The dragon lifted a claw and pointed. "You go south all the way." It grinned and licked its lips. "That is you go south if you answer my riddle correctly." Smog scratched his ear with one great filthy claw, making an irritating rasping sound, then reared up to its full height and gazed down with fascination at its p.r.o.nounced belly-b.u.t.ton. "Come to think of it, folks, you go south either way!"

c.l.i.toria and Ottar rattled their swords and snarled, but Rick silenced them with a gesture.

"We'll give you a few minutes of silence to concoct your riddle. Meantime, we will just step a short distance around yonder hill, where we may tinkle in the bushes. You don't want to gobble down travelers full of it, do you?"

Superb, thought Bill. What a great thinker Rick was! All they'd have to do when they got past that hill was to take off for the South. There was no way that those flimsy, tatty wings of Smog were going to keep him aloft to follow very long.

"No way, Sonny," the dragon said, though. "I've heard that old bowb before. Once around the hill and you are in the next county in seconds. Besides, I've got my riddle. Are you ready? I'm only going to give you to the count of ten to answer, folks, and then I'm going to gobble you up!" He winked at them. "Oh, this is a really good one! Are you ready for it?!" The dragon snickered coyly. Which, when you think about it, is a pretty repelling sight.

"Riddle on, Smog!" said Rick, standing up to every inch of his heroic height.

"Very well, tender people. The riddle: "What travels on four legs at dawn, two legs at midday, and three at dusk?"

The dragon leered at them, waggling his eyebrows knowingly. Rick slapped his forehead. "Gosh. Arrrrr!

That's a hard one. You'll excuse us while my friends and I huddle together on the matter."

"Of course," said the dragon. "But the count begins now," it reminded them. "One!" it rumbled.

The group convened, frowns of puzzlement all around. For Bill's part, he didn't have the faintest. It was the stupidest riddle he'd ever heard!

"I know!" ventured Hyperkinetic, tapping his long narrow nose. "A Martian orgy! At least, that's the answer I thought I saw in GALACTIC PLAYBOY Party Jokes!"

Rick shook his head. "We're not in the land of Feelthy Magazines yet! We're in the land of Absurd Fantasy. We need something appropriate."

"Two!" growled Smog.

"Chingers?" ventured Bill hopelessly and they all looked at him with disgust.

"Three!" drooled Smog.

"Let us not be too stupid, Bill." said Rick. "I know a lot of morons that would have a hard job coming up with something that dumb."

"Tempers, tempers, time's a-wasting. Four!" cozened Smog.

"I know what is!" said Ottar happily. "Sammy Wallund, come home after all-night drink, stagger, fall on face..."

"Five!" roared Smog.

"No, no, no!" said Rick, beginning to tear at his hair. "I know it! It's on the tip of my tongue, but I just can't spit it out!"

"Six!" sneered Smog.

"How about a Denubian Slime Dog?" ventured c.l.i.toria.

"What comes after six?" asked Smog, starting to count on his claws. "Oh yes! Eight!" But the bewildered dragon was running out of said-bookisms, so he just declared this number in a simple monotone.

"Man," said Bill. "This is one tough riddle!"

"Seven!"

"That's it!" cried Rick. "That's the answer!" He scampered over to the dragon, waving his arms wildly.

"Ed Rex told me this one in the Holy Bar and Grill!"

"Ten!" said Smog. "You guys come up with the answer or what?"

"Yes, I think so," said Rick. "What walks on four legs in the morning, two in midday and three at dusk, Smog? Why, a man of course! Four legs when he crawls after he's born, two when he is a mature man - and then three, in the twilight of his years, 'cause he needs a cane! Where'd you get that one, fellow? Your sphinxy buddy, Winks?"

Smog's lips curled unhappily. "Drat. I should have dug a little deeper in my riddle memory. Oh well.

That's the way the corpses crumple."

"Then we get to leave now?" Bill cried happily. "Can you also maybe let us know where the nearest bar is?"

"No to the first question - and I don't know to the second," the dragon susurrated succinctly through a singularly wicked grin. "I have no intention of letting such succulent suckers as yourselves go! Besides, I've rather a hankering for a good, long b.l.o.o.d.y fight!"

No sooner were the words spoken, than its great head speared forward, planting its considerable fangs around Hyperkinetic and his lute. The bard was quickly drawn up into the air, wriggling and screaming most unmusically, and then swallowed down with a gigantic gulp, following the priest to digestive destiny.

"Lying lout!" cried c.l.i.toria, raising her sword for battle.

"You lie to Ottar!" bellowed the Viking, sword whistling in fast circles. "Ottar chop you into hundemad, dog food!"

"Well, at least no more bad ballads!" Bill philosophized, dragging out his sword. Since the Troopers used only guns and heavy weapons, he wasn't sure how well he could handle one of these. He could only hope that his instincts and great desire for survival might teach him quickly enough.

Rick's weapons were also drawn. "Go get the foul fiend!" he cried. "I'll guard the rear!"

The barbarians trundled forward, slashing, feinting and stabbing at the green, snarling beast.

"That's a good idea," Bill agreed as a roaring blast of flame wrapped him in soot. He saw the flashing claws of the dragon rake out toward the barbarians. "We never can be sure who's going to attack from our backs, can we?"

c.l.i.toria and Ottar were oblivious. They had turned into the fierce, fighting-machine berserkers that were their nature. Swinging their broadswords, they dived happily into battle.

Unfortunately, the battle was over much too swiftly for Bill's taste.

Ottar was swiftly gutted and then swallowed down in three or four chunks, whiskey bottles in his pockets and all.

c.l.i.toria was slightly more successful. She managed to scratch the dragon here and there, but as soon as Smog's gullet was free of Ottar, he s.n.a.t.c.hed the woman up and sent her right after him.

Using the sword as a toothpick, Smog turned and smiled down at the two remaining travelers, leering sanguinely through the blood smeared on his chops.

"Yum, yum! And now, for dessert. Who goes first? The clever one or the stupid one!"

"Him!" cried Rick, pointing at Bill.

"No, him!" cried Bill, pointing at Rick.

"My, my, what a frightful choice." The dragon pounded forward toward them, bent over them, leering obscenely, its stomach a bloated green wall of flesh, the belly b.u.t.ton as big as a pool table popping out at them. Bill blinked up, shivering with fear, blinked again at the dragonian umbilicus, at the bra.s.s head of a screw in the middle of it. A screw?

For want of anything better to do, faced with certain death in any case, he jabbed the point of his sword into the slot in the screwhead. And turned.

"Don't do that!" the dragon screamed in a high girlish falsetto. Then shrieked again, weaker and feebler.

The next scream was hard to hear at all.

And began to fade away.

But as the dragon grew dimmer ghastly shapes appeared in its stead. Dark forms that coalesced and shimmered.

Something pretty exotic was taking place.

CHAPTER 12.

ALONE AND LIMPLY LOITERING.

"Well for the love of Beelzebubba!" said Rick, frozen with astonishment at the sight, just as Bill was.

"Will you take a look at that!"

As the dissolving dragon grew ever mistier dark forms began to coalesce in the area, approximately where the creature's stomach must have been. Streamers of ectoplasmic mist billowed up coating the mysterious shapes in feathery coc.o.o.ns. Within this thick, localized fog fizzed and glinted majestic sparklers of energy, like Pseudo-Fourth of July on Mistworld in the Pleiades Sector.

"Wow," Rick observed. "This sure beats late night holovision." Then fear hit. "I'm not sure I like this.

What's happening?"

"It could be anything, worry-wart. But that carnivorous dragon was dangerous and it's well vanished. Just keep your sword handy and we'll see what gives now."

Some sort of transformation, it would seem....

Bill leaned closer and watched. Within the glowing bulbs of fog, he thought he saw the reweaving of flesh, the rejoining of connective tissue. But before he could do much more thinking on the subject, one of the thrumming bulbs broke open with a gaseous sigh.

Stepping out, like a new-hatched chick from its eggsh.e.l.l, came a gangling adolescent, blinking through concave horn-rimmed gla.s.ses the size of radiation visors. The young man was afflicted with acne and had a cold sore on his lip. The top b.u.t.ton of his flannel shirt was b.u.t.toned, and his belted pants were fastened almost up to the base of his rib cage. In his top shirt pocket, pens and pencils peeked out from a plastic pocket protector.

"Hi! I'm Peter Perkins!" he announced perspicaciously. "Looks like I got wasted, huh? Oh well, I was getting kind of bored with the Priest character anyway." He looked down at his palm, in which he held a number of multi-sided dice. "Maybe I'll wander on up the street and see what's cooking at the game at Weird Alfred's." He looked with distaste at the surroundings, then at Rick and Bill. "He's a better Game Master, anyway. What do you say, guys?"

The "guys" were the others rising up from their misty bulbs, steaming with their foggy afterbirth. They were uniform only in their adolescence and bad complexions, the dice cupped in their hands, and general nerdiness. One was a grossly fat boy, munching on a Lactic Way candy bar. Another was a short, ugly boy wearing a ratty Boy Scout outfit. The last was female, in a kind of generally bloated manner, with a man-hating sneer on her pasty, pudgy face.

Bill scratched his head. "What the bowb's going on here, guys?"

"Don't you see, Bill?" said Rick, a glow of understanding washing over his face like an incoming tide of comprehension. "Dr. Delazny and the Chinger structured this as a role-playing game! These are just gamers from some other dimension, world or such that they picked up."

"Yeah, and he's a really lousy Game Master too," whined the girl, presumably formerly c.l.i.toria.

"You bet," said the formerly-Ottar fellow. "A h.o.m.ophagous dragon with lousy riddles. The Fountain of Hormones - an equally disastrous idea. The land of Absurd Fantasy?" He stared over at the two bemused soldiers of fortune and blinked at them. "Rick the Supernal Hero? Yeah, and this joker is really supposed to be Bill - as in Bill, the Galactic Hero! Right! And I'm Jason dinAlt of Deathworld!" The teenager snorted in contempt. "Let's blow this popsicle stand, guys, and get into a game with some hair on its chest."

"Yeah!" said the last, peering about him in a bored manner. "Where are the dwarves with the great big axes? And I bet these jokers haven't even read their Hickman and Weis!"

The others looked horrified at the very thought.

"Wait a minute," said Rick, scratching his head with apparent bafflement. "I thought this scenario was supposed to be the Over-Gland fantasy segment, based upon archetypes, myths, fairy tales and suchlike hundreds, even thousands of years old."

"Myths? Fairy tales? What are those? This is serious gaming, man!" announced the militant fantasy gamer female. "This is important stuff!"

"Yeah!" said the others in unison. "This place stinks!"

With that, they started shaking their hands, and their dice rattled and clicked. Motion lines jerked and swayed about them, courtesy of some unseen cartoonist perhaps, and with one final spectacular swirl of animated mist, they started to spin and spin and spin....

Into nothingness.

"Wow!" said Bill. "They disappeared. Just like that. Say, Rick. Think we can do that? I don't really like this place much either."

"No, Bill." Rick sighed. "I'm afraid we've been real patsies. We've been had by that Doctor and that Chinger. We're in this for the duration. The only way we're going to get out of this is to find that Fountain of Hormones for them."

"That bowbing Eager Chinger Bgr," gurgled Bill, his urgent need for Irma lessening somewhat, replaced by a sudden need for pure and simple revenge. "I'll get even with him for doing this to me."

"And don't forget Delazny!" grumbled Rick.

"No. I won't forget Doctor Delazny. I've got something very special planned for him!" Bill's eyes glimmered with hatred and calculation. "Keelhauling Doctor Latex Delazny in deep s.p.a.ce is too good for him!"

Rick agreed, and they continued on their journey southwards, away from the land of Absurd Fantasy and toward the doubtlessly much more worthwhile and interesting Land of Feelthy Magazines.

Unfortunately, they had no compa.s.s.

Which meant that with very little effort on their part they managed to get themselves terribly lost. Bill, who had been looking forward with tumescent expectation to squadrons of frolicking nudes, badly written yet graphic lascivious prose, as well as not funny cartoons with incredibly endowed lovelies in compromising situations, was disappointed to find himself in a new and depressing territory filled with almost unrelieved gloom.

"Arrrr!" observed Rick, looking about him at the wilted vegetation, the monochrome colors. There was an entire lack of any kind of smell to the air, be it foul or fair. The limbs of what few trees there were about drooped listlessly. The gra.s.s and the weeds lay pasted down upon the ground damply, as though they'd just been pelted by a fierce, not to say slimy, storm. Indeed, the entire glandscape had the appearance of nothing less than limpness as though all hint of life or vitality had been bled from every object.

"Zoroaster!" growled Bill. "Looks like this place has a terminal vitamin deficiency!"

"Grim, eh? Arrrr! I think we've traveled a bit off course, matey, and even now find ourselves upon the Fabled Isthmus of Impotence."

Bill cringed, filled with instant fear. The very term was anathema to an alcohol-blooded Trooper of the Empire, striking terror deep within the much-cherished macho self-image that was the eternal legacy of male-dominated society. Or something like that. And he wasn't worried about "Fabled" or "Isthmus." It was that terrible "I" word that got him.

"But this is supposed to be the all-powerful Over-Gland, fueled by the powerful chemical reactions of the collective overactive Ids of billions of human beings!" Bill suggested.

Rick shrugged. "Maybe it had a tough day at the office."

"No. It must be something more than that. I've got the feeling, in fact, that it's something very important."

He scanned the stale, flat, underwhelming territory. "We have got to figure this out. Do you have any idea of what is happening?"

"In a word - no."