Soft come the dragons

sense of the psychedelic, of a mild acid trip. The end of the story fits into this attempt, for it is much like a drug delusion, suddenly turning the tables on you and making you realize how thin is the fabric of what you thought was reality. . . .
    H e woke even before she and lay listening to the rasping of her breath: seafoam whispering over jagged rocks. It would get worse before she woke. He reached to the night-stand and took a cigarette from the nearly empty pack, lighted it, and sat up. He tried not to think of the energies raging within her mind, of the deadly and painful powers roaring there. In the darkness, he tried to turn his mind to other things.
    The view from the window was pleasant, for snow had been falling since suppertime, embracing everything. The clouds parted now and then to let the moon through. It lighted the night, washing onto the white blanket and splashing back. Beyond the hoary willow tree lay the highway, a black slash in the calcimined wonderland. It was obvious that the heater coils in the roadbed had broken down again, for the drifts were edging back onto the hard surface unchecked. Old-fashioned plows were working on things now.
     
    "Ashen dreams fluttering flaked
    float peacefully downward
    while lightning men with swords
    stroke the brain harshly
    and draw fingernails
    over the ice . . ."
     
    He was not certain whether that was completely senseless or not. It was a mood piece, no doubt. He repeated it softly again. He would have to remember it, polish it—perhaps—for inclusion in his next volume.
    Minutes later, he looked back to Laurie. Her face was pale, her eyes closed and edged with wrinkles. He ran his hand through the billows of raven hair that cascaded down her pillow. She moaned in answer, the air rushing in and out of her chest. Harder, harder she breathed. Deciding to get a head start this time, he stood and pulled on his trousers, slipped into a banlon shirt.
    "Frank?" she said.
    "I know."
    She slipped out of bed, naked, and dressed in a sheath— a red and black one that he liked.
    "I'll pull the car out of the garage," he said.
    "The snow—"
    "They seem to have it under control. Don't worry. I'll pick you up at the front door in five minutes."
    "I love you," she said as he went through the doorway into the shadow-filled living room. That always sent shivers through him: that face, that voice, those words.
    He took a flashlight and the gun that lay beside it from the kitchen catchall drawer. Stepping into the glittering night, he stuffed the gun in a jacket pocket and sniffed the cold air. It hurt all the way down into his lungs and woke him all the way up. The path between house and garage was unshoveled; the snow lay a good twelve or fourteen inches deep. He plodded through it, listening to the easy sweep of the wind, the distant moan of heavy machinery battling Nature. The garage door hummed open when it recognized his thumbprint on the lock disc. He crawled into the car, started it, backed out, pushing snow with the rear bumper. He flipped on the front and rear heating bars. With Laurie's problem, he had to be ready to move at any hour, in any weather. The melting bars had been a costly extra, but a necessary one. When he pulled up to the front door, she was waiting. She climbed in, huddled next to him.
    "Where to?"
    "The country somewhere," she whispered in her tiny voice. "Hurry, please. It's going to be real bad this time."
    Melting snow in advance, he drove across the highway into the lane leading away from the city and suburbs. The robo-grid drove for him then while he stroked her forehead and kissed her cheeks, her ears, her neck . . .
    Ten minutes later, they were cruising down a ramp, and the red eye winked at him as if to say he must now caress the controls. Somewhere in the bowels of the car a buzzer bleeped for the same reason. He turned left along a secondary route that was not nearly so well cleaned as the superhighway. Drifts were clawing at the macadam, choking it to half its normal width in many places. He held the accelerator down and kept the Champion moving.
    She was moaning . . .
    This looked bad. She was rapidly reaching the critical point: the moment when the psychic powers reached maximal point of tolerance and exploded violently and deadly. Laurie was an Esper, but it did her no good, for she could not control the power. She could not siphon it off until it reached the critical point, and once it had reached the critical point, there