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.Dinner was announced then, so the group broke up,leaving me to reflect sadly on the injustice of it all.There I was, trying to be nice andSummer of the Dragon / 159noncommital, and she didn t like me a bit.Apparentlyshe had heard about me from the other crackpots andhad decided that offense was the best defense.Butbeautiful Tom could sneer all he wanted, and shesmiled at him.Hank did not appear at dinner.I figured he must bein his room playing with his toy.He had said wewould get an early start, so I excused myself after din-ner and went to my room.I took with me an armloadof books from the library.I don t know why I was sointent on getting a clue to Hank s discovery; in anothertwenty-four hours I would know what it was.I supposeI felt he had challenged me.It would be one up for meif I could find out what the enigmatic dragon cluemeant before I learned the truth.It was like a game.But it wasn t a game, and I was soon to find thatout.My reading got me absolutely nowhere.Clues wer-en t lacking; in fact, to an imaginative mind there wereall too many clues.Fossil bones of dinosaurs and other large prehistoricanimals were believed to be the remains of dragons,back in the unenlightened Middle Ages.Paleontologistsused to search Chinese pharmacies for such bones,since they were considered cures for every known ali-ment.Dragons appear in the mythologies of manycountries, including England; remember Uther Pendrag-on and the red dragon of Wales? Not to mention160 / Elizabeth PetersSiegfried fighting a dragon and acquiring immunityfrom wounds by bathing in its blood.Traditionally,dragons are the guardians of treasure, and except inChinese mythology, they are malevolent.Well, theyare reptiles, after all, and we know that snakes areevil sometimes Evil with a capital letter, as in theGarden of Eden.That line got me off onto SerpentCults and Snake Gods, an enormous subject in itself.Not all snake gods were bad news.Snakes were sacredto Athena, the goddess of wisdom.Some NorthAmerican Indians worshiped rattlesnakes.Then therewas the biggest of all snakes, whose name I can t re-member at the moment the one Thor wrestled inScandinavian mythology, which symbolized the earthitself.Considering the way Hank s mind seemed to work,any or all of these dragon-snake references might con-tain the key to what he thought he had found.Hemight have been looking for dinosaurs, or proof thatthe western United States was colonized by theChinese, or even for the tomb of Saint George.Thefact that none of these interesting items could possiblyexist in the Arizona desert would not deter him fromlooking, or even concluding that he had found one orall of them.He might be on his flying-saucer kick; oldmyths describing flying creatures spouting fire couldrefer to spaceships, couldn t they?No, they couldn t.But Hank and Frau Doctor vonStumm didn t believe that.Summer of the Dragon / 161Finally I tossed the reference volumes aside in disgustand turned for refreshment to another book, which Ihad borrowed from Hank s excellent collection offantasy and science fiction.(I was not surprised to findthat he had a taste for that genre.) There is a very finedragon in The Hobbit, and I figured that Smaug wasas likely a candidate as any for Hank s elusive dragon.CHAPTER 8Dragons pursued me all night.I woke up when oneof them a medium-sized green dragon with bright-red eyes started pounding on my door.It was still dark in my room, but the windows to theeast were gray, heralding the approach of dawn.Irubbed my eyes and tried to wake up.I could still hearthe dragon beating on the door. D.J. Abbott! Open this door, damn it.Are youall right? Answer me, or I ll kick it down.The dragon shriveled up and vanished with a poplike a breaking balloon.The voice was Tom s, so Ideduced, cleverly, that it was he who was poundingon the door.I had not neglected to lock my door the night before [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]