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portray you accurately, however, I will need to know more about you.”
    “Such as?”
    “You’re kind of a confusing personality, Lord. You wanted to set up a recycling base here, using the Earth-catapulted gar-bahge as raw material. Then you were going to ship the recycled products back to Earth.”
    “That’s right.”
    “But you had all that trouble with Uncle Rosy and his sayermen. You were forced to hide here, beneath the surface. You managed to set up a system of getting gar-bahge down here to your recycling facility, and now you’ve got caverns full of recycled products—so much stuff you hardly have room to move around.”
    “So?”
    “What are you going to do with all the stuff? Is it supposed to stay here forever, proof to yourself and to no other human that recycled goods could be manufactured?”
    “Yeah, I guess that’s right.” Lord Abercrombie’s eye stared at the dirt floor. He focused on a piece of obsidian. ‘The work kept me busy, I suppose. Maybe I held out a hope that some big shot from Earth would come here and beg me to go back, saying Earth needed my expertise to set up a recycling industry there.”
    “All right. But what about your obsession with creating planetary disasters? You spend half your time in the Realm of Flesh, and half soil-immersed in the Realm of Magic. In flesh, most of your time is spent with that old Earthian disaster control equipment, trying to create earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and the like. In magic, that’s all you do: Every waking instant is spent trying to impose your will upon the elements.”
    “Well, it’s been something to do. It can get kinda dull around here. Haven’t I told you that before?”
    “It’s power, isn’t it? You want to feel absolute, dominating power over the planet and all its inhabitants.”
    “Could be. I don’t know. Say, I don’t need to be psychoanalyzed by a meckie! Just put what I tell you on the wall!”
    “Yes, Lord.”
    “Tell how Uncle Rosy’s evil sayermen came after me, and how I was fortunate enough to find the Sacred Scroll of Cork. Show that the scroll led me to this place and instructed me in the ancient methods of soil immersion.”
    “Okay, Lord. Shall I also relate your difficulties in magically inducing disasters? After all, you have only come up with one magically willed rockslide in four years of soil immersion.”
    “I’ve been here four years,” Abercrombie said, irritated. “Only half of that time was spent immersed.”
    “Pardon me, Lord.”
    “Give me a break, historian.”
    The meckie picked up a piece of obsidian and placed it on a wall ledge. “What about your fleshy half, Lord? Should I show you and those old rebuilt meckies working with patched-together Earthian disaster control equipment?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You have created some dust storms with the equipment, Lord. An earthquake, too. And three floods.”
    “Yeah, but the atmosphere goes haywire each time I get something going real good. That damned reverse rain, coming right up out of the planet!”
    “That is a big problem,” the meckie said. “We shouldn’t dwell on the, negative, I suppose.”
    “Make it heroic,” Abercrombie said. His brow furrowed.
    “Guess I’d better not depict your indecision, either, Lord. You know, the way you’re halfway between the realms of Flesh and Magic, afraid to commit yourself to either one.”
    “Leave all that out too.”
    “There isn’t much you’re permitting me to say about you, Lord,” the meckie gargled.
    “Just show me getting here,” Lord Abercrombie snapped. “Then leave a lot of blank space. My story isn’t over yet.”

CHAPTER 2
    Cork: Called Guna One by the AmFeds. A planet abandoned by soil-immersing magicians aeons ago. Declared unfit by the Council of Magic for the safe and efficient practice of magic. Unusual magnetic and ionic conditions encountered there.
    From the Encyclopaedia of Magic, one of the microdata books kept in Stone 31-12

    “See