The Galaxy Builder

Chapter Nineteen

First Lafayette was aware of a mild clamor of voices, then of dim light. He sat up and saw that he was far from being alone in the big room. In divans, easy chairs, couches, davenports, and settees arranged in conversational groupings all across the rather faded pseudo-oriental carpets, were people of all ages, both sexes and many degrees of apparent cultivation. Most, but not all of them, were at least vaguely familiar to him. Only the Man in Black, now clad in a wine-colored brocaded dressing gown with a satin shawl collar, was near him. He stood rocking slightly on his heels, glass in hand, looking down at O'Leary with an expression of mild distaste.

"The time has come at last," he said blandly, "for me to confront you directly, my boy, and to discover precisely what has motivated your unexampled persecution of me. You've had a nice nap; would you care for a bite, or perhaps a spiritous beverage? Later we shall dine."

"That's a good one," O'Leary said bluntly. "I've been persecuting you, have I? Funny, I thought it was the other way around. Anyway, we've been all over that."

Frumpkin's eyebrows went up in a shallow mime of surprise. "Why would I, in my position, trouble to persecute such a one as you, Sir Lafayette?"

"Maybe to get even for all the times I made you look like a jackass," Lafayette hazarded, a remark which netted a comfortable chuckle.

"You mistake me, boy," the dandified Frumpkin commented before taking a sip from his glass. "I employed a number of my analogs, of course, a few of whom you encountered in your mad course. It would be foolish of you to mistake any of them for my actual Prime-line self."

"What is this place, Frumpkin?" O'Leary demanded, looking around the big room—the gray room, he realized belatedly, which he was seeing for the first time in a good light. He noted the standing bridge lamps with their fringed, orange-parchment shades, the framed rotogravures on the flowered, brownish wallpaper, and on a nearby would-be Hepplewaite side-table, an Atwater Kent radio in a walnut-stained wooden cabinet. "It looks like a set for a Nils Asther movie," he commented. "Except for that." He nodded toward the control panel.

"I chose the decor for its ambience of complacent respectability, far pleasanter than bare, functional collapsed-matter," Frumpkin replied lazily. "As for the Big Board, it is of course a necessity. And you will call me 'Lord of All'."

"I doubt it," Lafayette said. "As soon as your keepers find you, you'll be back in a padded cell."

"There's no need to be rude," the Lord of All complained. "I've told you I brought you here for a nice chat, after which we shall no doubt have agreed on a mutually satisfactory division of spheres of influence. I'm quite willing to go half-and-half with you, so long as my half is the larger." He finished his drink and put down the empty glass beside the radio, which he absent-mindedly switched on.

"Seem like to me, Brudder Andy," a resonant baritone voice said amid static, "you is jest temporaciously regusted wid de taxicab business. But when de Kingfish tell you about how we gonna redisorganize, you goin' be singin' anudda choon."

"I indulge you, boy, out of admiration for your ingenuity, no more," the Frumpkin lookalike said grandly.

"Where's Daphne?" O'Leary demanded, rising abruptly to confront his host, who stood his ground, looking a trifle uneasy.

"That silly alibi again," Frumpkin commented and flopped his arms as one despairing of reasonableness. "Think, Sir Lafayette!" he urged. "Once you've made your peace with me, you'll have second choice of all the wonders in all the worlds that are or might have been!"

O'Leary himself was surprised to see his left fist shoot out in a straight jab to the middle of the fellow's smug face. Frumpkin went down on his back, bleating. Heads turned. O'Leary saw Chuck of Chuck-and-Chick take a quick look and busy himself with lighting a cigar. Sheriff Tode took a step his way and abruptly changed his mind, pausing to engage in conversation with Mickey Jo. Her cowgirl outfit was badly stained, but her hairdo was in place. Neither looked directly at him. Only Marv came forward, and with an apologetic look at Lafayette, bent over the furious Frumpkin and helped him to his feet.

"Don't waste your sympathy on that skunk, Marv," O'Leary said disparagingly. "He's the one who's responsible for all the problems we've been having. Where've you been, anyway? I lost you in the crowd back in Mudville."

"Is that right, mister?" Marv demanded of the no longer dignified Frumpkin, who was dabbing at the blood on his lip. "Is that what you told him?" Marv insisted. Behind him, Trog was making his way forward in haste, looking distressed.

"Hold on there, Marv," he called ahead. "I thought I tole you and Omar to consider yerselfs under house arrest!" Marv turned to look coldly at his whiskery boss. "Don't push it, milord," he said in a deadly tone. Trog responded by turning aside to join a conversational group including Dr. Smith, still in her starched whites, talking to a man of oriental appearance, and Special Ed. But his eyes searched in vain for a glimpse of the Lady Henriette.

"Some guest list," he said shortly to Frumpkin when the Prime agent had resumed his position facing Lafayette but out of range of left jabs now. "It's pretty clear that you were herding me every'step of the way," Lafayette went on. "And you had these people of yours planted to intercept me. Why? I think before this farce goes any furthur, we'd better clear up that point."

"As I've already told you, dear boy," Frumpkin began in an unctuous tone, "I acknowledge your expertise; you've unleashed forces which even I"—he paused to glance toward his guests, now busily chattering again as if no episode of violence had marred the tranquillity of the gathering—"skills which I admire, and indeed wish to learn from you. Do you have a drink, lad, and let's discuss way and means."

"Where is she?" was O'Leary's only response.

Frumpkin fluttered his hands. "Pray believe me, Lafayette, I haven't the faintest idea."

O'Leary shook his head. "Nope," he said. "I don't believe you."

"I have never so much as set eyes on this Daphne person," Frumpkin said loftily.

"You jostled her coming through the door of the lab not more than an hour ago," Lafayette stated flatly. Frumpkin threw up his hands.

"Dear boy, that was the Lady Henriette in the Hill, with her serving-wench, one Betty Brassbraid."

"Sure," Lafayette agreed. "I still want to talk to her. But you seem to forget that here in your gray room you call her 'Dame Edith'."

"Wait here," Frumpkin said, his tone of command once more in working order. Without awaiting O'Leary's response, he turned and made his way briskly across the wide room. Once more, Lafayette examined the familiar faces among those present. Of all those he had encountered in his wanderings since the sudden shower in the palace garden, only Duke Bother-Be-Damned, it seemed, was nowhere to be seen.

—and Roy, O'Leary told himself. He took out the flat-walker and held it to his ear:

"... Alpha Relay, via Forward Station Ten," a tiny voice whispered. "Kindly come in, whoever you are, Raf trass spintern!"

"Raf trass spoit," Lafayette said softly. "Get Roy on the line, quick!"

A different voice responded: "This is your Plane Supervisor. May I help you?"

"Where's Roy?" Lafayette demanded.

"Kindly speak up," the supervisor said sharply. "I have in excess of ten-to-the-thirtieth Roys listed. To which do you refer?"

"OK, Slim," Roy's more audible voice cut in. "What happened? We started through, and—zap!—there I was in ultraspace, alone! But—maybe I got it! Slim, I'm glad you're OK enough to talk, but did you maybe not orient the flat-walker precisely like it says in the brochure? You gotta realize Ajax can't accept no responsibility if the unit is not used as directed. Says so right in the guarantee."

"I don't know, Roy," O'Leary came back impatiently. "But don't worry, I'm not planning to sue. Listen, every so often I get snagged by Frumpkin into a place I call the gray room. His HQ, it seems. Right now he's staging some sort of convention. Everybody's here but Bother. Can you get your strongarm squad in here to nab Frumpkin in a hurry?"

"Don't worry, Bother's OK. He's here, in fact, putting away a stack o' flapjacks higher'n me. I don't know about the squad; you're almost out o' range, Slim, right outside the whole of explored space-time! Fact is, I'm surprised we even got the voice link—" With those words, his voice dwindled amid rising static.

"See here," Frumpkin said sharply. O'Leary looked up; the Man in Black was back, confronting him in challenging fashion, two troglodytic men in waiter's togs at his side.

"I've lost patience with you," Frumpkin snapped. "You will now give me your complete cooperation, or I shall simply destroy you. Now, speak up!"

"You're a lousy liar," O'Leary told the irate autocrat. "You pretend I just stumbled around after I met you burgling the old lab—or whatever you were doing there—but it's pretty clear now I was herded every step of the way. Every time I almost broke the pattern, one of your boys or girls was on hand to nudge me back in line." O'Leary's eyes went past Frumpkin to the crowd. "Look at 'em," he added. "What is this, a convention of your hirelings?"

Frumpkin dismissed the question with a flip of his well-manicured hand. "After all, lad," he murmured unctuously, "when one can call on unlimited resources, why be stingy? It's true my cadres are extensive; but, far from docilely following my wishes, as you suggest they forced you to do, you repeatedly committed a curious act which cut across my complex pattern of causality, plunging my carefully constructed scenario into confusion! At last my experts were able to learn that it was at moments when you, ah—to employ your own curious term—'focused the Psychical Energies', that my control of Destiny itself was broken. But"—Frumpkin paused to look triumphant—"they furthur established that it was also at precisely those moments that you were vulnerable to my own Prime Directive!"

"No bull?" Lafayette said contemptuously. "Professor Schimmerkopf didn't mention that part."

"I have also investigated this Professor Doktor Hans Josef Schimmerkopf, late of the University of Leipzig and the Homeopathic Institute of Vienna, in an obscure locus now forever dissolved both into the past and into the quasinothingness of the unrealized. He and all his works no longer exist and never did!"

"Too bad," Lafayette said carelessly. "I was going to write his estate a fan letter."

"You dare to jape at this, the crucial contretemps of all the cosmos?" Frumpkin demanded savagely. "Almost I incline to believe that you are indeed no more than an ignorant blunderer with an uncanny knack for precisely that paradoxical behavior which alone can seem to set my plans at naught. I say 'seems' because of course, in the end, I shall prevail!"

"You say Prof Schimmerkopf never existed?" O'Leary queried, unmoved by Frumpkin's outburst. "That has to mean that the locus he was a part of never existed, because without him it would be a different locus. And it follows that Colby Corners never existed, nor I— since he was on record in the local library, and he changed the course of my life. And if I never existed, then ... who am I?" He glared at Frumpkin, who smiled sleekly.

"You begin to see the magnitude of the problem, lad. Your one chance is to attach your trifling destiny to the great engine of my own fate, and then to refute the unacceptable. But I'm wasting time." Frumpkin turned to wave a hand, and at once the cocktail-sipping crowd begain to drift away. O'Leary noticed Marv standing nearby. Noticing Lafayette's eye on him, Marv came over and looked curiously at Frumpkin.

"Now what, Al?" he inquired genially. "I guess this is the like showdown, eh? I heard what His Nibs here was saying, about how it was you or him. But where does that leave me?" He looked more keenly at the haughty Man in Black.

"What you got in mind for a honest fellow like myself?" he asked in an edged tone. Frumpkin waved him aside. "Later, my man," he said coolly.

While the two talked, O'Leary again put the flat-walker to his ear.

"—outside our jurisdiction, Slim," Roy's voice peeped faintly. "We got one chance: Focus the Psychical Energies one more time, and I can get a hard fix and rotate a strong-arm gang in there fast. Maybe—"

The message was interrupted as a hand grabbed Lafayette's wrist just as something swept his feet from under him. The flat-walker was wrenched away, and as Lafayette fought his way back to his feet, Frumpkin was saying:

"—my own inspection!" He was holding the Ajax device close to his face, studying it. Marv was at his side, looking anxious.

"Hmmm, yes," Frumpkin muttered. "One of the fiendish devices of Ajax, I see." He glanced up at O'Leary. "Oh, yes, Sir Lafayette," he commented. I'm well aware of the warped ingenuity of those little beasts. You'll recall that I retain in my employ one Troglouse III, a renegado, who has briefed me thoroughly on the Ajax bag of tricks. I can't tell you the trouble they've caused me. Seem to have links to high orders of reality. One day I shall deal with them as they deserve."

"In that case," a hearty voice spoke from low and behind Frumpkin, who jumped as if prodded with a pin, "you can gimme the medal now—quick, before you find out you been fired off the job." It was Sprawnroyal's bass tones. O'Leary thrust Frumpkin aside to grab the small man's calloused hand and greet him enthusiastically.

"Roy! You got through! This Frumpkin is even nuttier than I thought! Now he's talking about switching the basic planes around so that I—and Artesia, and you, and Daphne, and everything worthwhile—never existed!"

"Easy, Slim," Roy replied soberly. "It's not all bluff," he admitted. "What he's talking about is possible, theoretically. If he can reweave the lines so as to render Plane V-87 less likely than some alternate he's cooked up—then the rest follows naturally."

"Take him!" Frumpkin yelled, making a grab for Roy, who stepped aside and casually tripped the taller man as he lunged. Marv popped up from a deep chair nearby to seize Frumpkin's arm and haul him to his feet.

"I heard all that," Marv blurted. "And I, for one, got no intention o' being relegated to a unrealized status like Shorty here says. So how about it, sir?" Marv was making ineffectual efforts to assist Frumpkin to rearrange his satin dressing gown.

"Leave me alone, you cretin!" Frumpkin snarled and thrust the clumsy Marv from him. He assumed as menacing an expression as his shattered dignity allowed.

"Whose side is the big bum on, Slim?" Roy asked Lafayette in a stage whisper. "I thought he was a pal of yours—"

"He is," O'Leary confirmed, watching Marv hovering at Frumpkin's elbow. "Or I thought he was. Frankly, Marv has had me puzzled; he's stuck with me through thick and thin, I'll give him that—but once I overheard him throwing me to the dogs. Of course, he had a logical explanation."

"Sure," Marv said eagerly, giving Roy a sour look. "At the time, like I said, I hadda tell 'em sumpin. Why, Al, they were planning on stringing me up!"

"What's this 'Al' business, Slim?" Roy asked.

"He pretends to think I'm some mythical character named Allegorus," O'Leary explained. "Or maybe he's not so mythical; I met him once ..." Lafayette broke off, looking thoughtful. "It was right back at the beginning of this farce, just after I ran into Frumpkin here for the first time, in the tower. He had some errand or something he wanted me to do, but before we got around to it, things started coming apart, literally."

"Enough of this idle chatter," Frumpkin barked. "Allegorus, indeed! It's well enough known that he's a figment—a demi-corporeal pseudobeing evoked as a totem by petty minds in moments of stress—a mere superstition, nothing more."

"I still talked to him," Lafayette said quietly. Glancing past Frumpkin across the low, now nearly dark and almost deserted room, he realized that the guests had been quietly departing, switching off bridge lamps as they went. But from the shadowy corners others were emerging: small, gnarly men in pink uniforms, carrying in their hands complex apparatuses which O'Leary felt sure were weapons. Noting Lafayette's expression, Frumpkin turned to follow his gaze.

"Oh, good enough, Trog," he called brightly. "Just deploy your troops loosely here and stand fast. I expect to transfer this interview to the technical installation in a moment. Here, you!" he yelped at one stubby figure, forging in advance of the main body. "Keep back there! I told you I'm about to effect a transfer. Can't have any interference; it's a delicate technique."

"Hard lines, Bub," the Ajax man replied jauntily. "Maybe you better lay down, face-first, hands out wide, flat on the rug."

"You're not Troglouse!" Frumpkin yelled, backing a step, only to recoil when Roy jabbed him sharply in the seat with a hard thumb.

"Better do like Casper says," the Ajax rep suggested mildly, "before he forgets his training about destroying evidence and gives you a jolt with the nothing-gun." Roy turned to wink up at O'Leary. "Now we'll get a few answers out o' the sucker," he said. "Old Casper's a real curious fellow, when I tell him to be."