Griswold had been demonstrating the action of a catalyst, and MacIlwraith had muttered a pun-spell to make a cat boil out of the test tube. Only, he slipped quantitatively and got a saber-toothed tiger. Because of the pun, it listed to starboard, but it was still a vicious, panic-raising thing. I ducked into a closet, used my pocket moonflash, and transformed; as a wolf I chased Pussy out the window and up a tree till somebody could call the Exorcism Department.

  Having seen MacIlwraith do it, I took him aside an warned him that if he disrupted the class again I’d chew him out in the most literal sense. Fun is fun, but not at the expense of students who really want to learn and a pleasant elderly anachronism who’s trying to teach them.

  “—TEAM!”

  The cheerleader waved his hands and a spurt of many-colored fire jumped out of nothingness. Taller than a man it lifted, a leaping glory of red, blue, yellow, haloed with a wheel of sparks. Slitting my eyes, I could just discern the lizard-like form, white-hot and supple, within the aura.

  The coed squealed. “Thrice-blessed Hermes,” choked the Old Grad. “What is that? A demon?”

  “No, a fire elemental,” I muttered. “Salamander. Hell of a dangerous thing to fool around with.”

  My gaze ran about the field as the burning shape began to do its tricks, bouncing, tumbling, spelling out words in long flame-bands. Yes, they had a fireman close by in full canonicals, making the passes that kept the creature harmless. It ought to be all right…I lit a cigarette, shakily. It is not well to raise Loki’s pets, and the stink of menace to come was acrid in my nostrils.

  A good show, but—The crystal revealed Abercrombie clapping, but Ginny with a worried frown between the long green eyes. She didn’t like it any better than I. Switch the ball back to MacIlwraith, fun-loving MacIlwraith.

  I was perhaps the only one in the stadium who saw it. The boy gestured at his baton. It sprouted wings. The fat fireman, swaying back and forth with his gestures, was a natural target for a good healthy goose.

  “Yeowp!”

  He rocketed heavenward. The salamander wavered. All at once it sprang up, thinning out till it towered over the walls. There was a spinning, dazzling blur, and the thing was gone.

  My cigarette burst luridly into flame and I tossed it from me. Hardly thinking, I jettisoned my hipflask. It exploded from a touch of incandescence and the alcohol burned blue. The crowd howled, hurling away their smokes, slapping at pockets where matches had kindled, getting rid of bottles. The Campus Queen shrieked as her thin dress caught fire. She got it off in time to prevent serious injury and went wailing across the field. Under different circumstances, I would have been interested.

  The salamander stopped its lunatic shuttling and materialized between goalposts that began to smoke: an intolerable blaze, which scorched the grass and roared. The fireman dashed toward it, shouting the spell of extinguishment. From the salamander’s mouth licked a tongue of fire, I heard a distinct Bronx cheer, then it was gone again.

  The announcer, who should have been calming the spectators, screeched as it flickered before his booth. That touched off the panic! In one heartbeat, fifty thousand people were clawing and trampling, choking each other in the gates, blind with horror and trying only to fight their way out.

  I vaulted across benches and an occasional head, down to the field. There was death on those jammed tiers. “Ginny! Ginny, come here where it’s safe!”

  She couldn’t have heard me above the din, but came of herself, dragging a terrified Abercrombie by one wrist. We faced each other in a ring of ruin. She drew the telescoping wand from her purse.

  The Gryphons came boiling out of their locker room. Boiling is the right word: the salamander had materialized down there and playfully wrapped itself around the shower pipes.

  Sirens hooted under the moon and police broomsticks shot above us, trying to curb the stampede. The elemental flashed for a moment across one of the besoms. The rider dove it low enough to jump off, and the burning stick crashed on the grass.

  “God!” exclaimed Abercrombie. “It’s loose!”

  “Tell me more,” I snorted. “Ginny, you’re a witch. Can you do anything about this?”

  “I can extinguish the brute if it’ll hold still long enough for me to recite the spell,” she said. Disordered ruddy hair had tumbled past her pale, high-boned face to the fur-clad shoulders. “That’s our one chance—the binding charm is broken, and it knows that!”

  I whirled, remembering friend MacIlwraith and collared him. “Were you possessed?” I shouted.

  “I didn’t do anything—” he gasped. His teeth rattle as I shook him.

  “Don’t hand me that guff. I saw it!”

  He collapsed on the ground. “It was just for fun,” he whimpered. “I didn’t know—”

  Well, I thought grimly, that was doubtless true. It’s the trouble with the Art—with any blind powerful force man uses, fire or dynamite or atomic energy or thaumaturgy. Any meathead can learn enough to begin something; these days, they start them in the third grade with spelling bees. But it’s not always so easy to halt the something.

  Student pranks were a standing problem at Trismegistus, as at all colleges. They were usually harmless enough—sneaking into the dorms with Tarnkappen, or ’chanting female lingerie out through the windows. Sometimes they could be rather amusing, like the time the statue of a revered and dignified former president was animated and went downtown singing bawdy songs. Often they fell quite flat, as when the boys turned Dean Hornsby into stone and it wasn’t noticed for three days.

  This one had gotten out of hand. The salamander was quite capable of igniting the whole city.

  I turned to the fireman, who was jittering about trying to flag down a police broom. In the dim shifty light, none of the riders saw him. “What d’you figure to do?” I asked.

  “I gotta report back for duty,” he said harshly. “And then we’ll need a water elemental, I guess.”

  “I have experience with the Hydros,” offered Ginny. “I’ll come along.”

  “Me too,” I said at once.

  Abercrombie glowered. “What can you do?”

  “I’m were,” I snapped. “In wolf shape I can’t easily be harmed by fire. That might turn out useful.”

  “All right, Steve!” Ginny smiled at me, the old smile which had so often gone between us. Impulsively, I grabbed her to me and kissed her.

  She didn’t waste energy on a slap. I collected an uppercut that tumbled me on my tuchus. “Not allowed,” she clipped. That double-damned geas! I could see misery caged within her eyes, but her mind was compelled to obey Malzius’ rules.

  “It’s…ah…no place for a woman—a lady as charming as you,” murmured Abercrombie. “Let me take you home, my dear.”

  “I’ve work to do,” she said impatiently. “What the devil is wrong with those cops? We’ve got to get a lift out of here.”

  “Then I shall come too,” said Abercrombie. “I am not unacquainted with blessings and curses, though—ha!—I fear that ever-filled purses are a trifle beyond my scope. In any event, the Treasury Department frowns on them.”

  Even in that moment, with riot thundering and hell let loose on earth, I was pleased to note that Ginny paid no attention to his famous wit. She scowled abstractedly and looked around. The Campus Queen was huddled near the benches, wearing somebody’s overcoat. Ginny turned and waved her wand. The Campus Queen shucked the coat and ran toward us. Thirty seconds later, three police broomsticks had landed. The fireman commandeered them and we were all whirled over the stadium and into the street.

  During that short hop, I saw three houses ablaze. The salamander was getting around!

  We gathered at the district police station, a haggard and sooty crew with desperate eyes. The fire and police chiefs were there, and a junior officer going crazy at the switchboard. Ginny, who had picked up her own broom and come via her apartment, arrived with Svartalf on one shoulder and the Handbook of Alchemy and Metaphysics under her arm. Abercrombie was browbeating the terrified MacIlwraith till I told him to lay off.

  “My duty—” he began. “I’m a proctor, you know.”

  I suppose it’s necessary to have witch-smellers on campus, to make sure the fellows don’t ’chant up liquor in the frat houses or smuggle in succubi. And every year somebody tries to get by an exam with a familiar under his coat whispering the answers from a crib-sheet. Nevertheless, I don’t like professional nosy parkers.

  “You can deal with him later,” I said, and gave the boy a push out the door. “The salamander can fight back.”

  President Malzius huffed into the room. “What is the meaning of this?” he demanded. His pince-nez bobbed above full jowls. “I’ll have you know, sir, I was preparing a most important address. The Lions Totem is holding a luncheon tomorrow, and—”

  “Might not be any lunch,” grunted the cop who had fetched him. “There’s a salamander loose around here.”

  “Sala—No! It’s against the rules! It is positively forbidden to—”

  The man at the switchboard looked toward us. “It just kindled the Methodist church at 14th and Elm,” he said. “And my God, all our equipment is already working—”

  “Impossible!” cried Malzius. “A demon can’t go near a church.”

  “How stupid does a man have to be to get your job?” Ginny fairly spat. “This isn’t a demon. It’s an elemental.” Her temper was again sheathed in ice, and she continued slowly: “We haven’t much hope of using a Hydro to put out the salamander, but we can raise one to help fight the fires. It’ll always be three jumps behind, but at least the whole city won’t be ruined.”

  “Unless the salamander gets too strong,” cut in Abercrombie. His face was colorless and he spoke through stiff lips. “Then it can evaporate the Hydro.”

  “Call up two water beings,” stammered Malzius “Call up a hundred. I’ll waive the requirement of formal application for permission to—”

  “There’s a limit, sir,” Abercrombie told him. “The restraining force required is an exponential function of the total embodied mass. There probably aren’t enough adepts in this town to control more than three at a time. If we raised four…we’d flood the city, and the salamander need merely skip elsewhere.

  “Alan—” Ginny laid her handbook on the desk and riffled its pages. Abercrombie leaned over her shoulder, remembering to rest one hand carelessly on her hip. I choked back my prize cusswords. “Alan, just for a starter, can you summon one Hydro and put it to work?”

  “Of course, gorgeous one,” he smiled. “It is a—ha!—elemental problem.”

  She gave him a worried glance. “They can be as tricky as Fire or Air,” she warned. “It’s not enough just to know the theory.”

  “I have some small experience,” he preened. “During the war—After this is over, come around to my place for a drink and I’ll tell you about it.” His lips brushed her cheek.

  “Mr. Matuchek!” yelled Malzius. “Will you please stop growing fangs?”

  I shook myself and suppressed the rage which had been almost as potent as moonlight.

  “Look here,” said the police chief. “I gotta know what’s going on. You longhairs started this trouble and I don’t want you making it worse.”

  Seeing that Ginny and Pretty Boy were, after all, legitimately busy, I sighed and whistled for a cigarette. “Let me explain,” I offered. “I learned a few things about the subject, during the war. An elemental is not the same as a demon. Any kind of demon is a separate being, as individual as you and I. An elemental is part of the basic force involved: in this case, fire, or more accurately energy. It’s raised out of the basic energy matrix, given temporary individuality, and restored to the matrix when the adept is through with it.”

  “Huh?”

  “Like a flame. A flame only exists potentially till someone lights a fire, and goes back to potential existence when you put the fire out. And of course, the second fire you light, even on the same log, is not identical with the first, so you can understand why an elemental isn’t exactly anxious to be dismissed. If it ever breaks loose, as this one did, it does its damnedest to stay in this world and to increase its power.”

  “But how come it can burn a church?”

  “Because it’s soulless, a mere physical force. Any true individual, human or otherwise, is under certain constraints of a…a moral nature. A demon is allergic to holy symbols. A man who does wrong has to live with his conscience in this world and face judgment in the next. But what does a fire care? And that’s what the salamander is—a glorified fire. It’s bound only by the physical laws of nature and paranature.”

  “So how do you, uh, put one out?”

  “A Hydro of corresponding mass could do it—mutual annihilation. Earth could bury it or Air withdraw from its neighborhood. Trouble is, Fire is the swiftest of them all; it can flick out of an area before any other sort of elemental can injure it. So we’re left with the dismissal spell. But that has to be said in the salamander’s presence, and it takes about two minutes.”

  “Yeh…and when it hears you start the words, it’ll burn you down or scram. Very nice. What’re we gonna do?”

  “I don’t know, chief,” I said, “except it’s like kissing a sheepdog.” I blew hard and immediately smacked my lips. “You got to be quick. Every fire the critter starts feeds it more energy and makes it that much stronger. There’s a critical point somewhere at which it becomes too powerful for anything to affect it.”

  “And what’d happen next?”

  “Ragnarok.”

  I saw Ginny turn from the desk. Abercrombie was chalking a pentagram on the floor while a sputtering Malzius had been deputized to sterilize a pocket knife with a match—blood is a substitute for the usual powders, since it has the same proteins. The girl laid a hand on mine. “Steve, it’ll take too long to get hold of all the local adept and organize them,” she said. “God knows what the salamander will be doing meanwhile. Are you game to track it down?”

  “Sure,” I agreed. “It can’t hurt—if I’m careful—till it gets big enough to burn up all the world’s oxygen. But you’re staying here!”

  As we went out the door, I gave Abercrombie a smug look. He had nicked his wrist and sprinkled the Signs; now he was well into the invocation. I felt cold dampness swirl through the room.

  Outside, the night was still autumnally sharp, the moon high. Roofs were a saw-toothed silhouette against the leaping red glare at a dozen points around us, and sirens howled in the streets. Overhead, across the small indifferent stars, I saw what looked like a whirl of dry leaves, refugees fleeing on their sticks.

  Svartalf jumped to the front end of Ginny’s Cadillac, and I took the saddle behind. We rode skyward.

  Below us, blue fire spat and the station lights went out. Water poured into the street, a solid roar of it with President Malzius bobbing like a cork in the torrent.

  “Unholy Sathanas!” I choked. “What’s happened now?”

  Svartalf ducked the stick low. “That idiot,” groaned Ginny. “He let the Hydro slop all over the floor…short circuits…” She made a few rapid passes with her wand. The stream quieted, drew into itself, became a ten-foot-high blob glimmering in the moonlight. Abercrombie scuttled out and started it squelching toward the nearest fire.

  I laughed. “Go on up to his place and listen to him tell about his vast experience,” I said.

  “Don’t kick a man when he’s down,” Ginny snapped. “You’ve pulled your share of boners, Steve Matuchek.”

  Svartalf whisked the broom up again and we went low above the chimneypots. Oof! I thought. Could she, really be falling for that troll? A regular profile, a smooth tongue, and proximity…I bit back an inward sickness and squinted ahead, trying to find the salamander.

  “There!” Ginny yelled it over the whistle of cloven air. Svartalf bottled his tail and hissed.

  The University district is shabby-genteel: old pseudo-Gothic caves of wood which have slipped from mansions to rooming houses, fly-specked with minor business establishments. It was burning merrily, a score of angry red stars flickering in the darkness between street lamps. As I watched, one of the stars exploded in a puff of steam—the Hydro must have clapped a sucker onto a fireplug and blanketed the place. I had a brief heretical thought that the salamander was doing a public service by eliminating those architectural teratologies…but lives and property were involved—

  Tall and terrible, the elemental wavered beside the house on which it was feeding. It had doubled in size and its core was too bright to look at. Flames whirled about the reptile head.

  Svartalf braked and we hovered a few yards off, twenty feet in the air and level with the hungry mouth. Ginny was etched wild against night by that intolerable radiance. She braced herself in the stirrups began the spell, her voice almost lost in the roar as the roof caved in. “O Indra, Abaddon, Lucifer, Moloch, Hephaestos, Loki…”

  It heard. The seething eyes swung toward us and it leaped.

  Svartalf squalled as his whiskers shriveled—perhaps it was only hurt vanity—and put the stick through an Immelmann turn and whipped away. The salamander bawled with the voice of a hundred blazing forests. Suddenly the heat scorching my back was gone, and the thing had materialized in front of us.

  “That way!” I hollered, pointing. “In there!”

  I covered Ginny’s face and buried my own against her back as we went through the plate-glass front of Stub’s Beer Garden. The flame-tongue licked after us, recoiled, and the salamander ramped beyond the door.

  We tumbled off the broom and looked around. The place was empty, full of a fire-spattered darkness. Everyone had fled. I saw a nearly full glass of beer on the counter and tossed it off.

  “You might have offered me a drink,” said Ginny. “Alan would have.” Before I could recover enough to decide whether she was taunting or testing me, she went on in a rapid whisper: “It isn’t trying to escape. It’s gained power—confidence—it means to kill us!”