A Sudden Wild Magic

“I’ll see.” Amanda swept out of the car. Zillah unbuckled Marcus and ran after her, carrying Marcus, ready to lend her weight to Amanda’s fury if necessary. And it might be necessary for once, she saw. The warehouse door slid aside under Amanda’s angry hand, evidently unlocked. “And they took the wards off!” Amanda snarled. “Who is this fool?”

They clattered inside, into semidark. Zillah at once felt that, for some reason, everything was probably all right. She could see the capsule, a shrouded, nearly oblong thing almost the size of a bus, bulking in the center of the space, and she could tell it had not been tampered with. There was more than that. A kind of strength grew up around her from the floor. Doubtfully, she conjectured that this warehouse had been chosen because it happened to have been built over some place of power. She felt quite unworried as she followed Amanda around to the far side of the capsule.

A limber brown-clothed figure swung its long legs down from the crate it had been sitting on. “At last!”

“Maureen!” Anger, relief, and surprise made Amanda’s voice turn high and chilly. “What the hell are you doing? We nearly hit your damn car! You know perfectly well that none of the rest of you are supposed to come here.”

Maureen shrugged. “Where’s the harm? This place is warded sky-high — and I just had to consult you over our final list for people to go. Whatever time they go, it has to be soon. Don’t you understand? And I’ve got teams training in separate batches all over the country. None of them know if they’re going or not, or anything about what they’re really going for, and it’s not fair on them or their families, Amanda. It’s putting me under a lot of pressure, not being—” She stopped as she saw Zillah behind Amanda and continued looking at Zillah over Amanda’s head, meaningfully.

Zillah lowered Marcus to the floor. She did not like Maureen, and she knew Maureen did not like her. This could be rather unfortunate.

“I still fail to see why you had to come here,” Amanda said. “You could have phoned me, or consulted one of the other two. They both know all the people as well as I do.”

“It’s your baby — you made the first selection,” Maureen said, strolling back and forth with her hands in the deep brown pockets of her coat. “And Gladys isn’t doing anything but watch Laputa-Blish these days. Mark’s up to the armpits calculating those tides Gladys found and matching them with sidereal tables, trying to find us a window.” Her eyes flicked across to Zillah. “I went and tried to see Mark twice, as it happens. The first time all we did was have this long, long argument, because he said it wasn’t possible for them to go at full Moon, and I said it had got to be.”

She knows! Zillah thought. She fancies Mark herself and she’s letting me know.

“I managed to persuade Mark in the end,” Maureen continued, “but it was so late then, I had to leave. The second time I went, that wife of his was there, and it was all cuddle up, cuddle up, and she wouldn’t let me have a moment alone with him—”

She stopped as Marcus plodded forward and stared up at her. He pointed with a starfish finger. “Do bitch,” he stated.

“What?” Maureen’s head jerked downward, and she bent over him like a vulture.

“He says you’re a witch,” Amanda translated hastily. “It’s amazing how they know.”

“Oh,” Maureen said.

It became imperative to Zillah to get away from Maureen. She scooped Marcus up and carried him away through the porthole-like door of the capsule. Inside, it was suddenly all right again. Immense safety had been built into the thick walls of the thing — strong Amanda safety, which reminded Zillah of Amanda’s house, particularly of her beautiful, battered kitchen. There were no windows. The only light came from the round door. Soothed and calm and quiet, Zillah carried Marcus along the central gangway, hearing nothing but the metallic ring of her footsteps and seeing nothing much but bent, wriggly reflections of herself and Marcus in the silver metal welded over the walls, ceiling, and floor. The thing had been a bus once. The seats were now reduced to twenty or so. The rear end was partly blocked off with more silvery metal, and Zillah conjectured that the machinery she could dimly see through the places where the metal was missing had to be a life-support system. At the front end, the drivers’ seats faced television screens instead of windows, and there were controls of a sort, though not many. Zillah paced back and forth. As she went, she detached a long, coiling gingerish hair from her head and then quietly removed a short, fine one from Marcus. Why she should do this, she had no idea. When she had both hairs, again impelled by reasons she did not understand, she tucked both, the long and the short one, well down inside the upholstery of a seat near the back.

Meanwhile, Maureen said ferociously to Amanda, “Why is she here? How much have you told her? You talk about me breaking security, but honestly!”