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look."
"That's right," said Melusine, "royal blood. I am the true daughter of
Elinas, King of Albania. My mother was the fairy Pressine. But he was so
cruel, my father. You just can't imagine how cruel he was. So I just had to
shut him up in a mountain. I mean, what would you do? I'm sure you'd shut him
up in a mountain too!"
She tugged at Jim's sleeve again.
"Don't you agree?"
Brandy! The thought exploded in Jim's mind. Yes, from wine to brandy would be
the most natural step in the world, seeing brandy was made from wine. But
Melusine already had abandoned the subject.
"Don't you think we've had enough wine?" she asked.
She put down her glass and waved her hand. The little fish congregated and
took away not only her glass and the two bottles but the glass out of Jim's
hand that was still better than two-thirds full.
Jim looked at her and saw that her attractiveness had suddenly glowed clear
up to at least two thousand watts. He faced the fact that it was now or never.
Hastily he wrote on the inside of his forehead:
MELUSINE-WINE?MELUSINE-BRANDY
Melusine threw herself into his arms.
"Oh, I'm so lonely!" she wailed.
Jim closed his eyes, desperate and helpless.Too late. He had been just a
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little too late. His mind felt empty. He could not think of anything left to
do that might still save him. He sat there for a long minute or so, waiting
for her to make another demand on him, or move in his arms; but she did not.
Cautiously, he opened his eyes and looked down at her.
Her own eyes were closed, her long lashes down on her cheeks. She looked like
a sleeping child; and when Jim spoke to her, she neither opened her eyes nor
answered.
The sudden change of well over two and a half pints of wine into brandy in
her stomach fairy or not had had its effect. She was out cold.
Chapter Twenty
Melusine's fish gathered about her worriedly as he laid her down. They paid
no attention to Jim, which was just as well. He was already on his feet and on
his way out of the palace. He had barely escaped beyond the limits of the
palace when he went, in a single breath, from breathing what seemed like
normal air to what seemed like something that was half-water. Hastily, he
wrote the magic formula on the inside of his forehead that would change him
into an oxygen-producing electrode, and the atmosphere around him cleared.
Bubbles streamed up from the end of his arm. Experimentally, he tried
extending the other arm and that also produced bubbles. In fact, now that he
stopped to notice it, he had a prickly sensation all over his body including
his scalp. He was apparently exuding oxygen from every point on the surface of
his body.
He headed toward the far end of the lake. Since he was not with Melusine, he
no longer skimmed along above the surface of the lake bottom, but had to tramp
it as if it were ordinary dry ground. He thought with a shudder of the
mud-flats, and remembered that they did not stretch quite to the walls of the
lake. He therefore angled toward the nearest lakeside, which was the one from
which Melusine had originally pulled him down, and found there enough rocky
surface even if sharply angled upward, into the nearly vertical cliffs that
walled in the lake at this point so that he could continue toward the far end
of the lake, where it would be possible to get out of it entirely.
It was not until he got into the far end of the lake with its gullies and its
mounts, and away from the mud, that he began to be conscious of potential
opposition to his leaving. The edge on which he walked had lasted all the way
around the sea of mud and he was traveling nicely up the underwater slopes
among the weeds and other growth, before he was aware that those accompanying
him had been getting definitely more threatening and able to threaten.
Somewhere along the line the little fish, like those that served Melusine in
her palace, had begun to cluster about him, apparently held at a distance by
the bubble of oxygen around him. Happily, the magic that produced it was
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