had happened?
Then he worked it out. The hydra had a magic talent after all: that of hanging by an invisible thread. The spell-reversal wood had nullified that magic, causing the monster to plummet forcefully down to its death. Its invisible thread had not disappeared; it had acted to draw the creature down as powerfully as it had drawn it up before. Disaster!
But now the wood was gone. How were they to escape the madness?
Bink looked up. The Good Magician's foaming agent had destroyed the dragon, and Chester's hooves and sword had beaten back the serpent. Crombie's fighting spirit had proved to be too much for the winged horse. So the individual battles had been won. But the war remained unpromising.
A number of constellations had remained in the sky. The centaur, giant, and whale had not been able to descend, because they lacked wings or flying magic, and the stairway had been pre-empted by the serpent. Now, seeing the fate of their companions, these three bellowed then raged from the safety of the nocturnal welkin. Novas and ringed planets and miniature lightning bolts and curly-tailed comets radiated from their mouths in confusing profusion and wonderful foulness, with the whale spouting obscene curlicues.
'Oh, yeah?' Chester bawled. 'We'll come up there and do the same to you! You're the cowards who started it all!' And Crombie and Humfrey and Bink closed in about him as well as they were able.
'No, stop!' Grundy screamed from his flying fish, zooming in a circular holding pattern. 'You've all seen the nature of your madness. Don't yield to it again! Pass the wood around, restore your perspectives, get your feet on the ground again! Don't let the spooks lure you to destruction!'
'He's right, you know,' Humfrey muttered.
'But I dropped the wood!' Bink cried, 'I dropped our sanity!'
'Then go down and fetch it!' the golem cried. 'And you, horserear-you threw it to him. You go down and help him.'
'Squawk!' Crombie exclaimed. 'And birdbeak says he's going up alone to grab all the glory for himself.'
'Oh no he doesn't!' Chester roared.
'Right!' the golem agreed. 'You have to go together, to be fair about it. You real creatures place great store by fairness, don't you? Or is honor a foreign concept to you, birdbeak? You don't want horserear's competition, because you know he'd show you up if you didn't have a head start?'
'Squawk! Squawk!' Bink almost thought he saw a comet spew from Crombie's mouth.
'Right! So you prove you can match him anywhere, anytime-by getting down there and finding that wood before he does. And take the gnome with you. Horse-rear can take the washout with him.'
Washout? That was what the golem had decided to call Bink? Bink's blood pressure started building. Just because his talent wasn't visible-
'All right, and may dung fall on you!' Chester said. 'I'll fetch the stupid wood. Then on to glorious battle!' Thus, ingloriously, they descended the glassy stair. The monsters above exploded with derision. The sky lit up with their exclamations: exploding cherry bombs in many silent colors, glowing tornadoes, forest fires. The whale diverted the River Eridanus so that its water poured down in a scintillating cataract. The giant swung his huge club, bashing stars out of their sockets and sending them flying down. The centaur fired glowing arrows.
'Keep moving, slowpokes!' the golem yelled. 'Keep walking away from their challenges. That makes them madder than anything else you can do!'
'Hey, yeah,' Chester agreed. 'You're pretty smart for a tangle of string and tar.'
'I'm sane-because I have none of the foolish emotions of reality to interfere with my thought processes,' Grundy said. 'Sane-because I am string and tar.'
'Therefore you are the only one qualified to lead us out of madness,' the Magician said. 'You are the only one who can perceive objective reality-because you have no subjective aspect.'
'Yes, isn't it great?' But the golem hardly looked happy.
Bink understood, suddenly, that Grundy would gladly join them in madness, though he knew it led to disaster, if this could be the proof of his reality. Only the golem's unreality enabled Him to hang on to what life he had. What a paradoxical fate!
An arrow struck a catnip bush right beside him. The plant yowled and spat, nipping at the shaft, then batting it back and forth with its paw-buds.
'Oh, I want to stick an arrow right up under his tail!' Chester muttered. 'That centaur's a disgrace to the species.'
'First find the wood,' Grundy cried.
One of the giant's batted stars whizzed over Bink's head and ignited a rubber tree. The plant stretched enormously, trying to get away from its own burning substance. The smell was horrible.
'We can't find anything here in the smoke,' Chester complained, coughing.
'Then follow me!' Grundy cried, showing the way on his fish.
Choking, they followed the golem. The constellations raged above them, firing volleys of missiles, but could not score directly. Madness had no power over sane leadership.
Yet the madness tried! The whale took hold of the river again and yanked it brutally from its new channel. The water spilled across the starry field in a thinning, milky wash, forming a flood. Then it found a new channel, coursed along it, ripped out several stars growing there, and poured down toward the ground.
'Look out!' Bink cried. 'We're at the foot of that waterfall!'
Indeed they were. The mass of water was descending at them like a globulous avalanche. They
