“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.”
“I’m the Sir Gawain all right, but I didn’t do any triumphing. That’s just a bit of propaganda Uncle Arthur put out after I got my head whacked off. What happened was that one night when we were all at dinner a drunk wearing green armor came staggering in looking for a fight.
“He was so old and feeble that the king didn’t feel right about matching him with any of the regulars so he picked on me. I’d had a couple of drinks myself or I’d never have gone through with it.
“As it was, I didn’t go very far. It was the shortest fight in the history of the Round Table. The old boy let fly with his battle axe and I ducked. Wasn’t fast enough. The head that came off was mine. Arthur hushed things up as best he could for the sake of the family name, and then a couple of years later when he got news that the Green Knight had lost the decision in a bout with the D.T.s, he had one of his bards cook up a story that didn’t make me look so silly.
“Anyway, after taking a quick look at that manuscript I decided you needed somebody else, so I used the guy in the other book.”
“What other book?” demanded Albert, a horrifying suspicion forming inside his head.
“Something called The Big Kill. That Hammer chap was quite a lad. He got himself out of worse spots than this in every other chapter.”
“Turn me back,” gasped Albert. “That character is a moral cesspool.”
“Why not just give him a try?”
Albert felt himself being more and more lost in the new growling stranger who was taking over his body.
“I’ll take care of you later!” he snarled. “Right now I’m going to smoke out some of the vermin that have been lousing up my city!”
Swinging the brass curtain rod like a war club, he stalked purposefully to the door and began to pound on it. A moment later Gutsy’s voice was heard on the other side.
“What’s going on in there?”
“Open up and you’ll find out,” growled Albert.
“Are you ready to talk business?”
“Yeah!”
There was a sound of a key turning and a little popping came from behind Albert as Whooping Water prudently removed himself from sight. Then the door swung open and Gutsy stepped in. There was an expression of deep disappointment on his face. He had been looking forward to his intimidation session with Priscilla