Ardor on Aros

where barbarians are truly barbaric
where warriors are not always noble
where heroines are not necessarily virgins
and where heroes are rarely indefatigable

where the world as we know it does not
exist but does in fact abide...

an outrageously inventive novel
of crossed swords and sorceries,
careening adventures and sublime
paradoxes.

While it is true that I have written some mildly imaginative stores, I am a businessman. I think my readers will corroborate that I have written nothing like the narrative that follows. This one was dictated to me—or rather into my office tape recorder—on five consecutive nights. I cannot tell you how, although on the day of the first transmission I had mentioned the narrator while dictating a letter on that same recorder. I recognize the name, if not his voice. (I admit mine is not the best of recorders.)

The file folder is one of only two with the helpless notion: LAPSED. WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN.

Whereabouts unknown! None of my other clients, however far-flung, has ever traveled so far. But I will let him tell his own story, through this transcription of the tapes. I am only the mouthpiece for my former client and his strange story.* I have not even corrected some of the narrator’s errors. There is a certain charm in the narration, from the mind and lips of one who has no reference books at hand and does not pretend to have all the answers.

I can assure you it is unlike any adventure you have ever read, although it is astonishingly similar to some, as if it were the prototype. But here you will find no omniscient, indefatigable, undefeatable superhero.

The barbarians
are
barbarians; real men with drives, emotions, and genitalia. They are not painted, as they have been by other mouthpieces, bigger than life. They will appeal to those of us Conan Doyle referred to when he wrote

I have wrought my simple plan
If I give one hour of joy
To the boy who’s half a man
Or the man who’s half a boy.

andrew j. offutt
Funny Farm
Morehead, Kentucky 40351
March 1972

*At the request of the narrator, I have turned over the cassette tapes themselves to the library of Morehead State University. The tapes are available there for listening, on request. Or you may write to Box P, Morehead, Kentucky. Hopefully the royalties from this narrative will enable the college officials to reply.

Mine was one of those wasted college careers: before miniskirts, marijuana, and muggings. All I got from four years in an American college—a place where we went not to learn but to obtain a lanolinized union card guaranteeing a job—was a far but mostly useless education and a basic grounding in human psychology: from the classroom, from a few of the many required books written by the professors and their old school chums, and mostly from participation in campus politics, and the best source, other human beings.

Let’s get the unfortunate part said fast: I’ve never had any physics, and the only hard science courses I took were General Science 101-102. Standard Freshman Requirements. I never took fencing either.

I was a fair shot and a fast thinker with good reflexes before I got to college. Yoga I studied on my own, without ever mastering it. I really don’t like being pushed, and disliked the useless ant colony of college “education.”

I am—was—a sort of Southerner, by the way. My state, to its shame, supplied the leader to each side in the war that gave Mississippi highway patrolmen the traitors’ flag they brandish in their front license plate holders.

I start with college because I’m not interested in making a Stendahlian Great Confession of my childhood. It wasn’t all that hungup, anyhow, and normal childhoods aren’t the thing to write about.

When I left school I hadn’t the foggiest notion who I was, what I was doing, or where I was going. Where I was at, in the then current terminology that destructed years of grade-school training. I remember one teacher who stood us in a corner for two hours if we ended a sentence with “to” or “at.” Same old girl who wouldn’t allow us to use nicknames. Called everyone by his birth certificate name, no matter what even his parents preferred. I hated my name then, particularly the formal version: Henry. Ukh. I wanted to be called Rocky. I hated that old bag, too. She’s in her grave now, along with most of what she represented: changelessness and the old Victorian formality and morality.

It hasn’t come back, has it?

Like a lot of students, I wasn’t ready to be a graduate, an adult.

It happens pretty fast, that graduation-and-turning-loose. Yesterday you were subject to the dean and dorm rules; today you’re supposed to be a man. I’d no idea what I wanted to do. Get married? Like a lot of males my age I was a lot more enchanted with the concept of living in sin. I even considered the Peace Corps. It seemed a good enough place for someone trying to find some answers (The Answer!), and most of us students were pretty much wide-eyed idealists in those days. Dad had made money, and Things. Since we had ’em we could afford to sneer at them and concentrate on changing the world. (To what? We didn’t know. Did Jefferson and Franklin, or Gaius Julius Caesar?)

I wanted to be a Nobel winner, another Sigmund Freud or Oliver Cromwell—in reverse: I considered going about taking an ax to Fundamentalist churches. I wanted to be a writer. I knew what I didn’t want to do: I didn’t want to fly a Huey in Vietnam. I didn’t want a uniform: Modern Army Green or Navy Blue or Air Force Blue or Madison Avenue gray, either. Maybe I wanted to climb the Matterhorn, explore the sea bottom, be an astronaut, get involved in human cloning, bomb the Vatican to try to Do Something about the population mess. Maybe hunt: tigers in Indian or for a lost explorer in Africa. (But none get lost anymore: Hemingway and his better, Ruark, left trails of gin bottles to follow.)

Instead I snapped up an intriguing Opportunity: sort of secretary, sort of assistant, to Dr. Finley Blakey. He knew I didn’t know where I was going, knew I was pretty bright, and he liked me. So I took the job—at $450 a month. But I didn’t need money and I didn’t worry about that end of it. I figured any man should spend a few years profiting by experience; in his head, rather than in his pocket. I had plenty of time for the great American pastime, the run for the money. Besides, that’s about what the high priest of management consultants, Peter Drucker, was saying—and Dr. Blakey had enough pull to get me a deferment.

Finley Blakey had two Masters’ degrees and an Sc.D. in addition to his Ph.D. He also had myopia, two cats, a dog, a verminously scummy parrot, bad breath, and one of the most brilliant minds on the hemisphere. He was one of those old-time oddballs: hated Feds and rules and sweated it out with a home laboratory, which the Feds were certain could not be done, to any purpose. One had to have staffs, committee decisions, $9000-a-year secretaries and all that. Dr. Blakey wasn’t interested in all that: security, a badge (belongingness and status), several assistants and secretaries, a regular salary, and that hospitalization plan you can’t buy but even your mongoloid postal clerk has. (Have they made it a private corporation yet?)

Dr. Blakey WAS absent-minded; that’s a normal adjunct of genius. He was a scientist. He was NOT mad.

Kooky, yes. Mad, no.

He was working on Something Big. I didn’t know what. I spent most of my time trying to discover what he and his assistant were doing. Now I know: that’s what they were doing, too! His assistant was going to write her doctoral thesis around their work, and I suppose she’s long since published and earned that ultimate union card. But I’ll bet her conclusion’s wrong. Things sure can’t be depended upon to be as they seem!

I did what I was told, trying to soak up what I could while observing the genius at work.
If he succeeds at whatever-it-is,
I thought,
I’ll be famous.
(I probably was, too, for a few days—was I?) His wife and the dog and his assistant did essentially what I did, while the cats and the parrot did what they pleased. The parrot was named Pope Borgia.

I never did learn where Dr. Blakey got his backing. I wrote letters to somebody named Gordon, mostly demanding more equipment or the money to buy it. Mr. Gordon called every now and then. I didn’t eavesdrop. There wasn’t an extension phone.

I admit I was more interested than anything else in the bulges in his assistant’s lab smock, fore and aft. Evelyn unfortunately was more interested in her work than in me. Which led to painful discussions:

“I think you must be a satyr,” she told me, pronouncing it: “say-tah.” “You must be. You really don’t think of anything else, do you?”

I went along. “Nope. I belong to a disadvantaged minority group called males. God laid on us a mandate:
fill women.
But cool it on the Freudian inreading. Satyriasis is a serious illness. Permanently up.”

“And with you it’s only ninety percent of the time.”

“Evelyn, we are a young man and a young woman thrown together by circumstances. It is kismet. It is only natural, only fitting, that we—“

“You’re an adventurer,” she said. (“You ah an adventuah.”) Evelyn, blonde hair and bulges or not, was a scientist, and worse, an American. Neither can stand to see things go unlabeled. Sure she was a bright young physicist. But I still call her Intellectually Disadvantaged. She probably got her jollies from a slide rule. Looking at it, I mean.

“I’ll accept that,” I said, in the teeth of her baleful look. “I’d *like* to be an adventurer. A knight in armor, rescuing white-smocked damsels from wizards in evil laboratories.” I eyed her knees. In the fashions of the time, the only way a woman could avoid having her knees eyed was to wear a bathrobe or pants—in which case she got her fanny eyed. What are they wearing now, those nonsorcerous women of Earth?

She got up off Dr. Blakey’s couch. “Hank, you ah ridiculous. Go—wait, one question: what are you going to do when you grow up?”

“Oh boy. That’s supposed to tear me up,” I said, torn up. “Be a fireman?”

She waited.

“Be a writer,” I sighed. “What about you?”

But her blue eyes had widened. “Really? Seriously?” She sounded breathless, and I hastened to assure her I would be the Great American writer. She sat back down. I soon found out why: she was writing a novel. Naturally she wanted an audience; every would-be writer does. Maybe I was good for something after all.

Angling for barter, I asked her what she and Dr. Blakey had been doing in the lab today.

They’d been a flap that afternoon: Something Happened in the lab. Cries. Exclamations. Much rushing about and shouting, followed by muttering and a phone call to Gordon and secret dictation. But Dr. Blakey must’ve mailed the tape itself. When I sat down to type, practically falling all over myself in my eagerness, all that little plug said in my ear was blah correspondence and such blah notes. There
was
a reference to “the experiment.” I typed it in caps: The Experiment. Dr. Blakey didn’t complain.

But Evelyn wouldn’t tell me. So I stupidly advised her to take her blank-blank story as a suppository, and I stalked off. (Paper tigers, yeah I know. But the two of them were destroying my male ego.)

It happened again the next day, whatever it was, again behind closed and locked (I checked) laboratory doors. Shouts. Exclamations. Pitter-patter-
pat.
Delighted outcries. Odd noises. Telephone to Gordon. Secret dictation. I even tried the lab door at one A.M. Locked. And guarded—damn that bigmouthed parrot!

In the morning Dr. Blakey interrupted my work.

“Hank, I want to make you a proposition.”

“Dr. Blakey!”

“Oh dear god, Henry, let’s don’t play freshman games. [Ouch! No paper tiger, him!] I want to involve you in my work—but first I want you to swear yourself to secrecy, and I mean from
anyone.
Anyone.”

I fixed his eyes, huge behind his superspecs, with my own, so far back in my head they’re barely visible. “Done,” I said.

He hesitated. “That was very fast,” he observed. “But—somehow I believe you mean it.”

“Dr. Blakey, you yourself told me it’s getting harder and harder to find someone who makes fast decisions. I do. A couple of odd but positive things have happened in the lab this week, and you want another head and a pair of yes involved, even unscientific mine. But it’s secret, and I’m curious. I’ll swap absolute silence for a look at what you’ve been afraid to let me type about.”

He regarded me thoughtfully. His eyes neither narrowed nor widened nor blinked. Nor did his mouth drop open, or any of that TV business. He merely gazed at me.

“Amazing,” he said at last, in a perfectly normal tone. “Your father’s totally wrong about you! I suppose you know he things you are a—, a—“

“—wastrel; stupid ass; et cetera,” I supplied. “But yes, I have a brain. It works, fairly often. I enjoy using it. Also—I’m a nonscience type. We’re number two these days. We try harder.”

He smiled; he’s fond of TV, and knows every commercial. Jingles are all he whistles—badly. “Come along, Hank.”

I went along. Into the lab.

There’s no sense describing it, is there? You’ve seen movies and TV. You see one home-grown lab, you’ve seen ’em all. All this one lacked was Igor and a Jacob’s ladder. Oh—and Vincent Price. Dr. Blakey looked more like Roger Price. And Evelyn looked more like the Mad Scientist’s blonde captive than his co-worker.

“Hank, keep your eyes on that platform and the glass bell and the contents at all times. Do not take your eyes from it. Please note all times exactly. Here, use this.” He handed me his cassette recorder and microphone. I nodded without pointing out that I’d have to take my eyes off the bell and platform to check my watch. That would have been more “freshman games,” no doubt. I’d noticed he seemed to have lost his pocket watch.

The little platform and the big glass bell didn’t look particularly impressive. The platform was metal—meteoric, as it turned out, a sort of Blakeyesque home-brew from something that plopped down in his daddy’s backyard when he was eleven. Dr. B not his father. The platform was precisely, I learned later, four feet by four feet. The bell covered it exactly and was four feet tall—precisely.

Dr. Blakey and Evelyn—looking very labbish in a long white coat, although the dirty seat in back and thrust in front detracted somewhat—exchanged meaningful looks. I so advised the microphone, quietly.

“Dr. Blakey is now approaching the platform. Now he is taking his ball-point pen from the breast pocket of his lab coat. It is 11:17. It is a gold pen, made by Cross, given him for Christmas by Mr. Gordon about whom I’m supposed to know nothing. I put a new cartridge into it yesterday: blue. It has a lifetime guarantee. He is placing it on the platform at…exactly 11:18 Ay Em. He turns to look as Miss Shay and he nods. At me. I nod. He steps back. The gold ball-point looks very tiny, there on the platform. Now he has depressed a button; the glass bell is descending to—11:19—cover the platform. It makes a clanging sound. Dr. Blakey says the air is being drawn from the airtight chamber thus formed. Again he looks at us. We both nod. He returns to the platform, peers into it, at the pen—it is 11:20 and a half. I believe his glasses need changing; make a note to remind him. Again he looks signif—11:21—icantly at both of us. I nod. Evel—Miss Shay—waits, looking very anxious. Waiting. 11:22,. I can see the pen. Is something supposed to happen to it? Dr. Blakey is looking at the pen. Ev—Miss Shay—is looking at Dr. Blakey. It is—11:25. Dr. Blakey nods and snaps his fingers without looking up—tells me to watch the pen—it is 11:26—Miss Shay closes a relay—the pen IS GONE!”

We looked at each other.

Dr. Blakey pushed his finger into his ear and wiggled it.

“Very good, Hank. You recorded every step and kept excellent track of time. Do by all means remind me about my spectagles—better still, call Dr. what’s-’is-name for an appointment. Make three, as soon as possible; I’ll try to keep them. Well, Miss Shay.”

Miss
Shay—and Hank. Relative importance, of course.

“Oh—yes. Well. That’s three times, doctor.”

We were sitting in what Dr. Blakey calls his study—it was meant to be a dining room. It was 2 P.M., we had not had lunch, we had just listend to my tape, we were having, ad Dr. Blakey’s suggestion, a very large brandy-soda. I swigged mine with the usual covered-up shudder.

“Please tell me.”

Dr. Blakey looked at me. “Henry, at 11:25—and probably a half—this morning, my gold Cross pen vanished. At 3:15 yesterday my chiming watch also vanished. From the same platform, in the same manner, apparently instantaneously as the relay was closed.”