Operation Chaos

XXIII

I TAKE CARE not to remember the next several hours in detail.

At noon we were in my study. Our local chief had seen almost at once that the matter was beyond him and urged us to call in the FBI. Their technicians were still busy checking the house and grounds, inch by inch. Our best service was to stay out of their way. I sat on the day bed, Ginny on the edge of my swivel chair. From time to time one of us jumped up, paced around, made an inane remark, and slumped back down. The air was fogged with smoke from ashtray, overflowing cigarets. My skull felt scooped out. Her eyes had retreated far back into her head. Sunlight, grass, trees were unreal in the windows.

“You really ought to eat,” I said for the ?-th time. “Keep your strength.”

“Same to you,” she answered, not looking at me or at anything I could tell.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Nor I.”

We returned to the horror.

The extension phone yanked us erect. “A call from Dr. Ashman,” it said. “Do you wish to answer?”

“For God’s sake yell” ripped from me. “Visual.” Momentarily, crazily, I couldn’t concentrate on our first message from the man who brought Valerie into the world. My mind spun off into the principles of telephony. Sympathetic vibrations, when sender and receiver are spelled to the same number; a scrying unit for video when desired; a partial animation to operate the assembly—Ginny’s hand seized mine. Its cold shocked me into sanity.

Ashman’s face looked well-nigh as exhausted as hers. “Virginia,” he said. “Steve. We have the report.”

I tried to respond and couldn’t.

“You were right,” he went on. “It’s a homunculus.”

“What took you so long?” Ginny asked. Her voice wasn’t husky any more, just hoarse and harsh.

“Unprecedented case,” Ashman said. “Fairy changelings have always been considered a legend. Nothing in our data suggests any motive for nonhuman intelligences to steal a child . . . nor any method by which they could if they wanted to, assuming the parents take normal care . . . and certainly no reason for such hypothetical kidnappers to leave a sort of golem in its place. ” He sighed. “Apparently we know less than we believe.”

“What are your findings?” The restored determination in Ginny’s words brought my gaze to her.

“The police chirurgeon, the crime lab staff, and later a pathologist from the University hospital worked with me,” Ashman told us. “Or I with them. I was merely the family doctor. We lost hours on the assumption Valerie was bewitched. The simulacrum is excellent, understand. It’s mindless—the EEG is practically flat—but it resembles your daughter down fingerprints. Not till she ... it ... had failed to respond to every therapeutic spell we commanded between us, did we think the body might be an imitation. You told us so at the outset, Steve, but we discounted that as hysteria. I’m sorry. Proof required a whole battery of tests. For instance, the saline content and PBI suggest the makers of the homunculus had no access to oceans. We clinched the matter when we injected some radioactivated holy water; that metabolism is not remotely human.”

His dry tone was valuable. The horror began to have some shadowy outline; my brain creaked into motion, searching for ways to grapple it. “What’ll they do with the changeling?” I asked.

“I suppose the authorities will keep it in the hope of-of learning something, doing something through it,” Ashman said. “In the end, if nothing else happens, it’ll doubtless be institutionalized. Don’t hate the poor thing. That’s all it is, a poor thing, manufacturer some evil reason but not to blame.”

“Not to waste time on, you mean,” Ginny rasped. “Doctor, have you any ideas about rescuing Val?”

“No. It hurts me.” He looked it. “I’m only a medicine man, though. What further can I do? Tell me and I’ll come flying.”

“You can start right away,” Ginny said. “You’ve heard, haven’t you, my familiar was critically wounded defending, her? He’s at the vet’s, but I want you to take over.”

Ashman was startled. “What? Really—Look, I can’t save an animal’s life when a specialist isn’t able.”

“That’s not the problem. Svartalf will get well. But vets don’t have the expensive training and equipment used on people. I want him rammed back to health overnight. What runes and potions you don’t have, you’ll know how to obtain. Money’s no object.”

“Wait,” I started to say, recalling what leechcraft costs are like.

She cut me off short. “Nornwell will foot the bill, unless a government agency does. They’d better. This isn’t like anything else they’ve encountered. Could be a major emergency shaping up.” She stood straight. Despite the looted eyes, hair hanging lank, unchanged black garb of last night, she was once more Captain Graylock of the 14th United States Cavalry. “I am not being silly, Doctor. Consider the implications of your discoveries. Svartalf may or may not able to convey a little information to me about what he encountered. He certainly can’t when he’s unconscious. At the least, he’s always been a good helper, and we need whatever help we can get.”

Ashman reflected a minute. “All right,” he said.

He was about to sign off when the study door opened. “Hold it,” a -voice ordered. I turned on my heel, jerkily, uselessly fast.

The hard brown face and hard rangy frame of Robert Shining Knife confronted me. The head of the local FBI office had discarded the conservative business suit of his organization for working clothes. His feather bonnet seemed to brush the ceiling; a gourd stuck into his breechclout rattled dryly to his steps, the blanket around his shoulders and the paint on his skin were patterned in thunderbirds, sun discs, and I know not what else.

“You listened in,” I accused.

He nodded. “Couldn’t take chances, Mr. Matuchek. Dr. Ashman, you’ll observe absolute secrecy. No running off to any blabbermouth some shaman or goodwife think should be brought in consultation.”

Ginny blazed up. “See here—”

“Your cat’ll be repaired for you,” Shining Knife promised in the same blunt tone. “I doubt he’ll prove of assistance, but we can’t pass by the smallest possibility. Uncle Sam will pick up the tab—on the QT—and Dr. Ashman may as well head the team. But I want to clear the other members of it, and make damn sure they aren’t told more than necessary. Wait in your office, Doctor. An operative will join you inside an hour.”

The physician bristled. “And how long will he then take to certify each specialist I may propose is an All-American Boy?”

“Very little time. You’ll be surprised how much he’ll know about them already. You’d also be surprised how much trouble someone would have who stood on his rights to tell the press or even his friends what’s been going on.” Shining Knife smiled sardonically. “I’m certain that’s a superfluous warning, sir. You’re a man of patriotism and discretion. Good-bye.”

The phone understood him and broke the spell.

“Mind if I close the windows?” Shining Knife asked as he did. “Eavesdroppers have sophisticated gadgets these days.” He had left the door ajar; we heard his men move around in the house, caught faint pungencies and mutterings. “Please sit down. He leaned back against a bookshelf and watched us.

Ginny controlled herself with an effort I could feel. “Aren’t you acting rather high-handed?”

“The circumstances require it, Mrs. Matuchek,” he said.

She bit her lip and nodded.

“What’s this about?” I begged.

The hardness departed from Shining Knife. “We’re confirming what your wife evidently suspects,” he said with a compassion that made me wonder if he had a daughter of his own. “She’s a witch and would know, but wouldn’t care to admit it till every hope of a less terrible answer was gone. This is no ordinary kidnapping.”

“Well, of course-!”

“Wait. I doubt if it’s technically any kind of kidnapping. My bureau may have no jurisdiction. However, as your wife said the case may well involve the national security. I’ll have to communicate with Washington and let them decide. In the last analysis, the President will. Meanwhile, we don’t dare rock the boat.”

I looked from him to Ginny to the horror that was again without form, not a thing to be fought but a condition of nightmare. “Please, I whispered.

Shining Knife’s mouth contorted too for an instant. He spoke flatly and fast: “we’ve ascertained the blood is entirely the cat’s. There are some faint indications of ichor, chemical stains which may have been caused by it, but none of the stuff itself. We got better clues from scratches and gouges in floor and furnishings. Those marks weren’t left by anything we can identify, natural or paranatural; and believe me, our gang is good at identifications.”

“The biggest fact is that the house was never entered. Not any way we can check for—and, again, we know a lot of different ones. Nothing was broken, forced, or picked. Nothing had affected the guardian signs and objects; their fields were at full strength, properly meshed and aligned, completely undisturbed.

Therefore nothing flew down the chimney, or oozed through a crack, or dematerialized past the walls, or compelled the babysitter to let it in. 3

“The fact that no one in the neighborhood was alerted is equally significant. Remember how common, hex alarms and second-sighted watchdogs are. Some thing paranatural and hostile in the street would touched off a racket to wake everybody for three blocks around. Instead, we’ve only got the Delacorts next door, who heard what they thought was a catfight.”

He paused. “Sure,” he finished, “we don’t everything about goetics. But we do know enough about its felonious uses to be sure this was no forced entry.”

“What, then?” I cried.

Ginny said it for him: “It came in from the hell universe.”

“Theoretically, could have been an entity from Heaven.” Shining Knife’s grin was brief and stiff. “But that’s psychologically-spiritually-impossible. The M.O. is diabolic.

Ginny sat forward. Her features were emptied of expression, her chin rested on a fist, her eyes were half-shut, the other hand drooped loosely over a knee. She murmured as if in a dream:

“The changeling fits your theory quite well, doesn’t it? To the best of our knowledge, matter can’t be transferred from one space-time plenum to another in violation of the conservation laws of physics. Psychic influences can go, yes. Visions, temptations, inspirations, that sort of thing. The uncertainty principle allows them. But not an actual object. If you want to take it from its proper universe to your own, you have to replace it with an identical amount of matter, whose configuration has to be fairly similar to preserve momentum. You may remember Villegas suggested this was the reason angels take more or less anthropomorphic shapes on earth.”

Shining Knife looked uneasy. “This is no time to be unfriends with the Most High,” he muttered.

“I’ve no such intention,” Ginny said in her sleepwalker’s tone. “He can do all things. But His servants are finite. They must often find it easier to let transferred matter fall into the shape it naturally wants to, rather than solve a problem involving the velocities of ten to the umpteenth atoms in order to give it another form. And the inhabitants of the Low Continuum probably can’t. They aren’t creative. Or so the Petrine churches claim. I understand the Johannine doctrine includes Manichaean elements.

“A demon could go from his universe to a point in ours that was inside this house. Because his own natural form is chaotic, he wouldn’t have to counter-transfer anything but dirt, dust, trash, rubbish, stuff in a high-entropy condition. After he finished his task, he’d presumably return that material in the course of returning himself. It’d presumably show effects. I know things got generally upset in the fight, Mr. Shining Knife, but you might run a lab check on what was in the garbage can, the catbox, and so forth.”

The FBI man bowed. “We thought of that, and noticed its homogenized condition,” he said. “If you could think of it, under these circumstances—”

Her eyes opened fully. Her speech became like slowly drawn steel: “Our daughter is in hell, sir. We mean to get her back.”

I thought of Valeria, alone amidst cruelty and clamor and unnamable distortions, screaming for a Daddy and a Mother who did not come. I sat there on the bed, in the night which has no ending, and heard my lady speak as if she were across a light-years-wide abyss:

“Let’s not waste time on emotions. I’ll continue outlining the event as I reconstruct it; check me out. The demon—could have been more than one, but I’ll assume a singleton—entered our cosmos as a scattered mass of material but pulled it together at once. By simple transformation, he assumed the shape he wanted. The fact that neither the Adversary nor any of his minions can create—if the Petrine tradition is correct—wouldn’t handicap him. He could borrow any existing shape. The fact that you can’t identify it means nothing. It could be a creature of some obscure human mythology, or some imaginative drawing some where, or even another planet.

“This is not a devout household. It’d be hypocrisy, and therefore useless, for us to keep religious symbols around that we don’t love. Besides, in spite of previous experience with a demon or two, we didn’t expect one to invade a middle-class suburban home. No authenticated case of that was on record. So the final possible barrier to his appearance was absent.

“He had only a few pounds of mass available to him. Any human who kept his or her head could have coped with him—if nothing else, kept him on the run, too busy to do his dirty work, while phoning for an exorcist. But on this one night, no human was here. Svartalf can’t talk, and he obviously never got the chance to call in help by different means. He may have outweighed the demon, but not by enough to prevail against a thing all teeth, claws, spines, and armor plate. In the end, when Svartalf lay beaten, the demon took our Val to the Low Continuum. The counter-transferred mass was necessarily in her form.

“Am I right?”

Shining Knife nodded. “I expect you are.”

“What do you plan to do about it?”

“Frankly, at the moment there’s little or nothing we can do. We haven’t so much as a clue to motive.”

“You’ve been told about last night. We made bad enemies. I’m inclined to take at face value the Johnnies’ claim that their adepts have secret knowledge. Esotericism has always been associated more with the Low than the High. I’d say their cathedral is the place to start investigating.”

Behind his mask of paint, Shining Knife registered unhappiness. “I explained to you before, Mrs. Matuchek, when we first inquired who might be responsible, that’s an extremely serious charge to make on no genuine evidence. The public situation is delicately balanced. Who realizes that better than you? We can t afford fresh riots. Besides, more to the point, this invasion could be the start of something far bigger, far worse than a kidnapping.”

I stirred. “Nothing’s worse,” I mumbled.

He ignored me, sensing that at present Ginny was more formidable. “We know practically zero about the hell universe. I’ll stretch a point of security, because I suspect you’ve figured the truth out already on the basis of unclassified information; quite a few civilian wizards have. The Army’s made several attempts to probe it, with no better success than the Faustus Institute had thirty years ago. Men returned in states of acute psychic shock, after mere minutes there, unable to describe what’d happened. Instruments recorded data that didn’t make sense.”

“Unless you adopt Nickelsohn’s hypothesis,” she said.

“What’s it?”

“That space-time in that cosmos is non-Euclidean, violently so compared to ours, and the geometry changes from place to pace.” Her tone was matter-of-fact.

“Well, yes, I’m told the Army researchers did decide—” He saw the triumph in her eyes. “Damn! What a neat trap you set for me!” With renewed starkness. “Okay. You’ll understand we dare not go blundering around when forces we can’t calculate are involved for reasons we can scarcely guess. The consequences could be disastrous. I’m going to report straight to the Director, who I’m sure will report straight to the President, who I’m equally sure will have us keep, alert but sit tight till we’ve learned more.”

“What about Steve and me?”

“You too. You might get contacted, remember.”

“I doubt it. What ransom could a demon want?”

“The demon’s master—”

“I told you to check on the Johnnies.”

“We will. We’ll check on everything in sight, reassonable or not. But it’ll take time.”

“Meanwhile Valeria is in hell.”

“If you want a priest we’ve clergy of most faiths cleared to serve our personnel. I can bring one here if you like.”

The red head shook. “No, thanks. Ask them to pray for her. It can’t hurt. I doubt it’ll help much, either. Certainly none of them can help us two. What we want is a chance to go after our daughter.”

My heart sprang. The numbness tingled out of me. I rose.

Shining Knife braced himself. “I can’t permit that. Sure, you’ve both accomplished remarkable things in the past, but the stakes are too high now for amateurs to play. Hate me all you want. If it’s any consolation, that’ll pain me. But I can’t let you jeopardize yourselves and the public interest. You’ll stay put. Under guard.”

“You—” I nearly jumped him. Ginny drew me back.

“Hold on, Steve,” she said crisply. “Don’t make trouble. What we’ll do, you and I, if it won’t interfere with the investigation, is choke down some food and a sleeping potion and cork off till we’re fit to think again.”

Shining Knife smiled. “Thanks,” he said. “I was certain you’d be sensible. I’ll go hurry ’em along in the kitchen so you can get that meal soon.”

I closed the door behind him. Rage shivered me.

“What the blue deuce is this farce?” I stormed. “If he thinks we’ll sit and wait on a gaggle of bureaucrats—”

“Whoa.” She pulled my ear down to her lips. “What he thinks,” she whispered, “is that his wretched guard will make any particular difference to us.”

“Oh-ho!” For the first time I laughed. It wasn’t a merry or musical noise, but it was a laugh of sorts.