"I can perceive all dangers radiating toward you and extending into time. My one desire is to protect you from them."
I had stopped. Two girls were giggling at me talking to myself. Now I began walking again.
"Look," I whispered, "can you wait until tomorrow evening?"
"You will let me be your protector?" the derg asked eagerly.
"I'll tell you tomorrow," I said. "After I read the late papers."
The item was there, all right. I read it in my furnished room on 113th Street. Man pushed by the crowd, lost his balance, fell in front of an oncoming train. This gave me a lot to think about while waiting for my invisible protector to show up.
I didn't know what to do. His desire to protect me seemed genuine enough. But I didn't know if I wanted it. When, an hour later, the derg contacted me, I liked the whole idea even less, and told him so.
"Don't you trust me?" he asked.
"I just want to lead a normal life."
"If you lead any life at all," he reminded me. "That truck last night —"
"That was a freak, a once-in-a-lifetime hazard."
"It only takes once in a lifetime to die," the derg said solemnly. "There was the subway, too."
"That doesn't count. I hadn't planned on riding it today."
"But you had no reason not to ride it. That's the important thing. Just as you have no reason not to take a shower in the next hour."
"Why shouldn't I?"
"A Miss Flynn," the derg said, "who lives down the hall, has just completed her shower and has left a bar of melting pink soap on the pink tile in the bathroom on this floor. You would have slipped on it and suffered a sprained wrist."
"Not fatal, huh?"
"No. Hardly in the same class with, let us say, a heavy flower-pot pushed from a rooftop by a certain unstable old gentleman."
"When is that going to happen?" I asked.
"I thought you weren't interested."
"I'm very interested. When? Where?"
"Will you let me continue to protect you?" he asked.
"Just tell me one thing," I said. "What's in this for you?"
"Satisfaction!" he said. "For a validusian derg, the greatest thrill possible is to aid another creature evade danger."
"But isn't there something else you want out of it? Some trifle like my soul, or rulership of Earth?"
"Nothing! To accept payment for Protecting would ruin the emotional experience. All I want out of life — all any derg wants — is to protect someone from the dangers he cannot see, but which we can see all too well." The derg paused, then added softly, "We don't even expect gratitude."
Well, that clinched it. How could I guess the consequences? How could I know that his aid would lead me into a situation in which I must not lesnerize?
"What about that flowerpot?" I asked.
"It will be dropped on the corner of Tenth Street and McAdams Boulevard at eight-thirty tomorrow morning."
"Tenth and McAdams? Where's that?"
"In Jersey City," he answered promptly.
"But I've never been to Jersey City in my life! Why warn me about that?"
"I don't know where you will or won't go," the derg said. "I merely perceive dangers to you wherever they may occur."
"What should I do now?"
"Anything you wish," he told me. "Just lead your normal life."
Normal life. Hah!
It started out well enough. I attended classes at Columbia, did homework, saw movies, went on dates, played table tennis and chess, all as before. At no time did I let on that I was under the direct protection of a validusian derg.
Once or twice a day, the derg would come to me. He would say something like, "Loose grating on West End Avenue between 66th and 67th Streets. Don't walk on it."
And of course I wouldn't. But someone else would. I often saw these items in the newspapers.
Once I got used to it, it gave me quite a feeling of security. An alien was scurrying around twenty-four hours a day and all he wanted out of life was to protect me. A supernormal bodyguard! The thought gave me a enormous amount of confidence.
My social life, during this period, couldn't have been improved upon.
But the derg soon became overzealous in my behalf. He began finding more and more dangers, most of which had no real bearing on my life in New York — things I should avoid in Mexico City, Toronto, Omaha, Papeete.
I finally asked him if he was planning on reporting every potential danger on Earth.
"These are the few, the very few, that you are or may be affected by," he told me.
"In Mexico City? And Papeete? Why not confine yourself to the local picture? Greater New York, say."
"Locale means nothing to me," the derg replied stubbornly. "My perceptions are temporal, not spatial. I must protect you from everything!"
It was rather touching, in a way, and there was nothing I could do about it. I simply had to discard from his reports the various dangers in Hoboken, Thailand, Kansas City, Angkor Wat (collapsing statue), Paris, and Sarasota. Then I would reach the local stuff. I would ignore, for the most part, the dangers awaiting me in Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, and Brooklyn, and concentrate on Manhattan.
These were often worth waiting for, however. The derg saved me from some pretty nasty experiences — a holdup on Cathedral Parkway, for example, a teen-age mugging, a fire.
But he kept stepping up the pace. It had started as a report or two a day. Within a month, he was warning me five or six times a day. And at last his warnings, local, national, and international, flowed in a continual stream.