The Complete Compleat Enchanter Read Free Page B

non-Aristotelian sorites—”
    The papers were still there, but overlaying the picture of those six white rectangles was a whirl of faint spots of color. All the colors of the spectrum were represented, he noted with the back of his mind, but there was a strong tendency toward violet. Round and round they went—round—and round—
    “If either P or Q is true or (Q or R) is true then either Q is true or (P or R) is false—”
    Round and round—He could hear nothing at all. He had no sense of heat or cold, or of the pressure of the chair seat against him. There was nothing but millions of whirling spots of color.
    Yes, he could feel temperature now. He was cold. There was sound, too, a distant whistling sound, like that of a wind in a chimney. The spots were fading into a general grayness. There was a sense of pressure, also, on the soles of his feet. He straightened his legs—yes, standing on something. But everything around him was gray—and bitter cold, with a wind whipping the skirts of his coat around him.
    He looked down. His feet were there all right—hello, feet, pleased to meet you. But they were fixed in grayish-yellow mud which had squelched up in little ridges around them. The mud belonged to a track, only two feet wide. On both sides of it the gray-green of dying grass began. On the grass large flakes of snow were scattered, dandruffwise. More were coming, visible as dots of darker gray against the background of whirling mist, swooping down long parallel inclines, growing and striking the path with the tiniest t s . Now and then one spattered against Shea’s face.
    He had done it. The formula worked!

    Two
    “Welcome to Ireland!” Harold Shea murmured to himself. He thanked heaven that his syllogismobile had brought his clothes and equipment along with his person. It would never have done to have been dumped naked onto this freezing landscape. The snow was not alone responsible for the grayness. There was also a cold, clinging mist that cut off vision at a hundred yards or so. Ahead of him the track edged leftward around a little mammary of a hill, on whose flank a tree rocked under the melancholy wind. The tree’s arms all reached one direction, as though the wind were habitual; its branches bore a few leaves as gray and discouraged as the landscape itself. The tree was the only object visible in that wilderness of mud, grass and fog. Shea stepped toward it. The serrated leaves bore the indentations of the Northern scrub oak.
    But that grows only in the Arctic Circle, he thought. He was bending closer for another look when he heard the clop-squash of a horse’s hoofs on the muddy track behind him.
    He turned. The horse was very small, hardly more than a pony, and shaggy, with a luxuriant tail blowing round its withers. On its back sat a man who might have been tall had he been upright, for his feet nearly touched the ground. But he was hunched before the icy wind driving in behind. From saddle to eyes he was enveloped in a faded blue cloak. A formless slouch hat was pulled tight over his face, yet not so tight as to conceal the fact that he was full-bearded and gray.
    Shea took half a dozen quick steps to the roadside. He addressed the man with the phrase he had composed in advance for his first human contact in the world of Irish myth:
    “The top of the morning to you my good man, and would it be fare to the nearest hostel?”
    He had meant to say more, but paused uncertainly as the man on the horse lifted his head to reveal a proud, unsmiling face in which the left eye socket was unpleasantly vacant. Shea smiled weakly, then gathered his courage and plunged on: “It’s a rare bitter December you do be having in Ireland.”
    The stranger looked at him with much of the same clinical detachment he himself would have given to an interesting case of schizophrenia, and spoke in slow, deep tones: “I have no knowledge of hostels, nor of Ireland; but the month is not December. We are in May, and this is