“Professor, there’s been no mistake! Who else but an expert in quantum theory could deal with a situation like this?”
“Well, I suppose there is a certain superficial semantic parallelism—”
“Wonderful, Professor: I knew you’d do it!” Lucifer grabbed Dimpleby’s hand and wrung it warmly. “How do we begin?”
“Here, you’re talking nonsense!” Dimpleby extracted his hand, used it to lift his ale tankard once again. “Of course,” he said after taking a hearty pull, “if you’re right about the nature of these varying energy levels—and these, er, entities do manage the jump from one quantum state to the next—then I suppose they’d be subject to the same sort of physical laws as any other energetic particles . . . ” He thumped the mug down heavily on the tabletop and resumed jotting. “The Compton effect,” he muttered. “Raman’s work . . . The Stern-Gerlack experiment. Hmmm.”
“You’ve got something?” Lucifer and Curlene said simultaneously.
“Just a theoretical notion,” he said off-handedly, and waved airily to a passing waiter. “Three more, Chudley.”
“Johnny,” Curlene wailed. “Don’t stop now!”
“Professor—time is of the essence!” Lucifer groaned.
“Say, the broccoli is stirring around,” Curlene said in a low tone. “Is he planning another practical joke?”
Lucifer cast apprehensive eyes toward the fireplace. “He doesn’t actually do it intentionally, you know. He can’t help it; it’s like, well, a blind man switching on the lights in a darkroom. He wouldn’t understand what all the excitement was about.”
“Excuse me,” Dimpleby said. “Ale goes through me pretty rapidly.” He rose, slightly jogging the elbow of the waiter pouring ice water into a glass at the next table. The chill stream dived precisely into the cleavage of a plump woman in a hat like a chef’s salad for twelve. She screamed and fell backward into the path of the servitor approaching with a tray of foaming ale tankards. All three malt beverages leaped head-first onto the table, their contents sluicing across it into Lucifer’s lap, while the overspill distributed itself between Dimpleby’s hip pockets.
He stared down at the table awash in ale, turned a hard gaze on the fireplace.
“Like that, eh?” he said in a brittle voice. He faced the Devil, who was dabbing helplessly at his formerly white flannels.
“All right, Lucifer,” he said. “You’re on! A few laughs at the expense of academic dignity are fine—but I’m damned if I’m going to stand by and see good beer wasted! Now, let’s get down to cases. Tell me all you know about these out-of-town incubi . . . ”
3
It was almost dawn. In his third floor laboratory in Prudfrock Hall, Professor Dimpleby straightened from the marble-topped bench over which he had been bent for the better part of the night.
“Well,” he said, rubbing his eyes, “I don’t know. It might work.” He glanced about the big room. “Now, if you’ll just shoo one of your, ah, extra-terrestrial essences in here, we’ll see.”
“No problem there, Professor,” Lucifer said anxiously. “I’ve had all I could do to hold them at bay all night, with some of the most potent incantations since Solomon sealed the Afrit up in a bottle.”
“Then, too, I don’t suppose they’d find the atmosphere of a scientific laboratory very congenial,” Dimpleby said with a somewhat lofty smile, “inasmuch as considerable effort has been devoted to excluding chance from the premises.”
“You think so?” Lucifer said glumly. “For your own peace of mind, I suggest you don’t conduct any statistical analyses just now.”
“Well, with the clear light of morning and the dissipation of the alcohol, the rationality of what we’re doing seems increasingly questionable—but nonetheless, we may as well carry the experiment through. Even negative evidence has a certain value.”
“Ready?” Lucifer said.
“Ready,” Dimpleby said, suppressing a yawn. Lucifer made a face and executed an intricate dance step. There was a sharp sense of tension released—like the popping of an invisible soap-bubble—and something appeared drifting lazily in the air near the precision scales. One side of the instrument dropped with a sharp clunk!
“All the air concentrated on one side of the balance,” Lucifer said tensely.
“Maxwell’s demon—in the flesh?” Dimpleby gasped.
“It looks like a giant pizza,” Curlene said, “only transparent.”
The apparition gave a flirt of its rim and sailed across to hover before a wall chart illustrating the periodic table. The paper burst into flame.
“All the energetic air molecules rushed to one spot,” Lucifer explained. “It could happen any time—but it seldom does.”
“Good lord! What if it should cause all the air to rush to one end of the room?” Dimpleby whispered.
“I daresay it would rupture your lungs, Professor. So I wouldn’t waste any more time, if I were you.”
“Imagine what must be going on outside,” Curlene said. “With these magical pizzas and broccoli wandering loose all over the place!”
“Is that what all those sirens were about?” Dimpleby said. He stationed himself beside the bread-board apparatus he had constructed and swallowed hard.
“Very well, Lucifer—see if you can herd it over this way.”
The devil frowned in concentration. The pizza drifted slowly, rotating as if looking for the source of some irritation. It gave an impatient twitch and headed toward Curlene. Lucifer made a gesture and it veered off, came sailing in across the table.
“Now!” Dimpleby said, and threw a switch. As if struck by a falling brick, the alien entity slammed to the center of the three-foot disk encircled by massive magnetic coils.
It hopped and threshed, to no avail.
“The field is holding it!” Dimpleby said tensely. “So far . . . ”
Suddenly the rippling, disk-shaped creature folded in on itself, stood on end, sprouted wings and a tail. Scales glittered along its sides. A puff of smoke issued from tiny crocodilian jaws, followed by a tongue of flame.
“A dragon!” Curlene cried.
“Hold him, Professor!” Lucifer urged.
The dragon coiled its tail around itself and melted into a lumpy black sphere covered with long bristles. It had two bright red eyes and a pair of spindly legs on which it jittered wildly.
“A goblin?” Dimpleby said incredulously.
The goblin rebounded from the invisible wall restraining it, coalesced into a foot-high, leathery-skinned humanoid with big ears, a wide mouth, and long arms which it wrapped around its knees as it squatted disconsolately on the grid, rolling bloodshot eyes sorrowfully up at its audience.
“Congratulations, Professor!” Lucifer exclaimed. “We got one!”
4
“His name,” Lucifer said, “is Quilchik. It’s really quite a heart-rending tale he tells, poor chap.”
“Oh, the poor little guy,” Curlene said. “What does he eat, Mr. Lucifer? Do you suppose he’d like a little lettuce or something?”
“His diet is quite immaterial, Curl; he subsists entirely on energies. And that seems to be at the root of the problem. It appears there’s a famine back home. What with a rising birth rate and no death rate, population pressure long ago drove his people out into space. They’ve been wandering around out there for epochs, with just the occasional hydrogen molecule to generate a quantum or two of entropy to absorb; hardly enough to keep them going.”
“Hmm. I suppose entropy could be considered a property of matter,” Dimpleby said thoughtfully, reaching for paper and pencil. “One can hardly visualize a distinction between order and disorder as existing in matterless space.”
“Quite right. The curious distribution of heavy elements in planetary crusts and the unlikely advent of life seem to be the results of their upsetting of the Randomness Field, to say nothing of evolution, biological mutations, the extinction of the dinosaurs just in time for Man to thrive, and women’s styles.”
“Women’s styles?” Curlene frowned.
“Of course,” Dimpleby nodded. “What could be more unlikely than this year’s Paris modes?”
Lucifer shook his head, a worried expression on his regular features. “I had in mind trapping them at the entry point and sending them back where they came from; but under the circumstances that seems quite inhumane.”
“Still—we can’t let them come swarming in to upset everything from the rhythm method to the Irish Sweepstakes.”
“Golly,” Curlene said, “couldn’t we put them on a reservation, sort of, and have them weave blankets maybe?”
“Hold it,” Lucifer said. “There’s another one nearby . . . I can feel the tension in the R field . . . ”
“Eek!” Curlene said, taking a step backward and hooking a heel in the extension cord powering the magnetic fields. With a sharp pop! the plug was jerked from the wall. Quilchik jumped to his large, flat feet, took a swift look around, and leaped, changing in mid-air to the fluttering form of a small bat.
Lucifer threw off his coat, ripped off his tie and shirt. Before the startled gaze of the Dimplebys, he rippled and flowed into the form of a pterodactyl which leaped clear of the collapsing white flannels and into the air, long beak agape, in hot pursuit of the bat. Curlene screeched and squeezed her eyes shut. Dimpleby said, “Remarkable!,” grabbed his pad and scribbled rapidly. The bat flickered in mid-air and was a winged snake. Lucifer turned instantly into a winged mongoose. The snake dropped to the floor and shrank to mouse form scuttling for a hole. Lucifer became a big gray cat, reached the hole first. The mouse burgeoned into a bristly rat; the cat swelled and was a terrier. With a yap, it leaped after the rat, which turned back into Quilchik, sprang up on a table, raced across it, dived for what looked like an empty picture frame—