Gerber took the box. The servant limped away and Herbie’s eyes followed him suspiciously. Was the limp genuine or was it a piece of misdirection?
The box folded out flat as the proverbial pancake. All four sides hinged to the bottom, the top hinged to one of the sides. There were little brass catches.
Herbie took a quick step back so he could see behind it while the front was displayed to the audience. Yes, he saw it now. A triangular compartment built against one side of the lid, mirror-covered, angles calculated to achieve invisibility. Old stuff. Herbie felt a little disappointed.
The prestidigitator folded the box, mirror-concealed compartment inside. He turned slightly. “Now, my fine young man—”
What happened in Tibet wasn’t the only factor; it was merely the final link of a chain.
The Tibetan weather had been unusual that week, highly unusual. It had been warm. More snow succumbed to the gentle warmth than had melted in more years than man could count. The streams ran high, they ran wide and fast.
Along the streams some prayer wheels whirled faster than they had ever whirled. Others, submerged, stopped altogether. The priests, knee-deep in the cold water, worked frantically, moving the wheels nearer to shore where again the rushing torrent would turn them.
There was one small wheel, a very old one that had revolved without cease for longer than any man knew. So long had it been there that no living lama recalled what had been inscribed upon its prayer plate, nor what had been the purpose of that prayer.
The rushing water had neared its axle when the lama Klarath reached for it to move it to safety. Just too late. His foot slid in the slippery mud and the back of his hand touched the wheel as he fell. Knocked loose from its moorings, it swirled down with the flood, rolling along the bottom of the stream, into deeper and deeper waters.
While it rolled, all was well.
The lama rose, shivering from his momentary immersion, and went after another of the spinning wheels. What, he thought, could one small wheel matter? He didn’t know that—now that other links had broken—only that tiny thing stood between Earth and Armageddon.
The prayer wheel of Wangur Ul rolled on, and on, until—a mile farther down—it struck a ledge, and stopped. That was the moment.
“And now, my fine young man—”
Herbie Westerman—we’re back in Cincinnati now—looked up, wondering why the prestidigitator had stopped in mid-sentence. He saw the face of Gerber the Great contorted as though by a great shock. Without moving, without changing, his face began to change. Without appearing different, it became different.
Quietly, then, the magician began to chuckle. In the overtones of that soft laughter was all of evil. No one who heard it could have doubted who he was. No one did doubt. The audience, every member of it, knew in that awful moment who stood before them, knew it—even the most skeptical among them—beyond shadow of doubt.
No one moved, no one spoke, none drew a shuddering breath. There are things beyond fear. Only uncertainty causes fear, and the Bijou Theater was filled, then, with a dreadful certainty.
The laughter grew. Crescendo, it reverberated into the far dusty corners of the gallery. Nothing—not a fly on the ceiling—moved.
Satan spoke.
“I thank you for your kind attention to a poor magician.” He bowed, ironically low. “The performance is ended.” He smiled. “All performances are ended.”
Somehow the theater seemed to darken, although the electric lights still burned. In dead silence, there seemed to be the sound of wings, leathery wings, as though invisible Things were gathering.
On the stage was a dim red radiance. From the head and from each shoulder of the tall figure of the magician there sprang a tiny flame. A naked flame.
There were other flames. They flickered along the proscenium of the stage, along the footlights. One sprang from the lid of the folded box little Herbie Westerman still held in his hands.
Herbie dropped the box.
Did I mention that Herbie Westerman was a Safety Cadet? It was purely a reflex action. A boy of nine doesn’t know much about things like Armageddon, but Herbie Westerman should have known that water would never have put out that fire.
But, as I said, it was purely a reflex action. He yanked out his new water pistol and squirted it at the box of the pigeon trick. And the fire did vanish, even as a spray from the stream of water ricocheted and dampened the trouser leg of Gerber the Great, who had been facing the other way.
There was a sudden, brief hissing sound. The lights were growing bright again, and all the other flames were dying, and the sound of wings faded, blended into another sound—the rustling of the audience.
The eyes of the prestidigitator were closed. His voice sounded strangely strained as he said: “This much power I retain. None of you will remember this.”
Then, slowly, he turned and picked up the fallen box. He held it out to Herbie Westerman. “You must be more careful, boy,” he said. “Now hold it so.”
He tapped the top lightly with his wand. The door fell open. Three white pigeons flew out of the box. The rustle of their wings was not leathery.
Herbie Westerman’s father came down the stairs and, with a purposeful air, took his razor strop off the hook on the kitchen wall.
Mrs. Westerman looked up from stirring the soup on the stove. “Why, Henry,” she asked, “are you really going to punish him with that—just for squirting a little water out of the window of the car on the way home?”
Her husband shook his head grimly. “Not for that, Marge. But don’t you remember we bought him that water gun on the way downtown, and that he wasn’t near a water faucet after that? Where do you think he filled it?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “When we stopped in at the cathedral to talk to Father Ryan about his confirmation, that’s when the little brat filled it. Out of the baptismal font! Holy water he uses in his water pistol!”
He clumped heavily up the stairs, strop in hand.
Rhythmic thwacks and wails of pain floated down the staircase. Herbie—who had saved the world—was having his reward.
Of Time and Eustace Weaver
When Eustace Weaver invented his time machine, he was a very happy man. He knew that he had the world by the tail on a downhill pull, as long as he kept his invention a secret. He could become the richest man in the world, wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. All he had to do was to take short trips into the future to learn what stocks had gone up and which horses had won races, then come back to the present and buy those stocks or bet on those horses.
The races would come first, of course, because he would need a lot of capital to play the market, whereas, at a track, he could start with a two-dollar bet and quickly parlay it into the thousands. But it would have to be at a track; he’d too quickly break any bookie he played with, and besides he didn’t know any bookies. Unfortunately the only tracks operating at the present were in Southern California and in Florida, about equidistant and about a hundred dollars’ worth of plane fare away. He didn’t have a fraction of that sum, and it would take him weeks to save that much out of his salary as stock clerk at a supermarket. It would be horrible to have to wait that long, even to start getting rich.
Suddenly he remembered the safe at the supermarket where he worked—an afternoon/evening shift from one o’clock until the market closed at nine. There’d be at least a thousand dollars in that safe, and it had a time lock. What could be better than a time machine to beat a time lock?