They ran. I didn't blame them; I've told you -- Mr. Indrasil was
crazy. And not just ordinary crazy -- he was like a crazy animal,
like one of his own cats gone bad.
'All right,' he muttered, staring down at me, his eyes like
hurricane lamps. 'No juju to protect you now. No grisgris.' His
lips twitched in a wild, horrible smile. 'He isn't here now, is he?
We're two of a kind, him and me. Maybe the only two left. My
nemesis -- and I'm his.' He was rambling, and I didn't try to stop
him. At least his mind was off me.
'Turned that cat against me, back in '58. Always had the power
more'n me. Fool could make a million -- the two of us could make
a million if he wasn't so damned high and mighty...what's that?'
It was Green Terror, and he had begun to roar ear-splittingly.
'Haven't you got that damned tiger in?' He screamed, almost
falsetto. He shook me like a rag doll.
'He won't go!' I found myself yelling back. 'You've got to --'
But he flung me away. I stumbled over the fold-up steps in front of
his trailer and crashed into a bone-shaking heap at the bottom.
With something between a sob and a curse, Mr. Indrasil strode past
me, face mottled with anger and fear.
I got up, drawn after him as if hypnotized. Some intuitive part of
me realized I was about to see the last act played out.
Once clear of the shelter of Mr. Indrasil's trailer, the power of the
wind was appalling. It screamed like a runaway freight train. I was
an ant, a speck, an unprotected molecule before that thundering,
cosmic force.
And Mr. Legere was standing by Green Terror's cage.
It was like a tableau from Dante. The near-empty cage-clearing
inside the circle of trailers; the two men, facing each other silently,
their clothes and hair rippled by the shrieking gale; the boiling sky
above; the twisting wheatfields in the background, like damned
souls bending to the whip of Lucifer.
'It's time, Jason,' Mr. Legere said, his words flayed across the
clearing by the wind.
Mr. Indrasil's wildly whipping hair lifted around the livid scar
across the back of his neck. His fists clenched, but he said nothing.
I could almost feel him gathering his will, his life force, his id. It
gathered around him like an unholy nimbus.
And, then, I saw with sudden horror that Mr. Legere was
unhooking Green Terror's breezeway -- and the back of the cage
was open!
I cried out, but the wind ripped my words away.
The great tiger leaped out and almost flowed past Mr. Legere. Mr.
Indrasil swayed, but did not run. He bent his head and stared down
at the tiger.
And Green Terror stopped.
He swung his huge head back to Mr. Legere, almost turned, and
then slowly turned back to Mr. Indrasil again. There was a
terrifyingly palpable sensation of directed force in the air, a mesh
