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which brought him back towards the maze.
This was one devil of a maze. A few months ago, after numerous earlier
attempts, Frank had finally reached the centre and memorized the correct
route. At the centre he had discovered a flagstone with a ring in it. Beneath
the flagstone, a flight of stone steps descended into blackness. He hadn t a
torch with him at the time, and he hadn t been back since, but no doubt these
steps joined the tunnel which linked the Farm buildings with the atom
bomb proof cavern under the uplands of the state.
Neither Maccoby nor McKinnon, nor Geneva for that matter, bothered to cut him
off as they so easily could have done when he sprinted past them. They
merely stood laughing as he dodged through the entry gap in the thick high
hedges, pursued by the two riflemen ten yards behind.
He ran, ducking low so that the guards up in the watchtower would not see him
except when he rounded corners.
Left here. Now right. And left again. And left again &
Frank made twenty choices and believed he was still on course. But then two
openings presented themselves, side by side. He stopped, unsure.
On the other side of the hedge, he heard footsteps pounding. But that didn t
matter! The other side couldn t mustn t! connect with this side.
Choosing the nearer entry, he chased after the footsteps which were now
departing. Very soon he diverged from them, plunging deeper into the
labyrinth.
That had been one set of footsteps. So the guards had split up.
Which only meant that one of them would be completely lost by now; their
chances of catching and subduing him were halved. He listened, and ran on.
Perhaps five minutes passed.
A shrill cry, from the tower. There he is!
Skidding in the cinders, Frank ducked around a corner then peered back.
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Geneva was holding Ariel out of one of the windows on the lookout cabin. While
Frank watched, she launched the sprite. Ariel s membrane ballooned, and he
glided down swiftly across the maze. He was not holding any dart gun, though.
Too heavy for him.
Frank dashed through another entrance, and another.
Thirty feet up, Ariel circled and spotted him again. The sprite dropped down
out of sight.
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So I m getting close, thought Frank. Too close for his comfort!
He ran round another corner and collided with the hedge. He was in a
cul-de-sac. For a moment he fought with the hedge, trying to force his way
through. But the yew was unyielding. Besides, the path on the other side was
probably further away from the centre. Hastily he backtracked, and took
another opening.
Another.
Suddenly he ran into the open square at the centre of the maze &
Ariel sat perched on the stone slab, with one hand on the ring.
Frank, Frank, behave yourself!
Would you just mind shifting off that stone & sir?
But I do mind. It s my stone.
I ll have to shift you myself, then. Sir.
Oh, Frank
.
Without thinking, Frank seized Ariel by the arm. And immediately a
sledgehammer hit him.
In his anxiety to escape, Frank had quite forgotten that Ariel s body was a
heavy-duty battery.
A while later he discovered that he was lying on his back, staring up at the
sky through a vortex of rotating hedges. He heard voices.
How the ? (Panting.)
Ariel s silvery tones: Oh, I have the magic touch. Now put a dart into him,
there s a good fellow.
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Spectres pranced around amidst the swirling hedges: ogres and centaurs and
hobgoblins & Which of them would he become? Surely now was the time to choose,
if choosing had anything to do with it.
Shazam! he wished. Oh Shazam!
A bee seemed to sting him in the leg, and thirty seconds later he was asleep.
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Chapter 12
Of what happened next his conscious mind knew nothing; and when his senses
were restored to him, he found himself in mind and body quite different from
before &
Yet what dreams he had dreamt.
He had dreamed that the two Japanese doctors changed a fertilized human egg
into a pine tree seed. This they planted, and as soon as it grew into a
seedling they proceeded to cultivate this seedling as a bonsai.
Amputating most of its roots, they repotted it in a tight bowl packed with a
sharp sand mixture to sting the remaining threadling roots. They wired it
tortuously so that it groaned as it grew becoming a tiny twenty-year-old
pine, bowed and gnarled. Whereupon they changed it back into a person, and
this person was a dwarf, an ugly gnome hunchbacked, covered with warts. They
had snipped his roots all too energetically, for this dwarf possessed no toes.
He could only stomp about awkwardly on the stumps of his feet.
He dreamed that Ohira and Shiba changed other human eggs into cactus seeds.
These grew into red-
blooded cacti with no chlorophyll in them at all. They were that freak of the
cactus family:
Gymnocalycium mihanowiczii Friedrichiae var.
Hibotan, little red tubs with chins under all the spines. The doctors
grafted these shrieking scions on to green cactus stock, and when they were
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fully grown changed them back into hedgehog-men and porcupine-women short,
rotund people bristling with quills and spines &
He dreamed of the doctors pursuing their experiments still further, changing
animals and people into plants, then grafting these together to produce weird
hybrids (when they were changed back later on), such as a centaur, a harpy, a
sphinx, a mermaid, a manticora &
In addition, they also cultivated the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary a
gourd-bearing plant, the fruit of which ripened to give birth to tiny sheep.
From this, they moved on to hybridize sunflowers which grew up to bloom with
human faces, petals in place of yellow hair.
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