Free Alternating Currents by Frederik Pohl

like Joan staring at the White Lady. ‘ Ehrlich!’ he gasped.
     
    ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Did you think I would go quietly away and die? I have something to show you, Brandon.’
     
    On his desk was a conjur bag from the Gold Coast; I shook its contents out of it, discarded the herbs and the rocks, picked up the knucklebones for prophesying. ‘Magic,’ I told Brandon in echo of his own words, ‘is ninety per cent lies and ten per cent half-understood science. There is no truth in superstition. There are no ghosts. Therefore: Watch.’
     
    I will say for the man that he didn’t scare. Now, thinking back, I must have seemed a dangerous figure to him, appearing at his door in a menacing manner at a suspicious time; but he sat watching me with all the poise of a freshman observing a demonstration of the precession of the pendulum. I touched the dry bones with the amulet and whispered, barely whispered, the word of power.
     
    There was a surging of forces, and in the room with us was a wizened, irritable-looking blackman, no taller than my shoulder, as ugly a wraith as any I had seen. I turned to Brandon.’ Would you care to comment ?’ I asked formally.
     
    Brandon’s hands were shaking, but he pursed his lips and touched his fingers together before he spoke. ‘These are not controlled conditions,’ he said. ‘But still - yes, Ehrlich, I may have been too hasty. If I owe you an apology I will give it. I will listen to anything you care to say.’ And he poured a glass of water from the carafe on his desk; and the only thing that showed he was in the least upset was that the glass filled and overflowed and the water ran across the desk and drenched his trousers before he took his eyes off the furious Bantu wraith. ‘Sorry,’ he said absently. ‘What are you going to do about him?’
     
    ‘Forget him,’ I said. ‘He will go away. Listen - can you hear him talking ?’ In my mind was a clacking, lip-smacking chant of anger that matched the little spectre’s gesticulations. He was jumping up and down around us, whirling about with his arms outstretched. ‘Interesting sight,’ I said. ‘I suppose he is trying to exorcise us, which is curious enough under the circumstances.’
     
    ‘Can you get rid of him? That noise is driving me insane,’ Brandon complained. ‘No? Then let’s step outside and leave him here. I want to hear about this.’
     
    I shrugged, and followed him outside. The Little Bantu shouted soundlessly after us, but did not follow. We walked a few yards down the hall, as far as the entrance to the Hall of Reptiles, before the guttural yells died away from our inner ears; by which time Brandon had completely recovered his composure and I was losing mine. The taste of revenge was nothing like as sweet in the realization as it had been in the hope. With little enthusiasm I answered his questions, told him of what I had done after he had, in his obstinacy, driven me to throw my written resignation in his face. I told him how certain I had been that practitioners of magic were abroad in the world; how I had deduced that they would read magazines of witchcraft and the occult; how I had most laboriously tracked down an adept whose spells could not be explained away. ‘ I came back here,’ I finished moodily, ‘to make you eat your words, Brandon. But now - well, I don’t know where to go from here. I suppose I shall write a paper for the Journal.’
     
    ‘And this spell,’ Brandon persisted, ‘it works on anything? Any corpse, or fragment of skeleton, or anything that was once alive? It never fails?’
     
    ‘Never. Here - I’ll show you.’ I beckoned him to follow me into the Hall of Reptiles. All around us were memories of the saurian time before man, the fencelike giant lizard bones, the thick-jawed creatures from the earth’s early fresh-water oceans, the enormous murderers that stalked the ferny swamps a hundred million years ago. ‘Let’s see,’ I meditated, ‘suppose