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the result is akin to shooting a frozen turkey out of a cannon and into a brick wall.
    “Couldn’t a dragon survive that?” I had asked. “If the impact wasn’t fatal?” Dragons were supposed to be able to survive lethal wounds to the brain, the heart, just about anything that didn’t cause outright dismemberment.
    “No,” he said gravely. “The damage descends to the cellular level.”
    The awful smell of the corpse was because it did rot quickly. Unlike a normal corpse, large segments of its flesh were dead before it was. The growth of bacteria in the body was three or four times as fast as in a normal body. Instant gangrene.
    Only a fraction of the corpse had rotted by the time I had arrived, but even that amounted to a half a ton of distilled putrescence to poison the air for a quarter mile in every direction.
    Probably, if I was a crime reporter, covering people’s dead kids for a living, I would have found the last few minutes of this dragon’s life a little less affecting. But the deaths I’d covered in the last ten years were those of people’s political careers, the blood largely metaphorical.
    I stared at the screen on my laptop, convinced I was writing crap.
    I kept thinking of the damn dragon, my hands hovering over the keyboard, unmoving. What had it been thinking? Where had it been going? Could it sense the end coming, like feeling the tidal bore before the wave crushes your body—or was it caught completely unaware? What would it be like to be stripped of your reason as the laws of nature decided to tear your body apart?
    There was a chorus of chairs scraping around me. I glanced up and saw Public Safety Director Julian Nesmith walk into the room, toward the podium. Everyone was standing, and I pulled out my nondigital notebook. Most everyone here pulled out a similar pad of paper, or a palm-top organizer and a stylus. A few people pulled out digital recorders, but the printed word held the upper hand.
    That was something that always struck the new people, especially in my profession. The lack of video. Even after the techies figured out how to get good quality digital imagery near the Portal, the photographic image had taken a cultural back seat in my hometown. There were only two digital cameras in evidence, in the back.
    The Portal had struck a deathblow to television in northeast Ohio, which—in the chaos right after the Portal opened—was barely noticed at the time.
    What the Portal does—in addition to opening the gates to another reality and giving us sprites and elves, mages and dragons—is play havoc with any recording medium. Take a pre-Portal tape recorder and try to dictate something, what will play back will sound like the taped inner monologue of a paranoid schizophrenic Tibetan monk, backward. Video, you’d get a fun-house mirror vision of hell seen by a color-blind housefly.
    Luckily, digital communications had proved a little less susceptible to the interference. Even when the phone lines seemed to only produce garbled static, anyone with an ISDN line had been able to—at least half the time—get on the Internet. This apparently had to do with redundancy and error-checking. What it meant in practical terms was that now every electronic communication device anywhere near the Portal had to carry at least three computer processors to transmit multiple signals that could be combined at the other end to filter out the garbage. It also meant that video monitors had to be high definition flatscreen LCDs, audio recordings had to be on CD or silicon, the hard drive on my laptop had to have five times the space to store enough copies of my data so I could be certain to get it back along with a custom operating system with three-way redundant check sums that could weed out ghost data on the fly.
    Bottom line, consumer electronics in this town were specialized and very expensive.
    But Cleveland now has more local dailies than New York City, so I guess it’s a blessing.
    Because of