Tracy stood up, walked across the room, and slowly extended his hand. "I'd like to make certain you're real," he said. "May I-"
"Gently. Don't try any tricks. My claws are sharp, and my magic's sharper."
Satisfied by the feel of the warm fur, Tracy drew back and looked down consideringly at the creature. "All right," he said, his voice a little thick. "We've progressed this far, anyhow. I'm talking to you-admitting your existence. Fair enough."
The cat nodded. "True. I came here to congratulate you on escaping the dryad, and to tell you I'm not discouraged."
Tracy sat down again. "Dryad, eh? I always thought dryads were pretty. Like nymphs."
"Fairy tales," the cat said succinctly. "The Grecian equivalent of yellow journalism. Satyrs only made love to young deciduous dryads, my friend. The older ones-well! You may be able to imagine what the dryad of a California sequoia would be like."
"I think so."
"Well, you're wrong. The older an anthropomorphic being grows, the less rigidly the dividing lines are drawn. Ever notice the sexlessness of old human beings? They die, of course, before they progress farther than that. Eventually the line between human being and god is lost, then between human being and animal, and between animal and plant. Finally there's a commingling of sentient clay. Beyond that you'd not care to go. But the sequoia dryads have gone beyond it." The cat eyes watched, alert and inscrutable. Tracy sensed some definite purpose behind this conversation. He waited.
"My name, by the way, is Meg," the cat said.
"Female, I presume?"
"In this incarnation. Familiars in their natural habitat are sexless. When aliens manifest themselves on earth, they're limited by terrestrial laws-to a certain extent, anyway. You may have noticed that nobody saw the dryad but you."
"There wasn't anybody else around."
"Exactly," Meg said, with an air of satisfaction.
Tracy considered, conscious more than ever that he was dueling with the creature. "O.K.," he nodded. "Now let's get down to cases. You were Gwinn's-eh?-familiar. What does that imply?"
"I served him. A familiar, Tracy, serves a wizard as a catalyst."
"Come again."
"Catalysis: a chemic reaction promoted by the presence of a third unaffected substance. Read 'magic' for 'chemic.'
Take cane sugar and water, add sulphuric acid, and you get glucose and levulose. Take a pentagram and ox blood, add me, and you get a demon named Pharnegar. He's the dowser god," Meg added. "Comes in handy for locating hidden treasures, but he has his limitations."
Tracy thought that over. It seemed logical. All through the centuries, folklore had spoken of the warlock's familiar. What purpose the creature had served was problematical. A glorified demoniac valet? Rather silly.
A catalyst was much more acceptable, somehow, especially to poor Tracy's alcohol-distorted brain.
"It seems to me we might make a bargain," he said, staring at Meg. "You're out of a job now, aren't you? Well, I could use a little magical knowledge."
"Fat chance," the cat said scornfully. "Do you think for a minute magic can be mastered by a correspondence course? It's like any highly trained profession. You have to learn how to handle the precision tools, how to train your insight, how to-My master, Tracy, it's something more than a university course! It takes a natural linguist to handle the spells. And trained, whiplash responses. A perfect sense of timing. Gwinn took the course for twenty-three years before he got his goatskin. And, of course, there's the initial formality of the fee."
Tracy grunted. "You know magic, apparently. Why can't you-"
"Because," Meg said very softly, "you killed Gwinn. I won't outlast him. And I had been looking forward to a decade or two more on Earth. In this plane, I'm free from certain painful duties that are mine elsewhere."
"Hell?"
"Anthropomorphically speaking, yes. But your idea of Hell isn't mine. Which is natural, since in my normal state my senses aren't the same as yours."
Meg jumped down from the chair and began to wander around the room. Tracy watched it-her-closely. His hand felt for and clutched the book.
The cat said, "This will be an interesting game of wits. The book will give you considerable help-but I have my magic."
"You're determined to-to kill me?" Tracy reached for his topcoat. "Why?"
"I told you. Revenge."
"Can't we bargain?"
"No," Meg said. "There's nothing you can offer me that would be any inducement. I'll stick around, and enlist a salamander or something to get rid of you."
"Suppose I put a bullet into you?" Tracy asked, taking his automatic from the coat. He leveled it. "You're flesh and blood. Well?".
The cat sat down, eyeing Tracy steadily. "Try it," Meg said.
For no sensible reason, the reporter felt curiously frightened. He lowered the gun.
"I rather wish," Meg said, "that you had tried to kill me."
"Oh, hell," Tracy grunted, and got up, the book in his hand. "I'm going to get another drink." Struck by a thought, he paused. "For all I know, you may still be a hallucination. A drunken one. In that case-" He grinned. "May I offer you a saucer of cream, Meg?"
"Thanks," said the cat appreciatively. "I'd like it."
Tracy, pouring the cream, grinned at his reflection in the kitchen window. "Toujours gai, all right," he soliloquized. "Maybe I should put rat poison in this. Oh, well."
Meg lapped the cream, keeping her eyes on Tracy, who was dividing his attention between his drink and the book. "I wonder about this," he said. "There doesn't seem to be anything magical about it. Do messages appear-like a clairvoyant's slate?"
The cat snorted delicately. "Things don't work that way," she said. "The book's got fifty pages. Well, you'll find an answer to every conceivable human problem on one of those pages."
Tracy frowned. "That's ridiculous."
"Is it? History repeats itself, and human beings live a life of cliches. Has it occurred to you, Tracy, that humanity's life pattern can be boiled down to a series of equations? Fifty of them, I think. You can find the lowest common denominator, if you go far enough, but that's far beyond human understanding. As I see it, the author of that book analyzed humanity's lives, boiled them down to the basic patterns, and expressed those equations as grammatical sentences. A mere matter of semantics," Meg finished.
"I don't think I get it. Wait a minute. Maybe I do. 13ab minus b equals 13a. '13ab' stands for eggs: Don't count your chickens before they are hatched."
"Muddy reasoning, but you have the idea," Meg acknowledged. "Besides, you forgot the hen."
"Incubator," Tracy said absently, and brooded over the book. "You mean, then, that this has the answer to every known human problem. What about this: 'Werewolves can't climb oak trees'? How often does anybody meet a werewolf?"
"Symbolism is involved. And personal psychological associations. The third-but-last owner of that book, by the way, was a werewolf," Meg purred. "You'd be surprised how beautifully it all fits."
"Who wrote it?" Tracy asked.
The cat shrugged, a beautifully liquid gesture. "A mathematician, of course. I understand he developed the idea as a hobby."