The winter night howled at his back. “I have to convene the Ministry, and make a public telecast, and get over to Staff, and—No. The devil with it! If you need me inside the next few hours, I’ll be at Sorgenlos on Ostarik. But the matter had better be urgent!”

  OPERATION CHANGELING

  And then a nurse led me to the bed where my darling lay. Always fair-hued, she was white after her battle, and the beautiful bones stood sharply in her face. But her hair was fire across the pillow, and though the lids drooped on her eyes, that green had never shone brighter.

  I bent and kissed her, as gently as I could. “Hi, there,” she whispered.

  “How are you?” was the foolish single thing that came to me to say.

  “Fine.” She regarded me for a moment before, abruptly, she grinned. “But you look as if couvade might be a good idea.”

  As a matter of fact, some obstetricians do put the father to bed when a child is being born. Our doctor followed majority opinion in claiming that I’d give my wife the maximum possible sympathetic help by just sweating it out in the waiting room. I’d studied the subject frantically enough, these past months, to become somewhat of an authority. A first birth for a tall slim girl like Ginny was bound to be difficult. She took the prospect with her usual coolness, unbending only to the extent of casting runes to foretell the sex of the child, and that only so we wouldn’t be caught flat-footed for a name.

  “How do you like your daughter?” she asked me.

  “Gorgeous,” I said.

  “Liar,” she chuckled. “The man never lived who wasn’t horrified when they told him he’d sired that wrinkled blob of red protoplasm.” Her hand reached for mine. “But she will be lovely, Steve. She can’t help being. It’s so lovely between us.”

  I told myself that I would not bawl right in front of the mothers in this room. The nurse saved me with a crisp: “I think we had better let your wife rest, Mr. Matuchek. And Dr. Ashman would like to finish things so he can go home.”

  He was waiting for me in the naming office. When I had passed through the soundproof door, the nurse, sealed it behind me with wax and a davidstar. This was an up-to-date hospital where they took every care. Thomas Ashman was a grizzled, craggy six-footer with a relaxed manner, at present a bit droopy from weariness. I saw that beneath the impressive zodiacal traceries on his surgical gown, he’d been wearing white duck pants and a tee shirt—besides his amulet, of course.

  We shook hands. “Everything’s good,” he assured me. “I’ve gotten the lab report. You understand that, with no therianthropes on the maternal side, none of your children will ever be a natural werewolf. But since this one has inherited the complete recessive gene complex from you, she’ll take transformation spells quite easily. A definite advantage, especially if she goes in for a thaumaturgic career like her mother. It does mean, however, that certain things should be guarded against. She’ll be more subject to paranatural influences than most people are.”

  I nodded. Ginny and I had certainly had an undue share of adventures we didn’t want.

  “Marry her off right,” Ashman joked, “and you’ll have werewolf grandchildren.”

  “If she takes after her old lady,” I said, “Lord help any poor boy we tried to force on her!” I felt as idiotic as I sounded. “Look, Doctor, we’re both tired. Let’s make out the birth certificates and turn in.”

  “Sure.” He sat down at the desk. The parchments were already inscribed with parental names, place and date, and the file number they bore in common. “What’re you calling her?”

  “Valeria.”

  “Yes, I suppose your wife would pick something like that. Her idea, wasn’t it? Any middle name?”

  “Uh…Mary. My decision—for my own mother—” I realized I was babbling again.

  “Good thought. She can take refuge in it if she doesn’t like the fancy monicker. Though I suspect she will.” He typed out the information, signed, gave me the document, and dropped the carbon in an out-box. Rather more ceremoniously, he laid down the primary certificate that bore her fingerprints. “And the true name?”

  “Victrix.”

  “Hm?”

  “Ginny always liked it. Valeria Victrix. The last Roman legion in Britain.” The last that stood against Chaos, she had said in one of her rare wholly serious moments.

  Ashman shrugged. “Well, it isn’t as if the kid’s going to use it.”

  “I hope she never has to!”

  “That’d imply a bad emergency,” he agreed. “But don’t fret. I see too many young husbands, shaken up by what they’ve undergone, be knocked for a loop at the grim possibilities they have to face now. Really, though, this is nothing more than another sensible precaution, like a vaccination, only against criminal name spells.”

  “I know,” I said. “Wish they’d had the idea when I was born.” Medical science is one of the few areas where I’ll admit that genuine progress gets made.

  Ashman dipped an eagle quill in a well of oak-gall ink. “By the bird of thy homeland and the tree of the lightning,” he intoned, “under their protection and God’s, child of this day, be thy true name, known on this earth but to thy parents, thy physician, and thee when thou shalt come of age: Victrix; and may thou bear it in honor and happiness while thy years endure. Amen.” He wrote, dusted sand from Galilee across the words, and stood up again. “This one I’ll file personally,” he said. Yawning. “Okay, that’s all.”

  We repeated our handshake. “I’m sorry you had to deliver her at such an unsanctified hour,” I said.

  “We GP’s get used to that,” he answered. The sleepiness left him. He regarded me very steadily. “Besides, in this case I expected it.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’d heard something about you and your wife already,” Ashman said. “I looked up more. Cast a few runes of my own. Maybe you don’t know it yourself, but that kid was begotten on the winter solstice. And, quite apart from her unusual heredity, there’s something else about her. I can’t identify it. But I felt pretty sure she’d be born this night—because a full moon was due on Matthewsmas. I’m going to watch her with a great deal of interest, Mr. Matuchek, and I suggest you take extra special care of her…Good night, now.”

  Nothing spectacular happened to us in the following three years. Or so you would have thought; but you are somebody else. For our little circle, it was when the world opened up for our taking and, at the same time, buckled beneath our feet.

  To start with, Valeria was unexpected. We found out later that Svartalf had been chasing the Brownie again and, in revenge, the Good Folk had turned Ginny’s pills to aspirin. Afterward I’ve wondered if more didn’t lie behind the incident than that. The Powers have Their ways of steering us toward situations that will sense Their ends.

  At first Ginny intended to go ahead according to our original plan, as soon as the youngster was far enough along that a babysitter could handle things by day. And she did take her Ph.D. in Arcana, and had some excellent job offers. But once our daughter was part of our home, well, mama’s emancipation kept getting postponed. We weren’t about to let any hireling do slobwork on Valeria! Not yet, when she was learning to smile, when she was crawling everywhere around, when her noises of brook and bird were changing into language—later, later.

  I quite agreed. But this meant giving up, for a while if not forever, the condition we’d looked forward to: of a smart young couple with a plump double income, doing glamorous things in glamorous places among glamorous people. I did propose trying to take up my Hollywood career again, but would have been astounded if Ginny had been willing to hear word one of that idea. “Do you imagine for half a second,” she said, “that I’d want a mediocre player of Silver Chief and Lassie, when I could have a damn good engineer?” Personally, I don’t think the pictures I made were that all bad; but on the whole, her answer relieved me.

  A newly created B.Sc. doesn’t step right into the kind of challenging project he hopes for, especially when he’s older than the average graduate. I had to start out with what I could get. By luck—we believed then—that was unexpectedly good.

  The Nornwell Scryotronics Corporation was among the new outfits in the booming postwar communications and instrument business. Though small, it was upward bound on an exponential curve. Besides manufacture, it did R & D, and I was invited to work on the latter. This was not simply fascinating in itself, it was a long step toward my ultimate professional goal. That pay wasn’t bad, either. And before long, Barney Sturlason was my friend as much as he was my boss.

  The chief drawback was that we had to stay in this otherwise dull city and endure its ghastly Upper Midwestern winters. But we rented a comfortable suburban house, which helped. And we had each other, and little Valeria. Those were good years. It’s just that nobody else would find an account of them especially thrilling.

  That’s twice true when you consider what went on meanwhile at large. I suppose mankind has always been going to perdition in a roller coaster and always will be. Still, certain eras remind you of the old Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times!”

  Neither Ginny nor I had swallowed the propaganda guff about how peace and happiness would prevail forevermore once the wicked Caliphate had been defeated. We knew what a legacy of wretchedness all wars must leave. Besides, we knew this conflict was more a symptom than a cause of the world’s illness. The enemy wouldn’t have been able to overrun most of the Eastern Hemisphere and a chunk of the United States if Christendom hadn’t been divided against itself. For that matter, the Caliphate was nothing but the secular arm of a Moslem heresy; we had plenty of good Allah allies.

  It did seem reasonable, though, to expect that afterward people would have learned their lesson, put their religious quarrels aside, and settled down to reconstruction. In particular, we looked for the Johannine Church to be generally discredited and fade away. True, its adherents had fought the Caliph too, had in fact taken a leading role in the resistance movements in the occupied countries. But wasn’t its challenge to the older creeds—to the whole basis of Western Society—what had split and weakened our civilization in the first place? Wasn’t its example what had stimulated the rise of the lunatic Caliphist ideology in the Middle East?

  I now know better than to expect reasonableness in human affairs.

  Contrary to popular impression, the threat didn’t appear suddenly. A few men warned against it from the beginning. They pointed out how the Johnnies had become dominant in the politics of more than one nation, which thereupon stopped being especially friendly to us, and how in spite of this they were making converts throughout America. But most of us hardly listened. We were too busy repairing war damage, public and personal. We considered those who sounded the alarm to be reactionaries and would-be tyrants—which some, perhaps, were. The Johannine theology might be nuts, we said, but didn’t the First Amendment guarantee its right to be preached? The Petrine churches might be in trouble, but wasn’t that their problem? And really, in our scientific day and age, to talk about subtle, pervasive dangers in a religious-philosophical system…a system which emphasized peacefulness almost as strongly as the Quakers, which exalted the commandment to love thy neighbor above every other—well, it just might be that our materialistic secular society and our ritualistic faiths would benefit from a touch of what the Johnnies advocated.

  So the movement and its influence grew. And then the activist phase began: and somehow orderly demonstrations were oftener and oftener turning into riots, and wildcat strikes were becoming more and more common over issues that made less and less sense, and student agitation was paralyzing campus after campus, and person after otherwise intelligent person was talking about the need to tear down a hopelessly corrupt order of things so that the Paradise of Love could be built on the ruins…and the majority of us, that eternal majority which wants nothing except to be left alone to cultivate its individual gardens, wondered how the country could have started to disintegrate overnight.

  Brother, it did not happen overnight. Not even over Walpurgis Night.

  I came home early that June day. Our street was quiet, walled in between big old elms, lawns, and houses basking in sunlight. The few broomsticks in view were ridden by local women, carrying groceries in the saddlebags and an infant or two strapped in the kiddie seat. This was a district populated chiefly by young men on the way up. Such tend to have pretty wives, and in warm weather these tend to wear shorts and halters. The scenery lightened my mood no end.

  I’d been full of anger when I left the turbulence around the plant. But here was peace. My roof was in sight. Ginny and Val were beneath it. Barney and I had a plan for dealing with our troubles, come this eventide. The prospect of action cheered me. Meanwhile, I was home!

  I passed into the open garage, dismounted, and racked my Chevy alongside Ginny’s Volksbesen. As I came out again, aimed at the front door, a cannonball whizzed through the air and hit me. “Daddy! Daddy!”

  I hugged my offspring close, curly yellow hair, enormous blue eyes, the whole works. She was wearing her cherub suit, and I had to be careful not to break the wings. Before, when she flew, it had been at the end of a tether secured to a post, and under Ginny’s eye. What the deuce was she doing free—?

  Oh—Svartalf zoomed around the corner of the house on a whisk broom. His back was arched, his tail was raised, and he used bad language. Evidently Ginny had gotten him to supervise. He could control the chit fairly well, no doubt, keep her in the yard and out of trouble…until she saw Daddy arrive.

  “Okay!” I laughed. “Enough. Let’s go in and say boo to Mother.”

  “Wide piggyback?”

  For Val’s birthday last fall I’d gotten the stuff for an expensive spell and had Ginny change me. The kid was used to playing with me in my wolf form, I’d thought; but how about a piggyback ride, the pig being fat and white and spotted with flowers? The local small fry were still talking about it. “Sorry, no,” I had to tell her. “After that performance of yours, you get the Air Force treatment.” And I carried her by her ankles, squealing and wiggling, while I sang,

  Up in the air, junior birdman,

  Up in the air, upside down—

  Ginny came into the living room, from the work-room, as we did. Looking behind her, I saw why she’d deputized the supervision of Val’s flytime. Washday. A three-year-old goes through a lot of clothes, and we couldn’t afford self-cleaning fabrics. She had to animate each garment singly, and make sure they didn’t tie themselves in knots or something while they soaped and rinsed and marched around to dry off and so forth. And, since a parade like that is irresistible to a child, she had to get Val elsewhere.

  Nonetheless, I wondered if she wasn’t being a tad reckless, putting her familiar in charge. Hitherto, she’d done the laundry when Val was asleep. Svartalf had often shown himself to be reliable in the clutch. But for all the paranatural force in him, he remained a big black tomcat, which meant he was not especially dependable in dull everyday matters…Then I thought, what the blazes, since Ginny stopped being a practicing witch, the poor beast hasn’t had much excitement; he hasn’t even got left a dog or another cat in the whole neighborhood that dares fight him; this assignment was probably welcome; Ginny always knows what she’s doing; and—

  “—and I’m an idiot for just standing here gawping,” I said, and gathered her in. She was dressed like the other wives I’d seen, but if she’d been out there too I wouldn’t have seen them.

  She responded. She knew how.

  “What’s a Nidiot?” Val asked from the floor. She pondered the matter. “Well, Daddy’s a good Nidiot.”

  Svartalf switched his tail.

  I relaxed my hold on Ginny a trifle. She ran her fingers through my hair. “Wow,” she murmured. “What brought that on, tiger?”

  “Daddy’s a woof,” Val corrected her.

  “You can call me tiger today,” I said, feeling happier by the minute.

  Ginny leered. “Okay, pussycat.”

  “Wait a bit—”

  She shrugged. The red tresses moved along her shoulders. “Well, if you insist, okay, Lame Thief of the Waingunga.”

  Val regarded us sternly. “When you fwoo wif you’ heads,” she directed, “put ’em outside to melt.”

  The logic of this, and the business of getting the cherub rig off her, took time to unravel. Not until our offspring was bottoms up on the living-room floor, watching cartoons on the crystal ball, and I was in the kitchen watching Ginny start supper, did we get the chance to talk.

  “How come you’re home so early?” she asked.

  “How’d you like to reactivate the old outfit tonight?” I replied.

  “Which?”

  “Matuchek and Graylock—no, Matuchek and Matuchek—Troubleshooters Extraordinary, Licensed Confounders of the Ungodly.”

  She put down her work and gave me a long look. “What are you getting at, Steve?”

  “You’ll see it on the ball, come news time,” I answered. “We aren’t simply being picketed any more. They’ve moved onto the grounds. They’re blocking every doorway. Our personnel had to leave by skylight, and rocks got thrown at some of them.”

  She was surprised and indignant, but kept the coolness she showed to the world outside this house. “You didn’t call the police?”

  “Sure, we did. I listened in, along with Barney, since Roberts thought a combat veteran might have some useful ideas. We can get police help if we want it. The demonstrators have turned into trespassers; and windows are broken, walls defaced with obscene slogans, that sort of thing. Our legal case is plenty clear. Only the opposition is out for trouble. Trouble for us, as much as possible, but mainly they’re after martyrs. They’ll resist any attempt to disperse them. Just like the fracas in New York last month. A lot of these characters are students too. Imagine the headlines: Police Brutality Against Idealistic Youths. Peaceful Protesters Set On With Clubs and Geas Casters.

  “Remember, this is a gut issue. Nornwell manufactures a lot of police and defense equipment, like witchmark fluorescers and basilisk goggles. We’re under contract to develop more kinds. The police and the armed forces serve the Establishment. The Establishment is evil. Therefore Nornwell must be shut down.”