Soft come the dragons

were only moments left to get rid of it.
    He was glad he had had the melting bars installed. Someday all cars, he thought, would have them. Then the snow plows and heating coils would both be obsolete. The bars burned away the crystals, evaporating some, melting some and leaving them behind to freeze into ice as the night wind roared in and covered the road in their wake.
    "A little further yet," he said.
    She whimpered something . . .
    He risked a glance away from the road, was shocked—as always—by the white fish-belly color of her beautiful face. It always reminded him of the dead. It always frightened him. "Hold on."
    The car skidded sideways without warning. He grabbed desperately at the wheel, then remembered to let the car follow the direction of the slide. They lodged in a drift, and it took the melting bars a few minutes to free them. He went another mile without seeing any houses and—therefore—turned abruptly across what appeared to be a wheat field, flat and snow covered. The bars were burning at full capacity. He took it slow, melting his way toward the edge of the forest which began where the field sloped upward and continued over the rise and into the distance. When they reached the forest's perimeter, he braked, stopped, shut off the lights. They would not be seen from the highway against the black backdrop of trees.
    He sat with her at the side of a tree, sat on the snow with her. She had reached the critical point.
    "Okay," he said. "There is no one here."
    She whimpered again . . .
    Her breath rushed out . . .
    The snow began to melt around them . . . In two minutes there was a four-foot circle of bare earth. Then there was mud. Then boiling mud . . .
     
    "I remember watt papered parlors
    With a grandfather clock that chimed
    Like a voice saying I'll give you
    A dollar for a dime.
     
    "I recall sun-bleached kitchens
    On a then late afternoon,
    A hundred thousand fragrances,
    My mother's tasting spoon . . ."
     
    He flipped off the recording machine, rewound the tape, removed and packaged it. That was Saturday's show—aired on one hundred and two FM radio stations. Fifteen minutes of poetry and commentary, recital and rebuttal. He was a little bitter about it. He wondered how many really listened and how many only laughed. He suspected that many of the gentler arts were not designed for the mass media. But then, it brought pennies for bread, pennies for lard.
    "Frank—" Laurie came into the den, all sweet-smiling in a dress covered with large red apples on a straw background, a red band dipping in and out of her dark hair. "Have you seen this morning's paper?"
    He couldn't have missed the headline: HALLUCINO-CHILD BELIEVED TO BE IN AREA. And below that: POLICE BEGIN SEARCH. It told all about the field near Crockerton where the snow had been vaporized, the earth boiled and glazed, the trees splintered and charred. It told how there was only one thing that could have done all that. And they were searching for the hallucino-child.
    "Don't worry," he said.
    "But they say the police are searching outward on a ten mile radius."
    He pulled her down on his lap and kissed her. "And what can they find? I'm a poet who contributes well to the party in power; the party in power is very anti-Esper. We live normal lives. We have never once voiced disapproval over punishment of captured hallucino-children."
    "Just the same," she said, "I'll worry."
    So would he.
    Until noon. That is when the police came.
    They stood watching through the porthole in the front door as the police approached the house. "It's just a question party. Only routine investigators following routine procedures," he said.
    She was trembling just the same. She retreated to the kitchen.
    He waited for two knocks before he opened the door. He did not want to appear too anxious, and he needed those extra few seconds to paint a false smile on his face. "Yes?"
    "Police Inspector Jameson and android assistant T," the dark-eyed detective said, motioning to the parody of a man beside him.
    "Oh, this must be about the hallucino-child in the papers. Come in, inspector."
    He led them into the den. The inspector and he sat, but T remained standing. The snowflakes that had fallen on his metal hide were melting and dropping onto the carpet after cutting wet swaths across the "skin" of his face to the precipice of his chin.
    "Nice place you have here, Mr. Cauvell"
    "Thank you."
    "This where you write poems?"
    Cauvell looked to the desk, nodded.
    "I'm