Free Alternating Currents by Frederik Pohl Page A

we try something small. This one, for instance.’
     
    I gently lifted the cover off a little rabbit-sized lizard skeleton and touched it with the amulet. Once more, below Brandon’s threshold of hearing. I whispered the word; and under my hands a bluish cloud swirled into the shape of a clumsy puppy of a reptile, frightened red glints in its agate eyes. The mindless trifle shuddered and flinched as it caught sight of us, and scurried off into the shadows.
     
    Brandon’s composure was gone again. ‘Good God,’ he said. ‘Ehrlich, do you realize what you’ve got here? What a tool for the paleontologists! They’ve been guessing and deducing and imagining what these things looked like - and probably guessing all wrong. Now you can show them!’
     
    He was right, of course; there was no need to guess about the long-vanished envelopes of the skeletons they had so laboriously disinterred, when a touch and a word could bring them back, But - ‘ Of course,’ I said coldly. ‘ Perhaps I shall, in due course. But really, Brandon, can you imagine that I have any desire to help the paleontologists with their problems ?’
     
    He gasped, ‘Ehrlich! What is this? What about the search for scientific truth ?’
     
    I laughed in his face, though I must confess that still I was not enjoying my triumph. I sneered, ‘The search for scientific truth took a holiday when I first came to you to discuss this subject. I am not sure that I care to co-operate now that I am in a position to make my own terms.’
     
    He said rigidly. ‘You want your job back. You shall have it.’
     
    ‘No, Brandon,’ I told him, ‘bribery won’t help you. The job is of no importance to me, you see. After all, I expect I can earn a living in another way, if I choose. Television, perhaps ? A turn on the vaudeville stage, if there still is a vaudeville stage - Professor Ehrlich and his Glamorous Ghosts? Cleopatra, Helen and Astarte, brought back before your eyes. I can do it, you know. Given a single fragment of a body, I can bring back its ghost as easily as I bring this one.’ And perhaps not entirely sanely - I was in a state not far from hysteria, I think - I thrust the amulet against the broad rib-cage of the Museum’s best brontosaur, and watched the bluish spirit of the beast sluggishly drag off down the hall.
     
    Brandon said sharply, ‘Ehrlich! Think this over!’ But this was my moment, and I laughed at him.                 
     
    Brandon and I heard the footsteps of the night guard at the same moment; Brandon called him over, and for a second I was instinctively worried. But, almost at once, I saw that I had nothing to fear. Perhaps I was guilty of some minor malfeasance - loitering, or trepass, or that catchall of police-court jurisprudence, disorderly conduct - but nothing more serious than that. And a reprimand from a magistrate was a small price to pay.
     
    I walked carelessly away from Brandon and the running, yelling guard. Stegosaur was before me; I touched a spiny bone and called over my shoulder, ‘Tell the paleontologists, Brandon. Want to see more?’ The monster ghost appeared, writhing and convulsing; that beast had not died easily, for it was dripping spectral blood from a ripped cavern in its side. It fled clumsily from some eon-dead attacker, blundered through a wall and was gone.
     
    I was shaken, but just before me was the massive bulk of tyrannosaur, the king lizard, the giant over-jawed killer of the dawn era that was evolution’s most deadly product; it was a temptation I could not resist. I stabbed the amulet at a segment of the brute’s skeletal tail, half-turning to Brandon and the guard as I said the word. I began to call to them, some mocking phrase. But the words died on my lips; for suddenly I knew that something was very wrong.
     
    I looked back to tyrannosaur. There was no bluish wraith, no movement in the ancient bones. I stood startled for a fraction of a second, then I heard a thud at my