Tales From Gavagan's Bar by L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt Page B

so, and not at the traffic, so he didn't notice a delivery truck that came around the corner on two wheels. I grabbed his arm and yanked him back on his tail on the sidewalk just in time. When we were back here in Gavagan's, getting some tonic for shaken nerves, he said "Roger, I think you have saved my somewhat unworthy life, and I want you to know I'm not ungrateful."
     
                  What can you say in a case like that? I was so embarrassed I wanted to paw the floor like a little boy, and he must have seen it, because he let the subject drop. But the next day, as I was sitting in the tower lunchroom, just about to start in on the apple I was having for dessert, old Mestor came poking in with his eyebrows wiggling. He said: "Roger, do you want to come with me a few minutes? I have something to show you."
     
                  I followed him, bringing my apple with me. He led the way downstairs to the basement, way in the back, where they keep uncatalogued newspaper files and things like that. He picked around in this wilderness of paper for a few moments and finally hauled out something from a shelf at the back. It looked exactly like one of those scrolls on which ancient manuscripts were written, and it had a rod through it, too. Only the material didn't seem to be paper.
     
                  Old Mestor laid it on a pile of newspapers which were in turn on a table. "Knowledge can be a very useful thing," he said, "and I wish to make some small, concrete expression of my gratitude for your kindness last night. This is the Apodict."
     
                  I had never heard of the Apodict, and when he began to unroll it, I didn't recognize the characters in which it was written, though they looked something like Greek. The most interesting thing, though, was that it was illustrated. The pictures were divided into frames, like in a comic strip. In fact, Mestor remarked on it. "The newspaper comic strip," he said, "is supposed to have begun with Outcalt's Yellow Kid, just before the turn of the century, but this is a good deal older. Also it serves a practical purpose. Now look at this series."
     
                  They ran from top to bottom on the roll, and there was nothing the least Greeklike about the little human figures pictured in them. In fact, they looked like the conventionalized figures you see in Aztec picture writing, and they had feather headdresses like the Aztecs, too—a whole series of figures going through gestures.
     
                  "What is it supposed to be?" I asked.
     
                  "That," he said, "is partly a lesson in apportation. Here, put that apple you have on this pile of papers, use your pencil as a wand, and follow through the motions of this figure here."
     
                  I was willing. I like parlor tricks. "It won't blow up or anything, will it?" I asked.
     
                  "I think not," he said, without smiling. "It will merely be removed elsewhere."
     
                  So I began copying the motions of the figure, tapping the apple on top, then once on each side, then making a couple of circles around it with the pencil and so on. The drawing was so stylized that it was hard sometimes to tell what motion was desired. Mestor kept straightening me out, and telling me to do it more smoothly, and to have faith that it would work. I was beginning to get bored and tired in the arm when it happened.
     
                  The apple simply disappeared.
     
                  One second it was there, and the next it wasn't. I stood there goggling, with old Methuselah Mestor chuckling in the background. "What did I tell you?" he said.
     
                  Just then I heard a step and turned around to see Polly Rixey coming down through the piles of newspapers. "My goodness," she said, "I've been all over the building after you. Roger, that Mr.