separate operations. The fact that sheâd failed in one of them didnât invalidate her success in the other. Stranger still, the finding stage was apparently the easy bit, which meant that the winning ought by rights to be so impossibly difficult that only the really clever, diligent humans ought to be able to manage it. Looking around the train compartment, however, and reflecting that each of her fellow passengers was the result of both a successful search and a successful outcome, she was amazed that there were so many brilliantly intelligent people on Earth; and if that was really the case, how come that in every other aspect of their lives they gave the impression of being so unbelievably dumb? The only explanation was that they used up so much of their reserves of cleverness on finding and winning their partners in life that they didnât have any left over for trivia such as fixing the economy or keeping out of wars. It followed that a non-human, who hadnât been trained from birth in these exceptionally difficult arts, didnât stand a chance. Sometimes , Karen mused unhappily, itâs hard to be a dragon, giving all your love to just one man .)
Beyond the train window it was bright and hot, and that started her thinking. It was, after all, June. This was England, not California. Bright, hot, cloudless sky; something was definitely wrong. The obvious conclusion was that, wherever her father was, he wasnât doing his job; and she knew her father well enough to be sure that if he wasnât doing his job, it was because something was preventing him - death, injury, capture. Karen had learned long ago that Providence was easy to tempt as an ex-smoker on the fifth day after giving up, so she made a conscious decision not to speculate about the first possibility. Injury? What could possibly injure a dragon? In order to be damaged in any way, heâd have to be in one of his other two shapes. What about the third option? If he was being held prisoner somewhere, what possible motive could the captor have?
(Well, that question was easily answered. Brewers; the English Tourist Board; the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Club; the National Farmersâ Union; every sad-eyed optimist who felt a vocation towards a dry activity and then tried to make a living doing it in England - any or all of them would have an all too obvious motive.)
Nevertheless, she felt that she was getting somewhere, even if her rate of progress wasnât much better than that of the train she was sitting in. Just suppose for a moment that someone with enough at stake to take the risk had found out the truth about dragons. Capturing a dragon in his mortal guise wouldnât be terribly difficult, provided you managed to take him by surprise. Keeping him caught was another matter; probably impossible, if the dragon was determined to get free, since even in human shape any dragon would be ten times as strong as a human, seven times faster and infinitely more resourceful. As a goldfish, however, completely surrounded by hostile, energy-depleting water, heâd be virtually helpless.
Well, it was a place to start from; as, by the same token, was Wolverhampton. Now all she needed was a way of locating all the goldfish in (initially) the West Midlands, and checking them to see if they were metamorphosed dragons. At first, the scope of the problem daunted her a little, until she reflected that it was the proverbial slice of Victoria sponge compared with the statistically far harder task sheâd accomplished so easily back at the start of this whole sorry adventure.
Goldfish , she thought.
Accordingly, the first thing she did after getting off the train at Wolverhampton was to find a post office and look up pet shops in the Yellow Pages. Having written out a list and bought a street map, she rehearsed in her mind what she was going to say. The words wouldnât be a problem. Pretending to be a ruthlessly single-minded public servant
Beyond the train window it was bright and hot, and that started her thinking. It was, after all, June. This was England, not California. Bright, hot, cloudless sky; something was definitely wrong. The obvious conclusion was that, wherever her father was, he wasnât doing his job; and she knew her father well enough to be sure that if he wasnât doing his job, it was because something was preventing him - death, injury, capture. Karen had learned long ago that Providence was easy to tempt as an ex-smoker on the fifth day after giving up, so she made a conscious decision not to speculate about the first possibility. Injury? What could possibly injure a dragon? In order to be damaged in any way, heâd have to be in one of his other two shapes. What about the third option? If he was being held prisoner somewhere, what possible motive could the captor have?
(Well, that question was easily answered. Brewers; the English Tourist Board; the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Club; the National Farmersâ Union; every sad-eyed optimist who felt a vocation towards a dry activity and then tried to make a living doing it in England - any or all of them would have an all too obvious motive.)
Nevertheless, she felt that she was getting somewhere, even if her rate of progress wasnât much better than that of the train she was sitting in. Just suppose for a moment that someone with enough at stake to take the risk had found out the truth about dragons. Capturing a dragon in his mortal guise wouldnât be terribly difficult, provided you managed to take him by surprise. Keeping him caught was another matter; probably impossible, if the dragon was determined to get free, since even in human shape any dragon would be ten times as strong as a human, seven times faster and infinitely more resourceful. As a goldfish, however, completely surrounded by hostile, energy-depleting water, heâd be virtually helpless.
Well, it was a place to start from; as, by the same token, was Wolverhampton. Now all she needed was a way of locating all the goldfish in (initially) the West Midlands, and checking them to see if they were metamorphosed dragons. At first, the scope of the problem daunted her a little, until she reflected that it was the proverbial slice of Victoria sponge compared with the statistically far harder task sheâd accomplished so easily back at the start of this whole sorry adventure.
Goldfish , she thought.
Accordingly, the first thing she did after getting off the train at Wolverhampton was to find a post office and look up pet shops in the Yellow Pages. Having written out a list and bought a street map, she rehearsed in her mind what she was going to say. The words wouldnât be a problem. Pretending to be a ruthlessly single-minded public servant
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