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Suddenly, in the midst of a casual remark, he grabbed the back of my head. A glass seemed to appear from nowhere in his fist. He tried to force its contents past my lips. I took just one sniff and knocked the glass from his grip and struck him with the other fist.
He danced back, holding the side of his face. “How do you feel now?” he asked.
“I’m all right,” I said, “but I thought for a moment I’d choke. I wanted to kill you for trying to do that to me.”
“I had to give you a final test. You passed it with a big A. You’re thoroughly conditioned against the Brew.”
The two Lewises said nothing. They were irked because I, a civilian, had thought of this method of combating the allure of the Brew. The thousand Marines, scheduled to follow me in two days, would have to wear oxygen masks to save them from temptation. As for my companion, she had been hastily put under hypnosis by Duerf, but he didn’t know how successfully. Fortunately, her mission would not take as long as mine. She was supposed to go to the source of the Brew and bring back a sample. If, however, I needed help, I was to call on her. Also, though it was unstated, I was to keep her from succumbing to the Brew.
We shook hands all around, and we walked away. Warm air fell over us like a curtain. One moment, we were shivering; the next, sweating. That was bad. It meant we’d be drinking more water than we had provided ourselves with.
I looked around in the bright moonlight. Two years had changed the Illinois-scape. There were many more trees than there had been, trees of a type you didn’t expect to see this far north. Whoever was responsible for the change had had many seeds and sprouts shipped in, in preparation for the warmer climate. I knew, for I had checked in Chicago on various shipments and had found that a man by the name of Smith—Smith!—had, two weeks after Durham’s disappearance, begun ordering from tropical countries. The packages had gone to an Onaback house and had ended up in the soil hereabouts. Durham must have realized that this river-valley area couldn’t support its customary 300,000 people, once the railroads and trucks quit shipping in cans of food and fresh milk and provisions. The countryside would have been stripped by the hungry hordes.
“It looks to me,” whispered Alice Lewis, “like the Garden of Eden.”
“Stop talking treason, Alice!” I snapped.
She iced me with a look. “Don’t be silly. And don’t call me Alice. I’m a major in the Marines.”
“Pardon,” I said. “But we’d better drop the rank. The natives might wonder. What’s more, we’d better shed these clothes before we run into somebody.”
She wanted to object, but she had her orders. Even though we were to be together at least thirty-six hours, and would be mother-naked all that time, she insisted we go into the bushes to peel. I didn’t argue.
I stepped behind a tree and took off my shorts. At the same time, I smelled cigar smoke. I slipped off the webbing holding the tank to my back and walked out onto the narrow trail. I got a hell of a shock.
A monster leaned against a tree, his short legs crossed, a big Havana sticking from the side of his carnivorous mouth, his thumbs tucked in an imaginary vest.
I shouldn’t have been frightened. I should have been amused. This creature had stepped right out of a very famous comic strip. He stood seven feet high, had a bright green hide and yellow-brown plates ru
My shock came not only from the unexpectedness of his appearance. There is a big difference between something seen on paper and that seen in the flesh. This thing was cute and humorous and lovable in the strip. Transformed into living color and substance, it was monstrous.
“Don’t get scared,” said the apparition. “I grow on you after a while.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
At that moment, Alice stepped out from behind a tree. She gasped, and she grabbed my arm.
He waved his cigar. “I’m the Allegory on the Banks of the Illinois. Welcome, strangers, to the domain of the Great Mahrud.”
I didn’t know what he meant by those last few words. And it took a minute to figure out that his title was a pun derived from the aforesaid cartoonist and from Sheridan’s Mrs. Malaprop.
“Albert Allegory is the full name,” he said. “That is, in this metamorph. Other forms, other names, you know. And you two, I suppose, are outsiders who wish to live along the Illinois, drink from the Brew, and worship the Bull.” He held out his hand with the two inside fingers clenched and the thumb and outside finger extended.
“How do you know I’m from the outside?” I asked. I didn’t try to lie. He didn’t seem to be bent on hurting us.
He laughed, and his vast mouth megaphoned the sound. Alice, no longer the cocky WHAM officer, gripped my hand hard.
He said, “I’m sort of a demigod, you might say. When Mahrud, bull be his name, became a god, he wrote a letter to me— using the U. S. mails of course—and invited me to come here and demigod for him. I’d never cared too much for the world as it was so I slipped in past the Army cordon and took over the duties that Mahrud, bull be his name, gave me.”
I, too, had received a letter from my former professor. It had arrived before the trouble developed, and I had not understood his invitation to come live with him and be his demigod. I’d thought he’d slipped a gear or two.
For lack of anything pertinent to say, I asked, “What are your duties?”
He waved his cigar again. “My job, which is anything but onerous, is to meet outsiders and caution them to keep their eyes open. They are to remember that not everything is what it seems, and they are to look beyond the surface of the deed for the symbol.”
He puffed on his cigar and then said, “I have a question for you. I don’t want you to answer it now, but I want you to think about it and give me an answer later.” He blew smoke again. “My question is this—where do you want to go now?”
He didn’t offer to expand his question. He said, “So long,” and strolled off down a side-path, his short legs seeming to move almost independently of his elongated saurian torso. I stared for a moment, still shaking from the encounter. Then I returned to the tree behind which I’d left my water-tank and strapped it back on.
We walked away fast. Alice was so subdued that she did not seem conscious of our nudity. After a while, she said, “Something like that frightens me. How could a man assume a form like that?”
“We’ll find out,” I said with more optimism than I felt. “I think we’d better be prepared for just about anything.”
“Perhaps the story Mrs. Durham told you back at Base was true.”
I nodded. The Professor’s wife had said that, shortly before the Area was sealed off, she had gone to the bluffs across the river, where she knew her husband was. Even though he had a
Mrs. Durham had taken two lawyers along, just in case. She was highly incoherent about what happened across the river. But some strange force, apparently operated by Dr. Durham, had turned her into a large tailed ape, causing her to flee. The two lawyers, metamorphosed into skunks, had also beaten a retreat.
Considering these strange events, Alice said, “What I can’t understand is how Durham could do these things. Where’s his power? What sort of gadget does he have?” Hot as it was, my skin developed gooseflesh. I could scarcely tell her that I was almost certainly responsible for this entire situation. I felt guilty enough without actually telling the truth. Moreover, if I had told her what I believed to be the truth, she’d have known I was crazy. Nevertheless, that was the way it was, and that was why I had volunteered for this assignment. I’d started it; I had to finish it.