I might temporarily superimpose a new character on your old one. Alexander, Napoleon, Julius Caesar—anybody at all.”
“People get shock therapy for that in this world,” said Albert. “What’s the point?”
“A rather obvious one. Suppose you wanted to play the stock market. I could give you the attitudes and responses of an Insull or a Rothschild. By following the imposed set of impulses you’d know just what to do and when.”
“I don’t want to play the market,” said Albert plaintively. “All that I want to do is rescue Priscilla before it’s too late!”
“Then think of somebody who was an expert at the rescuing business.”
“Well…” said Albert, and then suddenly smashed his right fist into his left palm in the most virile gesture he’d made in years. “Sir Gawain!”
“Beg pardon?” said Whooping Water with a start.
“Sir Gawain. He was King Arthur’s nephew and one of the greatest knights of the Round Table.”
There was a strange expression on Whooping Water’s face as he shook his head vigorously. “You’d be making a terrible mistake,” he said. “You see, actually the popular image of Gawain doesn’t correspond at all to the real man. In fact—”
“For your information,” interrupted Albert stiffly, “the Gawain myths happen to be my special field of study. In the first place, he had no actual existence. He was a folk hero who embodied all the characteristics of the ideal knight. And in the second—” He stopped suddenly as he realized that he was automatically swinging into the Gawain lecture that he always gave during the first week of his survey course.
“And in the second,” he snapped, “I’m giving orders around here. You will go immediately to my apartment and skim through the manuscript that is sitting on the coffee table. That will give you an excellent picture of Gawain’s character.”
“But…”
“Get going!”
Whooping Water got.
Ten seconds later he was back. His face was perfectly blank but there seemed to be a look of secret amusement in his eyes.
“Mission completed,” he said. “All set?” Albert nodded nervously.
“Go ahead,” he said.
The little Indian held two fingers up to his forehead like horns and pointed them at Albert. They wriggled slightly and then a fat green spark jumped from each of them. Albert winced as a sudden convulsive shock ran through him.
“I hope I made the right choice,” he muttered as he waited for the change.
“You didn’t,” said Whooping Water cheerfully, “so I took the liberty of making another selection.”
Before Albert could answer, the change hit him. He felt himself being swept by surges of strange raw emotion such as he had never felt before. There were gongs beating inside his head and he wanted to smash somebody—hard. The part of him that was still Albert fought desperately for control.
“I’m not turning into Gawain!” he gasped.
Whooping Water grinned. “Heap sorry, boss. But I got reasons. Good reasons.”
The air around the small Indian suddenly turned opaque.
4
When it cleared Whooping Water was gone and in his place stood a skinny and buck-toothed young man whose first words betrayed his English origin.
“Never did like that get-up,” he said. “But for some reason or other most of the local mediums demand Indians. Anyway, the reason I was so set against your patterning yourself on Sir Gawain was that”—his voice dropped to a confidential whisper—“I am, or at least I was the one and original Gawain. And frankly, old man, I’m the last person in the world I’d recommend to a man in your predicament as a model.”
“You’re the Sir Gawain?” whispered Albert. “The one who triumphed over the Green Knight.”
