A Feast of Demons Part 3

He had, in fact, done just that for Greco.

Greco said, "Here. First installment." He pulled something out of his pocket and handed it to me. It was metallic--about the size of a penny slot-machine bar of chocolate, if you remember back that far. It gleamed and it glittered. And it was ruddy yellow in color.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Gold," he said. "Keep it, Virgie. It came out of sea water, like you said. Call it the down payment on your salary."

I hefted it. I bit it. I said, "By the way, speaking of salary...."

"Whatever you like," he said wearily. "A million dollars a year? Why not?"

"Why not?" I echoed, a little dazed.

And then I just sat there listening, while he talked. What else was there to do? I won't even say that I was listening, at least not with the very fullest of attention, because that thought of a million dollars a year kept coming between me and his words. But I got the picture. The possibilities were endless. And how well I knew it!

Gold from the sea, sure. But energy--free energy--it was there for the taking. From the molecules of the air, for instance. Refrigerators could be cooled, boilers could get up steam, homes could be heated, forges could be fired--and all without fuel. Planes could fly through the air without a drop of gasoline in their tanks. Anything.

A million dollars a year....

And it was only the beginning.

I came to. "What?"

He was looking at me. He repeated patiently, "The police are looking for me."

I stared. "_You?_"

"Did you hear about Grand Rapids?"

I thought. "Oh--Wait. A fire. A big one. And that was you?"

"Not me. My demons. Maxwell demons--or Greco demons, they should be called. He talked about them; I use them. When they're not using me.

This time, they burned down half the city."

"I remember now," I said. The papers had been full of it.

"They got loose," he said grimly. "But that's not the worst. You'll have to earn your million a year, Virgie."

"What do you mean, they got loose?"

He shrugged. "Controls aren't perfect. Sometimes the demons escape. I can't help it."

"How do you control them in the first place?"

He sighed. "It isn't really what you would call controls," he said.

"It's just the best I can do to keep them from spreading."

"But--you said sometimes you separate metals, sometimes you get energy. How do the demons know which you want them to do, if you say you can't control them?"

"How do you make an apple tree understand whether you want it to grow Baldwins or Macintoshes?"

I gawked at him. "Why--but you don't, Greek! I mean it's either one or the other!"

"Just so with demons! You're not so stupid after all, are you? It's like improving the breed of dogs. You take a common ancestral mutt, and generations later you can develop an Airedale, a dachshund or a Spitz. How? By selection. My demon ent.i.ties grow, they split, the new ent.i.ties adapt themselves to new conditions. There's a process of evolution. I help it along, that's all."

He took the little slab of gold from me, brooding.

Abruptly he hurled it at the wall. "Gold!" he cried wildly. "But who wants it? I need _help_, Virgie! If gold will buy it from you, I'll pay! But I'm desperate. You'd be desperate too, with nothing ahead but a sordid, demeaning death from young age and a--"

I interrupted him. "What's that?"

It was a nearby raucous hooting, loud and mournful.

Greco stopped in mid-sentence, listening like a hunted creature. "My room," he whispered. "All my equipment--on the floor above--"

I stepped back, a little worried. He was a strange man, skinny and tall and wild-eyed. I was glad he was so thin; if he'd been built solidly in proportion to his height, just then he would have worried me, with those staring, frightened eyes and that crazy way of talking.

But I didn't have time to worry, in any case. Footsteps were thundering in the halls. Distant voices shouted to each other.

The hoot came again.

"The fire whistle!" Greco bayed. "The hotel's on fire!"

He leaped out of my room into the corridor.

I followed. There was a smell of burning--not autumn leaves or paper; it was a chemical-burning smell, a leather-burning smell, a henyard-on-fire smell. It reeked of an a.s.sortment of things, gunpowder and charred feathers, the choking soot of burning oil, the crisp tang of a wood fire. It was, I thought for a second, perhaps the typical smell of a hotel on fire, but in that I was wrong.

"Demons!" yelled Greco, and a bellhop, hurrying by, paused to look at us queerly. Greco sped for the stairs and up them.

I followed.

It was Greco's room that was ablaze--he made that clear, trying to get into it. But he couldn't. Black smoke billowed out of it, and orange flame. The night manager's water bucket was going to make no headway against _that_.

I retreated. But Greco plunged ahead, his face white and scary.

I stopped at the head of the stairs. The flames drove Greco off, but he tried again. They drove him off again, and this time for good.

He stumbled toward me. "Out! It's hopeless!" He turned, stared blindly at the hotel employees with their chain of buckets. "You! What do you think you're doing? That's--" He stopped, wetting his lips. "That's a gasoline fire," he lied, "and there's dynamite in my luggage. Clear the hotel, you hear me?"

It was, as I say, a lie. But it got the hotel cleared out.

And then--

It might as well have been gasoline and dynamite. There was a purplish flash and a muttering boom, and the whole roof of the four-story building lifted off.

I caught his arm.