The Galaxy Builder

Chapter Seventeen

Feeling dazed, Lafayette looked around at a well-lit room with neutral walls and a tall window with a vista of forested hills and jagged peaks in the distance. He allowed himself to be led to a long refectory table and eased into a chair. Sprawnroyal ignored the prone form of the Man in Black.

"Easy, boys," Sprawnroyal advised the two small fellows who had done their best to steady O'Leary's beanpole physique while working at knee level. "He's been through a lot; lucky he finely won his way to the Static Point, which, by the way, Slim, how'd ya know whereat it was located at? Top secret info, you know."

"Where it was located," Lafayette started wearily, but abandoned the didactic impulse as hopeless. "I didn't know it was a Static Point, whatever that is," he told his diminutive friend. "I went along to call on an alleged witch named Henriette in the Hill, and her apartment turned out to be Nicodaeus' old lab, from back in Artesia. It seems Nicodaeus anchored it so well that it stays in place no matter what happens to the locus. Strange, too: I was sure the lab was going to be in an ill-fitting room at the top of a shaky-looking structure back in the town."

"Look, Slim," Sprawnroyal put in seriously, "we got a real problem on our hands here. I tole you last I seen you, when I run into you out in the woods in one o' them hick loci: Some time back we took on a private security job for some kind o' local headman type name of Frodolkin, and pretty soon he come up with this Number-One-Public-Enemy-of-all-time deal, which we hadda go beating the bushes for him. And after we seen you, things really got rough. We got into some kinda swamp where the desert oughta be, and never did find this duke fellow."

"That's just as well," Lafayette told the little man. "Bother's not a bad fellow; actually he's an agent working out of Prime. Why did you want him?"

"This Frodolkin character hands us a dossier on him that'd make the Murderin' Turk look like Baby Leroy. Seems he's out to break down the whole EQ, and let the whole plane slide off the deep end into unrealized space-time. Nacherly, we hadda try and stop him, even if we din't have a contract, which we did have one. But like I says, we never seen the bum. We report in, and old Froddy gets all excited and says he's gonna do what he called a emergency dump on the whole level.

"That sounded bad, but it's just talk, we figger, and I and my boys get back onna job and pretty soon we're sort of swimming around like goldfish in a bowl, two guys watching us. After a while they pour us out on a cement slab, and we just about croak before we get straightened out and get it together, which we wasn't really goldfish, natch. And after a while we got used to breathing again and all, and then we found out we were really in the soup. We really gotta thank you, Slim. If it wouldn't of been for you giving us the old password from time to time, we'd prolly still be wading around in that swamp, or worse. But seems like every time we were really up against it, we picked you up again ... But I can tell you, Slim, you nearly slipped off the grid that one time, and we thought you were really a goner, and us too. But old Raf trass spoit"—Sprawnroyal broke off to glance cautiously about as he lowered his voice to speak the arcane words—"did the trick, and we homed back in on you. And now—here you are!"

"Right," Lafayette agreed. "But where am I? That's not Aphasia III out that window; there's hills and trees, and Aphasia III is all mud-flats."

"Cripes," Sprawnroyal muttered, as Lafayette went on to describe the bleak locus.

"... And so," Lafayette concluded, "it seems she not only isn't Daphne, but she decoyed us here to turn us over to this Frumpkin, alias the Man in Black."

"Can't blame Daph for that," Sprawnroyal reassured Lafayette. "She's a true-blue dame if I ever seen one, even if she is twice too high, no offense." His lumpy face looked unaccustomedly solemn for a moment. "But it's this Frumpkin character that intrigues me." Sprawnroyal paused to glance toward the now quietly groaning man on the floor. "He claims he's manipulating the exocosm wholesale, eh? Prolly just a nut like you said, but the fact is, somebody's been monkeying around on a big scale—"

"I'm afraid I'm to blame," Lafayette said miserably. He went on to tell Sprawnroyal of his idle tinkering with the Great Unicorn. Sprawnroyal waved that aside. "Don't figure, Slim. The energy requirement alone—"

"Don't talk theory at me, Roy," Lafayette protested. "I'm talking about what happened. I goofed and I'm ready to take the blame."

"This Aphasia place is nothing but mud-flats, you say," Roy changed the subject. "Sounds like a whole lot o' geology has gone down. But the moon was back to its old size, eh? Looks like you switched planes that time."

"I must have," Lafayette agreed. "But where are we now? That looks like Melange out the window, and those peaks must be the Chantspells. How'd I get here? And since when is the Ajax plant next door to the lab?"

"Easy, Slim," Roy said, holding up a calloused hand. "You got here by a little Ajax device we call a Come Hither. When you used the flat-walker, that gave us a hard fix and we just yanked you in. About the Works bein' next door to old Nicodaeus' lab, it ain't, natch.

... We coulda retrieved you to any place we liked, so why not right here to the head office? You're right about Nicodaeus really anchoring his lab right. Tied it to the Prime Postulates, and can't nothing short of total dissolution shake that. Lucky thing, too: gives us a good access to an infinite series of loci across nine planes, and well into the next manifold."

Frumpkin moaned and sat up on the floor, both hands carefully holding his head in place.

"I'll string yer innards out over an infinite series o' manifolds for this, you wretches!" he declared in a yell, rising to face O'Leary, who rose to confront him.

"Better quieten him down, boys," Sprawnroyal ordered his two handy men. They went briskly to the Man in Black, who shrank back with a yelp.

"Don't dare to lay hands on me, you miserable nits!" he commanded.

"No problem, Skinny," one of the sturdy little men said, and drawing a bright yellow, pen-sized tube from a clip at his belt, directed it at Frumpkin and released a jet of pink vapor.

"Ugh! Puce and lemon, a perfectly vile color combination," Frumpkin gasped as he sank to his haunches and squatted there, his face now on a level with the two Ajax men. His expression went vague.

"OK, Slim," Roy said to O'Leary. "One good sniff of Vox III and he's ready to tell us stuff he never even heard of before."

"I'd prefer to have him stick to what he has heard of," Lafayette protested.

"Just a like figger of speech, Slim," Roy reassured Lafayette easily. Lafayette followed Roy across to where the Man in Black squatted, and looked him directly in the face.

"What are you after, Frumpkin?" he demanded.

"You may address me as Sublime One," Frumpkin replied.

"And then again, I may not," Sprawnroyal replied, looking up to wink at Lafayette. "OK," he returned his attention to Frumpkin, "talk it up, Skin. What do you have to do with all this stuff that's been going on? Like running poor Slim ragged, and giving a hard time to I and my boys, and all?" Roy waved a stumpy arm to take in all the anomalies he had left unmentioned.

"To divulge what you suggest would be a gross violation of Cosmic Ultimate State Secrecy," Frumpkin replied in a grumpy tone.

"So, we pick up a little security violation, Skin," Roy returned briskly. "That's not as bad as this is it?" As he spoke he grasped Frumpkin's longish nose firmly between his knuckles and gave it a firm tweak. Frumpkin yelled and almost toppled. Roy hauled him up by the nose and said, "Talk it up, Skin. We got no time for games."

Frumpkin made muffled spluttering sounds and Roy tightened his grip. At once the Man in Black recoiled and said clearly:

"That did it, buster. You now occupy top spot on our personal hit list."

Roy adjusted his grasp on Frumpkin's now red nose and twisted it in the opposite direction. "You know, Skin, if that cartilage happens to get busted, you'll have a cauliflower nose; yer own old ma wouldn't reckernize ya." He twisted harder.

"Hurry up," he urged. "This is tough on a feller's knuckles."

"This isn't doing any good," O'Leary said unhappily. "He can't talk, anyway, when he's looking up his own nostrils."

"Slim," Roy said patiently, "you're a nice guy; that's yer problem: Yer too nice of a guy. With bums like Skin here, ya gotta squeeze. Maybe I'd have better luck with a ear at that—onney they break up awful easy." He shifted his grip to one of Frumpkin's generous ears. At once, the Man in Black yowled and blurted:

"All right, you nasty, ugly little monster! It wasn't my fault! If he hadn't continually interfered with me, I'd have never so much as known of his miserable existence!"

"My existence was far from miserable until you started tampering with it," O'Leary notified the irate Frumpkin, who glared at him and ground his teeth in fury.

"Aha! The technique of the Big Lie!" Frumpkin charged. "You, having had the temerity to seek to thwart my efforts to establish a New Reality, now charge me with the crime, directed against your petty person! Intolerable! You know perfectly well that it was you who initiated the series of antisocial acts aimed at destroying my life's great work!"

"Name one thing I did to bother you before you stuck your nose in my affairs," O'Leary challenged. "The first time I ever saw you, right here in this room, you handcuffed me and were all ready to kidnap me, when you panicked and ran."

"Panic? I?" Frumpkin echoed derisively. "Pooh. Are you attempting to maintain that you introduced no alternatives into the tranquil fabric of Reality during the' years directly preceding the confrontation to which you refer?"

"I don't actually know what you're talking about," O'Leary started, "but—"

"He means the times you kind of did some unauthorized shifts, Slim," Roy put in. "Like when you come to Melange and changed Rudolfo's plans for Ajax —and Ajax Novelty is grateful, even if it did louse up Skin's plans, here."

"All I did was focus my Psychical Energies a few times," Lafayette protested. "And that one time, I messed with a gadget from the Probability Lab, accidentally almost. But I never heard of Frumpkin until after ..." Lafayette paused to swallow. "... after I messed with the Great Unicorn," he finished lamely.

"Whatta ya talkin', ya messed with the Great Unicorn?" Roy challenged. "That's a constellation or something, right? How do you mess with a bunch of stars, some of 'em over a hundred miles away?"

"I didn't mean to," Lafayette explained. "I just happened to be looking at Ursa Major—that means the Big Bear, or the Bigger Bear, to translate precisely—and it seemed to me like a dumb name. Bears don't have tails; it looked a lot more like a horse with a horn on its head. That was the only thing—I needed one more star for the tip of the horn—so there it was."

"Just a minute," Roy said, and went across to stare at a large star-chart pinned to the wall.

"Funny thing, Slim," he said, pointing. "This here chart has been here since Prince Krupkin's time anyways; here's the Great Unicorn, just as big as life. The star at the tip o' the horn is, uh, looks like a dim galaxy, Slim. NGC-51a, it says. A irregular galaxy of the Local Group."

"It wasn't there at first," Lafayette insisted. "Too bad I don't have a witness—"

"What about Daphne?" Sprawnroyal suggested. "You said she was with you."

"But I don't know where she is, Roy," O'Leary moaned. "I've been trying to pick up some trace of her, but it's no use. For a minute or two, I thought this Henriette was Daph, but she betrayed me, just lured me there to her place to turn me over to Frumpkin here." O'Leary prodded the black-clad leg of the red-nosed but still haughty Frumpkin, who responded with a cold smile.

"But, don't you understand, poor fool, the wench was indeed this Daphne of yours. But when I explained to her the consequences that would result if you were allowed to run loose any longer, she at once fell in with my plan."

"Prolly done it just to save you from something worst," Roy suggested sympathetically. "And maybe he tortured her—you can't expect a female to stand up to no PPS, even if she is over five foot high."

Lafayette groaned, "If even Daphne's against me, what's the use of going on?"

"Precisely, Lafayette," Frumpkin seconded eagerly. "Just relax now and let events take their course—and I'll still cut you in for a share."

"Maybe you oughta talk to the kid first before you go condemning her out of hand, like," Roy suggested.

"Sure, but how?" O'Leary returned. "She's not here. I should have brought her along, but I was pretty busy with Frumpkin here."

"Sure, Slim, nobody could fault you," Roy agreed. "But we could find her—or give it a try, anyways."

O'Leary turned to the little man gratefully. "Then you'll help me, Roy? With your Ajax gear we can get something done. Come on. Let's get started. We can truss Frumpkin up and leave Casper and Rugadoon to watch him."

"Sure." Roy gave quick instructions to his two helpers, who bustled off to procure ropes.

"Now," Roy said gravely, "we gotta figure our next move. How do we get back to Aphasia?"

"Easy," O'Leary assured him. "The room where I left her is just on the other side of the wall here. So—we use the flat-walker again and go back."

"Slim," Roy said, wagging his head heavily. "I guess I never tole you, but tryna use a one-man unit to merge two guys is risky. Fact is," he went on, turning to look at Frumpkin, still hunkered down on his haunches, watching blankly as Casper came back with a coil of fine white line, "... fact is, I'm surprised you got away with it that once without leaving old Skin's innards strung out in half-phase."

"Can't you rustle up another one?" Lafayette asked.

"That ain't too easy," Roy told him. "We had our problems here at Ajax too, Slim. This here troublemaker"—he jerked a thumb at Frumpkin—"has put a crimp in operations. We managed to trace the interference to him before our energy tap was cut."

"He cut your energy tap?" O'Leary echoed in alarm. "That means you're out of business, for all practical purposes, according to what Flimbert told me about how you manage all your tricks."

"Bert always did have too big of a mouth," Roy said. "Anyways, you see how it is. Fact is," he added, "the only thing we can do, is I take the flat-walker and see what I can do on my own."

"Nonsense," O'Leary came back at once. "If only one of us can go, it'll be me. After all, Daphne's my wife."

"Sure," Sprawnroyal concurred, "and the whole future of Ajax is riding on us now, Slim—or on me, rather. I got to take some prompt and effective action, or all Melange will revert to unrealized status, and b'lieve me, Slim, that'll be a poor way to go."

"Struggle as you will, poor fools," Frumpkin contributed with a note of triumph, "you and your petty entropic level are doomed. The wheels I have set in motion cannot now be stopped, short of a cataclysm which will destroy the Prime Postulate itself."

"Ignore him, Roy," O'Leary advised his old comrade. "He's cracked."

Roy nodded. "Sure he is. But unfortunately, Slim, the data we recorded before everything shut down confirms what he's saying. Still, you might as well go on and try to see Daph one last time. S'long, kid." Roy thrust out his hard square hand. "We had a few kicks together, din't we? Good luck—and you better try the same spot, so's to catch the aura of temporarily enhanced permeability before it fades. Only lasts about ten minutes."

"I've been here nearly that long already," O'Leary said hastily. "And don't look so glum, Roy. Things have looked bad before, and we got out of it somehow."

"Do good, Slim," Roy urged solemnly. "Looks like you're the only chance we got. Make it count."

O'Leary nodded and stepped to the wall to stand facing it, the flat-walker in his hand.

"Little to the left, Slim," Roy advised from behind him. Lafayette nodded and stepped forward.

He felt the momentary resistance of the masonry, then thrust impatiently forward, ignoring the display of darting points of light which moved together and coalesced into a uniform dim grayness. Lafayette looked quickly toward the central panel; Frumpkin was nowhere near it. He went over, looked at the safety-locked knife-switch the Man in Black had been about to throw the last time he was here. O'Leary looked around carefully for the first time, saw nothing but an immense room like the deserted lobby of an out-of-date hotel, its walls dim with distance through the grayish air. A blinking light on the panel caught his eye. It was one of a row of amber, blue, and white indicators, directly beneath which were tiny dials. They were cryptically marked: MAYHAP, CINCH, GET READY, THIS IS IT, FORGET IT. The one under the flashing amber lens read LET'S FACE IT.

"Good idea," Lafayette said aloud. "I'm wasting time. I need to get out of wherever I am, and back to work." He started forward, met resistance, pushed harder, and was abruptly clear, standing in another dim light looking at the dangling skeleton. He turned at a clanking sound to his right to see Duke Bother-Be-Damned coming toward him.

"What—where's the scoundrel got to?" Bother demanded. "My eyes play tricks on me. It almost seemed you were gone for an instant, lad. But as I started forward to search for a hidden panel, here you are. But where is the wretch Frumpkin?"

"Take it easy, Bother," O'Leary suggested. "He's in good hands, under guard. Excuse me; I have to find Daphne—I mean Lady Henriette." He strode past the man in armor and went to the open doorway through which Her Ladyship had disappeared. His eyes strayed en passant to the hardwood wall cabinet beside the dark opening. On impulse, he paused to open the door. There, amid dust curls and spider webs, was the tall, old-fashioned black dial telephone which linked the lab to Central. O'Leary hesitated, then lifted the receiver and put it to his ear. A feeble dial tone sounded. He frowned, wondering if he could remember the ten-digit number after so long a time ... He dialed: nine five three four nine zero zero two one one, and waited, not even breathing. Then he heard the tinny rattle of the ring signal. Bawp—bawp ... bawp-click, rattle.

"Central," a tired-sounding voice said.

"Uh," O'Leary said, "Central—this is an emergency! I'm Sir Lafayette O'Leary, part-time agent, and I'm calling from a locus known as Aphasia. We've got big trouble here. A nut-case named Frumpkin from some far-out plane claims to be reshaping all Greater Reality, and he doesn't care what he runs over in the process. I need help to interrogate him and find out what we can do to save what's left, if anything. Artesia's gone, and so is Aphasia I by now; and Melange is in deep trouble—even Ajax doesn't have any ideas—so get somebody in here fast to straighten things out!"

"Please note," a tinny voice said, "that this line is for limited official use only. Please cite your priority and classification code."

"No time," O'Leary cut in briskly. "Listen: This is an emergency! The world—several of them—is, or are, coming to an end! We have to do something!"

"Yes, yes, Sir, ah, I'm sure things can't be as bad as all that. We at Central—" The voice stopped as a deafening barr-room! blasted in O'Leary's ear. He rattled the receiver hook frantically.

"... Please note this line is for limited official use," the mindless voice parroted again. "Please cite—"

"Shut up, brainless!" Lafayette yelled. "Listen to me!"

There was no reply. O'Leary groaned. "It's a recording," he called over his shoulder to Bother, and tried again:

"Hello, Central!" he yelled into the instrument. "Are you still there? What happened—" Then an ironclad hand closed on his arm, tugging him gently away.

"Easily, lad, be calm," Bother urged him. "Hast lost thy wits, Sir Knight? Why talketh thou to this ugly object here?" Gingerly, he moved the receiver from Lafayette's hand and let it fall to swing from its cord, uttering quacking sounds.

"It's a telephone, Bother!" O'Leary protested. "You're supposed to talk to it! Listen, somebody's on the line now. Let me hear what they're saying!"

"... Your supervisor," a cold voice snapped. "I repeat: This is a limited access line. Identify yourself, please."

"I already told that dumb broad," O'Leary said, suppressing a desire to yell and choke the telephone. "Do I have to start all over? This is a crash emergency! Everything's coming apart, or it will if a screwball named Frumpkin has his way! Get me a squad of your best harness bulls in here double pronto. And no tricky undercover types like Mickey Jo and Lard-Ass! Plain old uniformed coppers with big billy clubs and packing plenty of iron—and ready to use it! Got me?"

"This is your final warning, sir," the unyielding supervisory voice said. "Do not attempt to make use of this classified circuit for personal calls. You will be traced and service discontinued."

"Discontinued?" Lafayette yelled. "What service have I gotten that you can discontinue? AH I've had is a dumb recording and a dumber bureaucrat! This is disaster, I'm telling you. Do something!" He was cut off by a click and a prolonged buzz.

"No use, Your Grace," Lafayette told Bother dispiritedly. "It's up to us. I should have known better." He hung up the phone, then leaned close to examine the heavy black-insulated cable which ran from the base of the instrument through a hole in the cabinet.

"This is strange," he told the uncomprehending duke. "Back in Aphasia I, this line had been cut and the phone was gone. Now it's back again." O'Leary's eyes went to the gilded skeleton dangling in the gloom above. "And Mr. Bones hasn't been here for years. Something's funny here. Somebody's been tampering ..." O'Leary sat in the decrepit chair beside the marble-topped counter, deep in thought.

"What troublest thee, Sir Lafayette?" Bother inquired.

Lafayette slapped the counter-top. "This isn't really the lab," he stated. "It's a fake someone rigged up for some reason. Probably Frumpkin's work. If I'm right that leaves the upstairs room back in town! You see, the lab is so firmly grounded that even though the loci come and go around it, it stays forever the same. That's why it's fifty feet above the ground level, and they had to build that scaffolding up to it. So let's go back, and this time I'll get inside!" As he concluded, Lafayette noticed a tiny vibration from the flat-walker still in his hand. He raised it to his ear:

"OK, Slim," Roy's voice came through, more clearly than before, "I'm going to try that area of permeability. If I don't make it in the next ten seconds, call out a strainer squad to look for me. Here goes!" The last words, spoken in full voice, came from behind O'Leary; he whirled to see the stumpy figure of Sprawnroyal standing by the wall, looking shaken.

"Wow," the Ajax rep said feelingly, "for a hour or two there, I thought I wasn't gonna make it. But then I thought to home in on the field from the flat-walker, and here I am."

"Glad to see you, Roy," O'Leary said. "But it's been only a second or two since you said you were on the way—but I know time gets all distorted in half-phase. Roy, it just dawned on me that this room is a fake—"

"It's Nicodaeus' old lab, isn't it?" Roy interrupted, looking around curiously. "I remember the alchemy department and the astrology section"—he indicated the star-charts on one wall, and paused, looking puzzled—"but seems like there was a high-tech electronic panel right next to it. When did he remodel?"

"I don't think he did," Lafayette persisted. "This is apparently a duplicate of an earlier stage of the lab. The question is, why?"

"Hard luck, Slim," Roy said mildly. "If it was the real thing, we coulda used the homing box we just installed a couple weeks ago."

"What's a homing box?" Lafayette demanded.

"A new item in our line," Roy explained. "One of Pratwick's best ideas—"

"Sure, but what does it do?" Lafayette cut in.

"Well, Slim, it's what ya might say versatile, is what it is," Roy explained in a leisurely way. "Instantaneous transport is the main function, but it's also useful for fast search-and-rescue jobs, you know? It's good as a substitute for a supply warehouse; you can tune to whatever you happen to need—got a zillion megabit storage capacity or something."

"But how could we use it?" Lafayette demanded, coming over to confront the Customer Service rep.

"What's it matter?" Roy countered. "After all, it ain't here. We onney installed it maybe a couple weeks back, and like you said, this is a copy off a early stage, prolly not long after Nick first set it up in Artesia."

"Never mind, Roy, just answer me. How could we use this gadget if we did have access to it?"

"Shift us right to the Ajax main office on Plane Two," Roy said. "Solid locus. From there we could gather in all the clues and find out what's going on."

"Why didn't you do it before?" O'Leary pressed. "If you had that kind of capability, why were you out beating the bushes in Aphasia I, instead of going right to the top?"

"Shoulda, I guess," Roy conceded. "But I had my orders. We didn't exactly realize how bad things were until it was too late, anyways. I tole you they cut our power source."

"Oh. Well, Roy, I think I'll try something: I'm going to make a real try to focus the old Psychical Energies—"

"What good's that gonna do, Slim?" Roy queried, frowning. "It's OK for you to duck out, maybe— though it ain't like ya—but how's about me and yer sheet-metal pal, here?"

"Oh, Roy, this is Duke Bother-Be-Damned," Lafayette made the intro hurriedly. "Your Grace, Sprawnroyal, Customer Service rep from the Ajax Novelty Works, Melange branch. And what do you mean 'duck out'?" Lafayette went on hotly. "If my idea works, we're all home safe!"

"Well, it won't hurt to try, maybe," Roy conceded. "Go ahead."

"Just one thing first," Lafayette demurred. "I'm going to find Henriette and get a few answers."

"They'll all be 'no', Sir Lafayette," Bother told him. "Many's the wight who's assailed my lady's virtue, but none, it's said, has scored."

"That's not what I had in mind," O'Leary advised the duke. "At least, not exactly. And I could have told you those local Romeos would bomb out. Daphne's true-blue—even if she's not really Daphne."

"I know, my boy," Bother said kindly. "None can expect reason and logic from a man bewitched by a maid. Seek out this witch, the while I search for the wily Frumpkin. He must have hid hereabouts; no man can, after all, walk through a wall!"

"Actually, Your Grace," Roy spoke up, "the scamp is well-trussed and locked in a garde-robe at this moment. We'll collect him in due course."