Christopher Stasheff

‘Bit you?’ Rod frowned and ran his fingers over the metal box. He felt the stab of a mild electric shock and jerked his fingers away. Whoever had wired this gadget must have been the rankest of amateurs. It wasn’t even grounded properly.

The box was easy to see once you knew where to look for it. It was white metal, about eight inches on a side, two inches deep, recessed so that its front and top were flush with the stone, halfway between two of the crenelations.

But come to think of it, that faulty grounding might have been intentional, to keep people from tampering.

Rod drew his dagger, glad of the insulation provided by the leather hilt. Carefully, he pried open the front of the box.

He could make out the silvery worm-trails of the printed circuit and the flat, square pillbox of the solid-state components

- but the whole layout couldn’t have been larger than his thumbnail!

His scalp prickled uneasily. Whoever had built this rig knew a little more about molecular circuitry than the engineers back home.

But why such a big box for such a small unit?

Well, the rest of the box was filled with some beautifully-machined apparatus with which Rod was totally unfamiliar.

He looked at the top of the box; there was a round, transparent circle set in the center. Rod frowned. He’d never run into anything quite like this before. At a guess, the circuitry was part of a remote-control system, and the machined parts were what?

‘Master, what is it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Rod muttered, ‘but I have a sneaking suspicion it’s got something to do with the banshee.’

He probed the mechanism with his dagger, trying to find a moving part. He felt sublimely reckless; the gadget could very easily have a destruct circuit capable of blowing this whole section of the battlements halfway back to Sol.

The probing point found something; the machine clicked and began to hum, almost subsonic.

‘Away, master!’ Big Tom shouted. ”Tis accursed!’

But Rod stayed where he was, hand frozen for fear the knife-point would lose whatever contact it had closed.

Smoke billowed out of the transparent circle, shooting ten feet Christopher Stasheff

into the air, then falling back. In less than a minute, a small localized cloud had formed.

A second machine clicked, somewhere in front of Rod, and a shaft of light stabbed upward from the outer wall, toward Rod but over his head, shooting into the smoke-cloud. The shaft of light spread into a fan.

Big Tom wailed in terror. ‘The banshee! Flee, master, for your life!’

Looking up, Rod saw the banshee towering ten feet above him. It seem’ed he could almost smell the rotting, tattered

shrouds that covered the voluptuous woman’s body.

The rabbit mouth opened, showing long, pointed teeth. A hidden loudspeaker hummed into life; the apparition was about to start its wailing.

Rod lifted his dagger a quarter of an inch; the fan of light blacked out, the hiss of mechanical smoke-pot died.

The wind murmured over the battlements, dispelling the last of the smoke-cloud.

Rod knelt immobile, still staring upward; then, shaking himself, he picked up the front of the box and forced it back into place.

‘Master,’ whispered Big Tom, ‘what was it?’

‘A spell,’ Rod answered, ‘and the banshee it called up was a sham.’

He stood, drumming his fingers on the stone.

He struck his fist against the wall. ‘No help for it. Come on, Big Tom, hold my ankles.’

He lay face-downward between the two great granite blocks, his knees above the smoke-pot machine.

‘What, master?’

‘Hold my ankles,’ Rod snapped. ‘I’ve got to take a look at the outside of the wall. And you’ve got to keep me from falling into the moat.’

Tom didn’t answer.

‘Come on, come on!’ Rod looked back over his shoulder. ‘We haven’t got all night.’

Big Tom came forward slowly, a huge, hulking shape in the shadow.

His great hands clamped on Rod’s ankles.

Rod inched forward until his head was clear of the stone. There, just under his chin, was a small, square box with a short snout:

miniaturized projector, shooting a prerecorded Christopher Stasheff

banshee into the cloud of smoke, giving the illusion of three dimensions - a very compact projector’ and removable screen, all susceptible to remote control From where?

Rod craned his neck. All he could see was gray stone. ‘Hold tight, Big Tom.’ He inched forward, hoping he’d guessed right about the big peasant.

He stopped crawling when he felt the granite lip of the battlements pressing his belt buckle. His upper body jutted free beyond the castle wall, with nothing underneath but air, and, a long way down, the moat.

He looked down.

Mm, yes, that was a long way, Wasn’t it? Now, just what would happen if he’d judged Big Tom wrong? If, contrary to expectation, the big lug let go of Rod’s ankles?

Well, if ‘that happened, Fess would send a report back to SCENT

headquarters, and they’d send out another agent. No need to worry.

Tom’s hoarse, labored breathing sounded very loud behind him.

Get it over with quick, boy. Rod scanned the wall under him.

There it was, just the projector, a deep, silver-lined cup recessed into the wall - a hyperbolic antenna.

Why a hyperbolic? he wondered.

So that the radio impulse that turned the projection machines on could be very, very small, impossible to detect outside the straight line between the transmitting and receiving antennas.

So, if you want to find the transmitting antenna, just sight along the axis of the receiving dish.

And, looking along that line and allowing for parallax, he found himself staring straight at the rotting basalt pile of the House of Clovis.

For a moment, he just stared, dumbfounded. So it hadn’t been the councillors after all.

Then he remembered Durers poison attempt at breakfast, and amended his earlier guess: it hadn’t been the councillors all the time.

And, come to think of it, that warming-pan trick would have been much easier for a servant to pull than for a councillor.

He was jarred out of his musing rather abruptly; Big Tom’s hands were trembling on his ankles.

Hell, I don’t weigh that much, he thought; but he wriggled backward while he thought.