again."
In the control room, he took the _Yore_ back to 7:20 p.m. of the sameday and re-materialized it half a mile farther down the valley.Turning, he saw that Rowena had followed him and was watching him fromthe doorway. "Whereabouts may I find oats that I may feed thy horse,fair knight?" she asked.
"Easy Money doesn't eat. He--" Mallory paused astonished as two of thelargest tears he had ever seen coalesced in her eyes and went tumblingdown her cheeks. "Oh, it's not that he's sick," he rushed on. "It'sjust that horses like him don't require food to keep them going. Why,Easy Money's guaranteed for ... he'll live another thirty years."
The sun came up beyond the plum-blue horizons of her eyes. "Itpleaseth me mickle to hear ye speak thus, fair knight. I ... I havegreat joy of him."
Back in the rec-hall, Mallory pulled on his gauntlets, reset histimepiece, and donned his helmet. The left audio-amplifier was shot,but otherwise the piece was in good condition--aside from the dent, ofcourse. He encephalopathed Easy Money to his side, hung his shieldaround his neck, and mounted. "Hand me my spear, will you, Rowena?" heasked.
She did so. "Ye be a most noble knight indeed, fair sir," she said,"for to set so little store by thine own life in the service of adamosel the which is undeserving of thy deeds. I ... I would leverthat ye forsook the Sangraal than that ye be fordone."
Her concern touched him, and he removed his helmet and leaned down andkissed her on the forehead. "Keep the home fires burning," he said;then, setting his helmet back in place, he activated the lock, rodeacross the mirage-moat, and set forth into the forest once again.
V
This time when he reached the crest of the ridge that separated thetwo valleys, Mallory took an azimuth on the towers of Carbonek,encephalo-fed the direction to Easy Money, and programmed the "animal"to proceed in as straight a course as possible.
In the east, the moon was just beginning to rise; in the west, tracesof the sunset lingered blood-red just above the horizon. On thehighway below, a knight sitting astride a brown rohorse and bearing awhite shield with a red cross in the center was riding toward Carbonekto challenge a twenty-second century "felon paynim" in imitationAge-of-Chivalry armor. In the valley Mallory had just left behind himthere were two castles named _Yore_, and soon, a third would pop intoexistence and yet another Mallory come riding out. Mallory grinned. Itwas a little bit like playing chess.
The forest which Easy Money presently entered was parklike in places,and sometimes the trees thinned out into wide, moonlit meadows.Crossing one of the meadows, Mallory saw the first star, and when atlength Easy Money emerged on the highway, the heavens were decked outin typical midsummer panoply. The rohorse had followed its programmingalmost perfectly and had emerged at a point just south of the laneleading to the castle of Carbonek. All Mallory had to do was toencephalo-guide it farther down the highway to a point beyond the siteof the forthcoming joust. While doing so, he kept well within theconcealing shadows of the bordering oaks and beeches where the groundwas soft and could give forth no telltale _clip-clop_ of hoofbeats.His circumspection proved wise--as in one sense, of course, it alreadyhad--and when the false Sir Launcelot came riding by on his way to thecastle and the chamber of the Sangraal, he was no more aware ofMallory III's presence by the roadside than he would presently beaware of Mallory II's presence in the shadows of the trees thatbordered the lane.
Mallory III grinned again and brought Easy Money to a halt just beyondthe next bend. "Wit ye well, Sir Jason, that thy hours be numbered,"he said.
He remained seated in the saddle, feeling pretty good about theworld. In no time at all, if his one-man ambuscade came off, he wouldbe on his way back to the _Yore_, and thence to the twenty-secondcentury and a haircut. Selling the Sangraal without the aid of aprofessional time-fence like Perfidion would be difficult, of course,but it could be done, and once it was done, he, Mallory, could takehis place on Get-Rich-Quick Street with the best of them, and noquestions would be asked. There was, to be sure, the problem of whatto do about a certain damosel that hight Rowena, but he would facethat when he came to it. Maybe he could drop her off a dozen years inthe future in a region far enough removed from Carbonek to ensure hersafety. He would see.
At this point in his reflections he was jolted into alertness by thesound of approaching hoofbeats. A moment later he heard a second setof hoofbeats and knew that Mallory II had made his presence known.Presently both sets crescendoed into staccato thunder as the two"knights" came pounding toward each other, and not long afterwardthere was a clank and a clatter as Mallory II went tumbling out of hissaddle and into the roadside weeds. Finally the single set ofhoofbeats took over again, and Mallory III saw a horse and ridercoming around the bend in the highway. He braced himself.
Before making his play, he waited till horse and rider were directlyopposite him; then he encephalopathed Easy Money to charge. "SirLauncelot" managed to get his shield up in time, but the maneuver didhim no good. Mallory's spearhead struck the shield dead center, and"Sir Launcelot" went sailing out of his saddle to land with an awesomeclatter flat on his back on the highway. He did not get up.
Dismounting, Mallory removed the man's helmet. It was Perfidion allright. There was a large bruise on the side of his head and he was outcold, but he was still breathing. Next, Mallory looked for theSangraal. Perfidion had concealed it somewhere, and apparently he haddone the job well. Since the armor could not have accommodated anobject of that size, the hiding place had to be somewhere on the bodyof his horse. The horse was standing quietly beside Easy Money in themiddle of the highway. It was jet-black and its fetlock-lengthtrappings were blue, threaded with silver; otherwise, the two steedswere identical. Mallory tumbled to the truth then, went over to wherethe black "horse" was standing, raised its trappings, found the tinyactivator button, and depressed it. The croup-hood rose up, and therein the secret compartment, wrapped in red samite, lay the cause of themounting absentee-rate in King Arthur's court.
Always the skeptic, Mallory raised a corner of the samite in order tomake certain that he was not being cheated. Instantly, a reflected rayof moonlight stabbed upward into his eyes, and for a moment he wasblinded. Exorcising the thought that sneaked into his mind, he closedthe croup-hood, rearranged the trappings, and returned to Perfidion'sside. Dragging the armor-encumbered man over to the black rohorse andslinging him over the saddle was no easy matter, but Mallory managed;then he picked up Perfidion's helmet and spear and set the former onthe pommel and wedged the latter in one of the stirrups. Finally hemounted Easy Money and, encephalopathing the black rohorse to follow,set out down the highway away from the castle of Carbonek.
Make-believe castles could fool the hadbeens, but they couldn't fool aprofessional. He spotted the phony towers of Perfidion's TSB risingabove the trees before he had proceeded half a mile. After raising the"portcullis", he got the man down from the black rohorse, dragged himinside, and propped him against the rec-hall bar. Then he got theman's helmet and spear and laid them beside him. After considerablereflection, he went into the control room, set the time-dial for June10, 1964, the space-dial for a busy intersection in downtown LosAngeles, and punched out H-O-T-D-O-G S-T-A-N-D on the lumillusionpanel. Satisfied, he went into the generator room and short-circuitedthe automatic throw-out unit so that when rematerialization tookplace, the generator would burn up. Finding a ball of heavy-dutytwine, he returned to the control room, tied one end to the masterswitch, and began backing out of the TSB, unwinding the twine as hewent.
In the rec-hall, he paused, and grinned down at the still-unconsciousPerfidion. "It's a better break than you meant to give me, Jason," hesaid. "And don't worry--once you explain to the authorities whatyou're doing in a suit of sixth-century armor and how you happened toopen a giant hot-dog stand in the middle of a traffic-cloggedcrossroads, you'll be all right. As a matter of fact, with yourknowledge of things to come, you'll probably wind up a richer man thanyou are now--if the smog doesn't get you first." He stepped throughthe lock, jerked the twine, and the "castle" vanishe
d into thin air.
Remounting Easy Money and encephalopathing the black rohorse tofollow, he started back toward the _Yore_, taking a direct routethrough the forest. He was halfway to his destination and had justemerged into a wide meadow when he saw the knight with the whiteshield riding toward him in the bright moonlight. In the center of theshield there was a vivid blood-red cross.
When the knight saw Mallory, he brought his steed to a halt. Moonlightglimmered eerily on his shield, turned his helmet to silver. His armorseemed to emit an unearthly light--a light that was at once terrifyingand transcendent. The hilt of his sword was as blood-red as the crosson his shield; so was the pommel of his spear. Here was righteousnessincarnate.