Even then, I wanted to tell her that tousled red hair and a soot-smudge across an aristocratic nose were particularly enchanting. But the occasion didn’t seem appropriate. “Can’t get in here,” I panted. “Can’t do much more than ignite the building by thermal radiation, and that’ll take a while. We’re safe for the moment.”

  “Why…oh, yes, of course. Stub’s is cold-ironed. All these college beer parlors are, I’m told.”

  “Yeh.” I peered out the broken window. The salamander peered back, and spots danced before my eyes. “So the clientele won’t go jazzing up the brew above 3.2—Quick, say your spell.”

  Ginny shook her head. “It’ll just flicker away out of earshot. Maybe we can talk to it, find out—”

  She trod forth to the window, and the thing crouched in the street, extended its neck and hissed at her. I stood behind my girl, feeling boxed and useless. Svartalf, lapping spilled beer off the counter, looked toward us and sneered.

  “Ohé, Child of Light!” she cried.

  A ripple went down the salamander’s back. Its tail switched restlessly, and a tree across the way kindled. I can’t describe the voice that answered…crackling, bellowing, sibilant, it was Fire given a brain and a throat. “Daughter of Eve, what have you to say to the likes of Me?”

  “I command you by the Most High, return to your proper bonds and cease from troubling the world.

  “Ho—oh, ho, ho, ho!” The thing sat back on its haunches—asphalt bubbled—and shuddered its laughter into the sky. “You command me, combustible one?”

  “I have at my beck powers so mighty they could wither your little spark into the nothingness whence it came. Cease and obey, lest worse befall you than dismissal.”

  I think the salamander was, for a moment, honestly, surprised. “Greater than Me?” Then it howled so the tavern shook. “You dare say there are mightier forces than Fire? Than Me, who am going to consume the earth?”

  “Mightier and more beautiful, O Ashmaker. Think—you cannot even enter this house. Water will extinguish you. Earth will smother you, Air alone can keep you alive. Best you surrender now—”

  I remembered the night we had faced an afreet together. Ginny must be pulling the same trick—feeling out the psychology of the thing that raged and flared beyond the door—but what could she hope to gain?

  “More beautiful!” The salamander’s tail beat furrows in the street. It threw out bursting fireballs and a rain of sparks, red, blue, yellow, a one-being Fourth of July. I thought crazily of a child kicking the floor in a tantrum.

  “More beautiful! Stronger! You dare say—Haaaaa—” Teeth of incandescence gleamed in a mouth that was jumping fire. “We shall see how beautiful you are when you lie a choked corpse!” Its head darted to the broken glass front. It could not pass the barrier of cold iron, but it began to suck air, in and out. A furnace wave of heat sent me gasping back.

  “My God…it’s going to use up all our oxygen…. Stay here!” I sprang for the door. Ginny shrieked, but I scarcely heard her “No!” as I went through.

  Moonlight flooded me, cool and tingling between the unrestful guttering fires. I crouched to the hot sidewalk and felt a shudder when my body changed.

  Wolf I was, and a wolf which my enemy could not kill…I hoped. My abbreviated tail thrust against the seat of my pants, and I remembered that some injuries are beyond the healing powers of even the were shape.

  Pants! Hell and damnation! Have you ever tried being a wolf while wrapped in shirt, trousers, underwear, and topcoat designed for a man?

  I went flat on my moist black nose. My suspenders slid down and wrapped themselves about my hind legs. My tie tripped me in front and my coat gleefully wrapped itself around the whole bundle.

  Frantic, I snapped at the cloth, rolling over and tearing it with my fangs. The salamander grew aware of me, and its tail slapped contemptuously across my back. For a moment of searing agony, hair and skin went up with the fabric…then I was free and the fluid molecules rebuilt themselves. Hardly realizing what I did, I picked up a shoe which had dropped from my now smaller foot, laid it on the salamander’s white-hot toe, and bore down.

  It roared and swung about to attack me afresh. Those jaws gaped wide enough to bite me in half. I skittered away. It paused, gauged the distance, flicked into nothingness, and materialized right on top of me.

  I think I got a tooth-grip in the obvious place to bite a salamander when it is sitting on you, but the pain was too great for me to know. Then it was gone, the street lay bare and quiet between burning houses, and I gasped my way back toward wholeness.

  Sanity returned. My shaggy head was in Ginny’s lap, and she was stroking it and crying. Feebly, I licked her hand. Strength flowed back. As a man, I’d naturally have stayed where I was, but being a wolf with lupine instincts, I sat up and yipped.

  “Steve…Almighty Father, Steve, you saved our lives,” whispered Ginny. “Another minute and we’d have been suffocating. My lungs still feel like mummy dust.”

  Svartalf trotted from the bar, looking as smug as a cat with singed whiskers can. He meowed. Ginny gave a trembling laugh and explained:

  “But you owe Svartalf a pint of cream or something. He saved you too. A few more seconds and you’d have been dead—but he showed me how to drive the beast off.”

  I cocked my ears inquiringly.

  “He manned the beer taps,” she said. “I filled stein after stein and went out and threw them at the salamander. Not enough to do more than discommode it…but added to the trouble you were making, enough to make it skip.”

  Horrible waste of beer, I thought. But there was still work to do.

  Penalties attach to everything. The trouble with being were is that in the other shape you have, essentially, an animal brain, with only a superficial layer of human personality. Or in plain language, as a wolf I’m a rather stupid man. I was only able to think I’d better reassume human form…and I did.

  Ever see a cat grin? “Omigawd!” I groaned, and started to change back.

  “Never mind that,” said Ginny crisply, peeling off her fur coat. I broke all records donning it. Pretty tight fit around the shoulders, but it went low enough…if I was careful. The night wind nipped my shanks, but my face was of salamander temperature.

  “Now where?” I asked quickly. “The damned critter could be anyplace.”

  “I think it will hang around the campus,” she said. “Plenty of grazing, and it’s not very smart. Let’s get back on our stick,”

  She fetched it from the smoldering barroom and we lifted. “All we’ve done so far,” I said, “is lose time.”

  “No, not entirely. I did get a line on its mind.” Ginny turned her head back to face me as we cleared the rooftops. “I wasn’t sure into just what form it had been conjured—you can mold the elemental forces into almost anything. But apparently the cheerleader was satisfied to give it a knowledge of English and a rudimentary intelligence. Add to that the volatile nature of Fire, and what have you got? A child.”

  “Some child,” I muttered, hugging her coat to me.

  “No, no, Steve, this is important. It has all the child’s traits. Improvidence, complete lack of foresight…a wise salamander would lie low, gathering strength slowly, and would never think of burning the entire planet. Because what would it use for oxygen when that was finished? You’ll note, too, its fantastic vanity; it went into an insane rage when I said there were powers stronger and more beautiful than it, and the crack about beauty hurt as much as the one about strength. Short span of attention…it could have smothered us easily before attending to as minor a nuisance as you provided. At the same time, within that span of attention, it focuses on one issue only, to the exclusion of everything else.” She nodded thoughtfully, and the long blowing hair tickled my face. “I don’t know just how, but some way its psychology must provide us with a lever.”

  My own vanity is not small. “I wasn’t such a minor nuisance,” I grumbled.

  Ginny smiled and reached around to pat my cheek. “All right. Steve, all right. I love you just the same, and now I know you’ll make a good husband.”

  That left me in a comfortable glow until I wondered precisely what she was thinking of.

  We spotted the salamander below us, igniting a theater, but it flicked away even as I watched, and a mile off it appeared next to the medical research center. Glass brick doesn’t burn so well. As we neared, I saw it petulantly kick the wall and vanish again. Ignorant and impulsive…a child…a brat from Hell!

  Sweeping over the campus, we saw lights in the Administration Building. “Probably that’s HQ for our side, said Ginny. “We’d better report.” Svartalf landed us on the Mall in front of the place and strutted ahead toward the stairs.

  A squad of cops armed with fire extinguishers guarded the door. “Hey, there!” One of them barred our path. “Where you going?”

  “To the meeting,” said Ginny, smoothing her tangled hair.

  “Yeh?” The policeman’s eye fell on me. “Really dressed for it, too, aren’t you? Haw, haw, haw!”

  I’d had about enough for one night. I wered and peeled off his own trousers. As he lifted his billy, Ginny turned it into a small boa constrictor. I switched back to human; we left the squad to its own problems and went down the hall.

  The faculty meeting room was packed. Malzius had summoned all of his professors. As we entered, I heard his orotund tones: “…disgraceful. The authorities won’t so much as listen to me. Gentlemen, it is for us to vindicate the honor of Gown against Town.” He blinked when Ginny and Svartalf came in, and turned a beautiful Tyrian purple as I followed in the full glory of mink coat and stubbly chin. “Mister Matuchek!”

  “He’s with me,” said Ginny curtly. “We were out fighting the salamander while you sat here.”

  “Possibly something other than brawn, even lupine brawn, is required,” smiled Dr. Alan Abercrombie. “I see that Mr. Matuchek lost his pants in a more than vernacular sense.”

  Like Malzius, he had changed his wet clothes for the inevitable tweeds. Ginny gave him a cold look. “I thought you were directing the Hydro,” she said.

  “Oh, we got enough adepts together to use three water elementals,” he said. “Mechanic’s work. I felt my job was here. We can control the fires easily enough—”

  “—if the salamander weren’t always lighting fresh ones,” clipped Ginny. “And each blaze it starts, it gets bigger and stronger, while you sit here looking beautiful.”

  “Why, thank you, my dear,” he laughed.

  I jammed my teeth together so they hurt. She had actually smiled back at him.

  “Order, order!” boomed President Malzius. “Please be seated, Miss Graylock. Have you anything to contribute to the discussion?”

  “Yes. I understand the salamander now.” She took a place at the end of the table. That was the last vacant chair, so I hovered miserably in the background wishing her coat had more buttons.

  “Understand it sufficiently well to extinguish it?” asked Professor van Linden of Alchemy.

  “No. But I know how it thinks—”

  “We’re more interested in how it operates,” said van Linden. “How can we make it hold still for a dismissal?” He cleared his throat. “Obviously, we must first know by what process it shuttles around so fast—”

  “Oh, that’s simple enough,” piped up little Griswold timidly. He was drowned by van Linden’s fruity bass:

  “—which is, of course, by the well-known affinity of Fire for Quicksilver. Since virtually every home these days has at least one thermometer—”

  “With due respect, my good sir,” interrupted Vittorio of Astrology, “you are talking utter hogwash. It is simple matter of the conjunction of Mercury and Neptune in Scorpio—”

  “You’re wrong, sir!” declared van Linden. “Dead wrong! Let me show you the Ars Thaumaturgica.” He glared around after his copy, but of course it had been mislaid and he had to use an adaptation of the Dobu yam-calling chant to find it. Meanwhile Vittorio was screaming:

  “No, no, no! The conjunction, with Uranus opposing in the ascendant…as I can easily prove—” He went to the blackboard and started to draw a diagram.

  “Oh, come now!” snorted Jasper of Metaphysics. “I don’t understand how you can both be so wrong. As I showed in the paper I read at the last A.A.A.S. meeting, the intrinsic nature—”

  “That was disproved ten years ago!” roared van Linden. “The affinity—”

  “Ding an sich—”

  “—up Uranus—”

  I sidled over and tugged at Griswold’s sleeve. He pattered into a corner with me. “Okay, how does the bloody thing work?” I asked.

  “Oh…merely a question of wave mechanics,” he whispered. “According to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, a photon has a finite probability of being at any point of space. The salamander uses a simple diffraction process to change the spatial coordinates of psi squared, in effect going from point to point without crossing the intervening distance, much like an electron making a quantum jump, though of course the analogy is not precise due to the modifying influence of—”

  “Never mind,” I sighed. “This confab is becoming a riot. Wouldn’t we do better to—”

  “—stick by the original purpose,” agreed Abercrombie, joining us. Ginny followed. Van Linden blacked Vittorio’s eye while Jasper threw chalk at both of them. Our little group went over near the door.

  “I’ve already found the answer to our problem,” said Abercrombie, “but I’ll need help. A transformation spell—turn the salamander into something we can handle more easily.”

  “That’s dangerous,” said Ginny. “You’ll need a really strong T-spell, and that sort can backfire. Just what happens then is unpredictable.”

  Abercrombie straightened himself with a look of pained nobility. “For you, my dear, no hazard is too great.”

  She regarded him with admiration. It does take guts to use the ultimate runes. “Let’s go,” she said. “I’ll help.”

  Griswold plucked at my arm. “I don’t like this, Mr. Matuchek,” he confided. “The Art is too unreliable. There ought to be some method grounded in nature and nature’s quantitative laws.”

  “Yeh,” I said disconsolately. “But what?” I paddled out after Ginny and Abercrombie, who had their heads together over the handbook. Griswold marched beside me and Svartalf made a gesture with his tail at the Trismegistus faculty. They were too embroiled to notice.

  We went out past an enraged but well-cowed squad of cops. The Physical Sciences hall was nearby, and its chemistry division held stuff that would be needed. We entered an echoing gloom.

  The freshman lab, a long room full of workbenches; shelves, and silence, was our goal. Griswold switched on the lights and Abercrombie looked around. “But we’ll have to bring the salamander here,” he said. “We can’t do anything except in its actual presence.”

  “Go ahead and make ready,” the girl told him. “I know how to fetch the beast. A minor transformation—” She laid out some test tubes, filled them with various powders, and sketched her symbols on the floor. Those ball-point wands are useful.

  “What’s the idea?” I asked.

  “Oh, get out of the way,” she snapped. I told myself she was only striking at her own weariness and despair, but it hurt. “We’ll use its vanity, of course. I’ll prepare some Roman candles and rockets and stuff—shoot them off, and naturally it’ll come to show it can do more spectacular things.”

  Griswold and I withdrew into a corner. This was big-league play. I was frankly scared, and the little scientist’s bony knees were beating a tattoo in march time. Even Ginny—yes, there was sweat beading that smooth forehead. If this didn’t work, we here were probably done for: either the salamander or the backlash of the spell could finish us. And we had no way of knowing whether the beast had grown too strong for a transformation.

  The witch got her fireworks prepared, and went to an open window and leaned out. Hissing balls of blue and red, streamers of golden sparks, flew skyward and exploded.

  Abercrombie had completed his diagrams. He turned to smile at us. “It’s all right,” he said. “Everything under control. I’m going to turn the salamander’s energy into matter. E equals me squared, you know. Just light me a Bunsen burner, Matuchek, and set a beaker of water over it. Griswold, you turn off these lights and use the Polaroid bulbs. We need polarized radiation.”

  We obeyed—I hated to see an old and distinguished man acting as lab assistant to this patronizing slick-paper adman’s dream. “You sure it’ll work?” I asked.

  “Of course,” he smiled. “I’ve had experience. I was in the Quartermaster Corps during the war, till they tapped me for the propaganda division…broadcasting nightmares, you know.”

  “Yeh,” I said, “but turning dirt into K-rations isn’t the same thing as transforming that hell-born monster. You and your experience!”

  Suddenly and sickly, remembering how he had bungled with the Hydro, I realized the truth. Abercrombie was confident, unafraid—because he didn’t know enough!

  For a minute I couldn’t unfreeze my muscles. Griswold stood fiddling unhappily with some metallic samples. He’d been using them the other day for freshman experiments, trying to teach us the chemical properties—Lord, it seemed a million years ago…

  “Ginny!” I stumbled toward her where she stood at the window throwing rainbows into the air. “My God, darling, stop—”

  Crack! The salamander was in the room with us.

  I lurched back from it, half-blinded. Grown hideously bigger, it filled the other end of the lab, and the bench tops smoked.

  “Oh, so!” The voice of Fire blasted our eardrums. Svartalf shot to a shelf top and began upsetting bottles of acid onto the varmint. It didn’t notice. “So, small moist pests, you would try to outdo Me!”

  Abercrombie and Ginny lifted their wands and shouted the few brief words of transformation.

  Crouched back into my corner, peering through a sulfurous reek of fumes, I saw Ginny lurch and then jump for safety. She must have sensed the backlash. There was a shattering explosion and the air was full of flying glass.