Tracy grunted. "You know magic, apparently. Why can't you-"
"Because," Meg said very softly, "you killed Gwinn. I won't outlast him. And I had been looking forward to a decade or two more on Earth. In this plane, I'm free from certain painful duties that are mine elsewhere."
"Hell?"
"Anthropomorphically speaking, yes. But your idea of Hell isn't mine. Which is natural, since in my normal state my senses aren't the same as yours."
Meg jumped down from the chair and began to wander around the room. Tracy watched it-her-closely. His hand felt for and clutched the book.
The cat said, "This will be an interesting game of wits. The book will give you considerable help-but I have my magic."
"You're determined to-to kill me?" Tracy reached for his topcoat. "Why?"
"I told you. Revenge."
"Can't we bargain?"
"No," Meg said. "There's nothing you can offer me that would be any inducement. I'll stick around, and enlist a salamander or something to get rid of you."
"Suppose I put a bullet into you?" Tracy asked, taking his automatic from the coat. He leveled it. "You're flesh and blood. Well?".
The cat sat down, eyeing Tracy steadily. "Try it," Meg said.
For no sensible reason, the reporter felt curiously frightened. He lowered the gun.
"I rather wish," Meg said, "that you had tried to kill me."
"Oh, hell," Tracy grunted, and got up, the book in his hand. "I'm going to get another drink." Struck by a thought, he paused. "For all I know, you may still be a hallucination. A drunken one. In that case-" He grinned. "May I offer you a saucer of cream, Meg?"
"Thanks," said the cat appreciatively. "I'd like it."
Tracy, pouring the cream, grinned at his reflection in the kitchen window. "Toujours gai, all right," he soliloquized. "Maybe I should put rat poison in this. Oh, well."
Meg lapped the cream, keeping her eyes on Tracy, who was dividing his attention between his drink and the book. "I wonder about this," he said. "There doesn't seem to be anything magical about it. Do messages appear-like a clairvoyant's slate?"
The cat snorted delicately. "Things don't work that way," she said. "The book's got fifty pages. Well, you'll find an answer to every conceivable human problem on one of those pages."
Tracy frowned. "That's ridiculous."
"Is it? History repeats itself, and human beings live a life of cliches. Has it occurred to you, Tracy, that humanity's life pattern can be boiled down to a series of equations? Fifty of them, I think. You can find the lowest common denominator, if you go far enough, but that's far beyond human understanding. As I see it, the author of that book analyzed humanity's lives, boiled them down to the basic patterns, and expressed those equations as grammatical sentences. A mere matter of semantics," Meg finished.
"I don't think I get it. Wait a minute. Maybe I do. 13ab minus b equals 13a. '13ab' stands for eggs: Don't count your chickens before they are hatched."
"Muddy reasoning, but you have the idea," Meg acknowledged. "Besides, you forgot the hen."
"Incubator," Tracy said absently, and brooded over the book. "You mean, then, that this has the answer to every known human problem. What about this: 'Werewolves can't climb oak trees'? How often does anybody meet a werewolf?"
"Symbolism is involved. And personal psychological associations. The third-but-last owner of that book, by the way, was a werewolf," Meg purred. "You'd be surprised how beautifully it all fits."
"Who wrote it?" Tracy asked.
The cat shrugged, a beautifully liquid gesture. "A mathematician, of course. I understand he developed the idea as a hobby."
"Satan?"
"Don't give yourself airs. Human beings aren't important. Earth isn't important, except to provide intellectual exercise to others. Still and all, this is a simple world, with too little of the uncertainty factor."
Tracy started to laugh. After a while he said, "I just realized I was sitting here discussing semantics with a cat."
But Meg had vanished.
Familiarity with an enemy destroys wariness, and no doubt the cat knew that well enough. Obviously Tracy should have been on guard. The fact that Meg had drunk his cream-the equivalent of bread and salt-meant nothing; cats are amoral, familiars, by preference, immoral. The combination was perilous.
But Tracy, his mind slightly hazy with whiskey, clutched the book like a buckler and felt safe. He was thinking about formulas of logic. "Matter of deduction," he muttered. "I suppose the author made a lot of graphs and things and arrived at his conclusions that way. Tested them by induction. Whew.'" It was a dizzying thought.
Again he examined the book. The white circle on the cover was luminous again, and there was a number visible there. Tracy's stomach lurched.
Page 34.
He glanced around hastily, expecting anything; but the apartment seemed unchanged. Meg had not reappeared.
Page 34 said, "Canaries need oxygen."
Canaries?
Tracy remembered. A few days ago, a friend had given him an expensive roller canary, and he had not yet got rid of the creature. Its cage hung in a corner, covered with a white cloth. No sound proceeded from it.
Tracy went over and pulled the cover away. The canary was in trouble. It was lying on the bottom of the cage, kicking spasmodically, beak wide open.
Oxygen?
Tracy whistled under his breath and whirled to the windows, yanking them open one by one. The gusts of cold, fresh air made his head spin. He hadn't realized how drunk he was.
Whiskey, however, didn't account for the feeling of sick nausea in his stomach. He watched the canary slowly revive, and chewed at his lip. The air in the room hadn't been depleted enough to kill a bird. This wasn't a coal mine.
A coal mine-gas-yeah! Tracy, grinning tightly, dropped to his knees beside the gas radiator. As he had expected, the cock was turned on full, and he could hear a soft hissing.
Meg didn't always depend on magic. And a cat's paws were handy little tools.
Tracy closed the valve and made a circuit of the apartment, finding another open radiator in the bedroom. He attended to that. The canary recovered and peeped feebly. Tracy threw the cover back over its cage and considered.
The book. The numerals on the cover had faded again.
He felt a resurgence of panic. Ten references were allowed him. He had used two. That left eight-only eight. And Meg was a resourceful familiar, hell bent on revenge.
There was a thought stirring at the back of Tracy's mind, but it refused to emerge. He relaxed and closed his eyes. After a while the thought came out of hiding.
In his hands he held a magical power whose potentialities were unlimited. The brown book had the answer to every human problem. If Napoleon had possessed it, or Luther, or Caesar-well! Life was a succession of problems. Men were handicapped by their inability to visualize the complete equation. So they made mistakes.
But this book, Tracy thought, told the right answer.
Ironic that its powers should be wasted. That was what the situation amounted to. Ten references were allowed; after that, Meg would get her revenge, unhindered by the book's countermagic. What a waste!
Tracy rubbed his temples hard. A gold mine had been dumped in his lap, and he was trying to figure out a way of using it. Any time danger threatened, the book would give the solution, according to the equation of logic. Then the magic was, so to speak, passive.
Not quite. If Tracy faced financial ruin, that would certainly come under the classification of danger. Unless the meaning embraced only the danger of bodily harm. He hoped there were no such limitations.