The Galaxy Builder (15 page)

            He opened his 'eyes to dim light and a tall
woman standing beside the narrow cot.

            "No more mischief now, sir," she said
in a cool, melodious voice. "I'm Doctor Smith, and I want to help
you."

            "That's fine, Doctor," Lafayette
replied briskly, sitting up. The woman at once bent to rearrange his pillows to
support him in a half-erect position. "Please don't exert yourself,
sir," she said in a no-nonsense tone. "And actually I must ask you to
do nothing at all for the present; don't even think. The debriefing team will
be along in a moment to wire you up and set things to rights."

            "Wire me up?" Lafayette echoed
vaguely. "I don't think I like the sound of that."

            "Please, sir—"

            "My name's Lafayette," he stated,
feeling a vague impulse to stabilize the situation. "I've had a bad time
of it, but I'm better now, I think. Is Daphne OK? Is she here?"

            "I'm sorry, sir. The DB team will handle
all your queries. You may sleep a little now, and they'll be here." Then
she was gone with a rustle of starched whites.

-

           
Let's hold it right here,
O'Leary said
sternly to himself.
This has gone far enough. They've been herding me along
like a sheep to the slaughter. I haven't been just wandering around at will,
he
told himself with dawning comprehension.
Someone's been manipulating me— and
the time has come to break the cycle!
He rose from the Spartan hospital bed
and discovered he was clad only in a threadbare purple pajama bottom. There was
a steel locker against the wall. Inside, Lafayette found his once splendid
court suit, sadly worn and stained but freshly cleaned and pressed. He at once
checked the trick pocket. The flat-walker was still in place.

            "But that's what's been messing me
up," he said aloud. "Every time I used it, I got in deeper; so I
won't touch it again until I'm back at Ajax—or an Ajax field station."
With that decision, he felt a surge of confidence. "Now I can start
unraveling this mess," he told himself. 'It's still not too late to rescue
Daphne. But I've got no time to waste."

            He dressed quickly, then went to a window and
looked down on a city street bathed in afternoon sunlight, lined with cars
parked by shops bearing signs announcing Giant Sales and Discounts up to 70%,
and Your Credit's Good. For the first time in years, Lafayette remembered his
old life in Colby Corners as a junior draftsman at the foundry, living on a
diet of Tend-R Nood-L soup, sardines, and crackers, and saltwater taffy, his
sole indulgence—except for his scientific work, of course. And that was what
was needed now, he realized with sudden insight. The mundane bustle in the
street below seemed to him to restore a correct perspective to the mad jumble
of events of the last day or so. Now, before committing himself to another
move, it would be well to sum up, to reexamine affairs in the cold, precise
light of the scientific method. First, as he had already concluded, it was
clear that he had been manipulated, herded along from one blunder to the next.
But for what purpose? That point would have to await furthur clarification.
Basically, the thing that had been nagging at the back of his mind was the
problem of energy imbalance. Formerly, in simply shifting himself by means of
the Psychical Energies from one locus to an adjacent one, the transfer of
energy had been slight, and as had been explained to him by Nicodaeus, the
equation had been balanced by an equivalent displacement of inorganic matter at
scattered points. Thus, when he had first changed loci from Colby Corners to
Artesia, a number of small items equal in mass to his own one hundred
thirty-eight pounds had, quite unknown to him or to anyone, slipped across from
Artesia to the Corners, causing some Artesian housewife, perhaps, to wonder
what had become of her antique ginger jar, while some ragpicker in Colby
Corners had come upon a perfectly good cannister marked GINGER in an ash-can on
his regular route. A loose stone on an Artesian road might have disappeared
when no one was looking and just as unobtrusively appeared on the potholed
tarmac of the Springs Road. So that part—as had been explained to him at length
by Nicodaeus on the latter's last visit to Adoranne's court—was rational
enough. But these shift-overs he'd been making lately to loci well outside his home
widerange involved massive energy demands across wide stretches of E-space.
That fact, in turn, implied that someone, somewhere, for some reason, was
supplying the required energies. Question: who? Also, why, how, etcetera,
Lafayette reflected in frustration. His fingers, idly exploring his pocket,
encountered the angular shape of the flat-walker. Only slowly, and with a sense
of shock, did he realize what he was fingering; with sudden awe, he brought out
the waferlike device and studied it carefully, as if he had never seen it
before. It looked like nothing more than a rectangle of bluish plastic embossed
with wavy lines. Could this thing actually enable one to pass through solid
matter? Again, whence the energy supply? It was too silly, he decided, and
checked an impulse to toss it into the immaculate wastebasket beside the
window. Had he been hallucinating? The question shook him. Some people
did
hallucinate,
and if he were one of them, where did the imaginary begin? With Zoriel, or with
Doctor Anschluss and the waspish Miss Gorch, or earlier, with Shurf Tode and
Cease? Or the gray room that kept popping up? Or was it Frodolkin and his
troops who had initiated the nonobjective phase of his mental life? Or Lord
Trog—or Allegorus, the mysterious visitant to the tower? Or did it go farther
back, to Artesia itself, to Adoranne and Alain, and Lod, the two-headed giant,
or even to Daphne—dear, loyal, lovely Daphne? No! he almost yelled aloud. His
bride of ten years was no figment: of that he was sure. But where was she now?
Why had she been taken from him? Where was the gray room?

            The pattern of his manipulation was far from
clear, but a few points could be fixed firmly: He had drifted progressively
farther from the Artesian locus. Aphasia I was a recognizable analog, Aphasia
II not much different. Then, in the swamp, his attempt to find Artesia had
misfired, placing him, along with Marv, in an alternate version of Colby
Corners, in some ways much like his old home town but grossly different at the
geological level—which meant a massive shift indeed. Then the disembodied
passage through half-phase, to emerge at Prime, no doubt of another order of
reality entirely, quite outside the purview of Central. Then, once again he had
made use of the flat-walker ... How clear it was, now that he was pausing to
consider matters in depth, that the seemingly innocuous device, outré though it
was, was at the bottom of most of his trouble. He put it back in its pocket,
fully resolved not to use it again. That last time, he recalled with a shudder,
had almost finished him: thinking he was a fish—but not exactly a fish, merely
some life form indigenous to half-phase, existing weightless and intangible in
the void between worlds, a subjective experience which his mind had automatically
rationalized by concluding that he was immersed in a featureless fluid like a
fish in water. But somehow, by sheer luck, perhaps, he had been recovered from
that eerie environment, too. He remembered the descending scalpel, Fred's
immense face, then —nothing, until he woke here, in this hospitallike room,
with the view of a sane and normal street in the late spring sunshine.

-

           
And now,
he told himself firmly,
now
I'm taking over. I'm not going to be herded anymore, not going to take any more
sudden desperate measures. Not even going to try to focus the Psychical
Energies,
moments at which, he abruptly realized, he was peculiarly
susceptible to manipulation. And he would definitely not mess with the
flat-walker. Except, he hedged, perhaps to use it to communicate with Ajax.

            The decision made, he turned from the window to
ponder for a moment his next move—a move he must be quite certain was entirely
his own idea, made at his own volition and not under some pressure, subtle or
gross.

           
OK,
he agreed firmly.
That brings me
to the question of what to do now. What do they expect me to do, want me to do?
They've left me alone and ambulatory, with my clothes handy. And I'll bet the
door is conveniently unlocked. So, they think I'll do a bolt for freedom—but
I'll fool 'em. This time I'll play it smart: I'm staying.

           
At that moment, the door to the big room
opened and Doctor Smith appeared, carrying a tray rather awkwardly. Lafayette
caught a whiff of poached egg and over-boiled coffee.

            "It's time for your lunch, Mr.
O'Leary," the woman said in a tone in which he could read no fell intent.
She showed no surprise at seeing him up and dressed.

            "No, thanks," he said casually.
"Not hungry. By the way, what town is this?"

            "Why, the Institute is at Caney, Kansas,"
she replied glibly.

            "Why?" Lafayette asked bluntly.
"Why did you bring me to Caney, Kansas?"

            "You were found, Mr. O'Leary, nearly dead
of exposure and alcohol, in an alley only a block east of the Institute. A
kindly passerby brought you here, since it was the nearest facility."

            "I've never been in Kansas in my
life," Lafayette stated more firmly than his certainty warranted.
"And I don't drink—just a nice wine with dinner, perhaps, or a cold beer
on a hot afternoon."

            "Nevertheless, your body shows the ravages
of advanced alcoholism," the doctor rebutted equally firmly.

            "Uh, where's the men's room?"
Lafayette blurted.

            "You'll find a facility through that
door," she said, pointing to a brown-painted panel Lafayette had not
previously noticed. She put the tray on a table and came closer to Lafayette.
"Seven P.M. at the YW," she breathed in his ear, and turned away
before he could see her expression.

            "Thanks, Doc," Lafayette said with a
show of casualness. He went to the undersize door and opened it. A glance
inside revealed the usual plumbing. He went in and closed the door.

            "OK," he told himself. "She
expects me to break out of here—probably through the window." He eyed the
small square unglazed opening through which a brick wall opposite was visible.
" 'Seven
p.m
. at the Y', he
echoed silently. "She must think I'm the original sucker —and why
shouldn't she? I've taken every cue, so far— went along like a puppet on
strings. But no more. So, I'll just kill a few minutes here and see what they
try next."

            This decided, he felt a sense of accomplishment
which he recognized as out of proportion to his actual achievement. He
determined to take it easy, resort to no desperate measures, and to look for
the unexpected opportunity. Meanwhile, it wouldn't hurt to take a peek out that
window to check on the lay of the land. He pushed a dusty crate into position
under the window, climbed up, and looked out at a narrow slice of street
visible between corroded red bricks on the left and a slant of heavily tarred
roof on the right. An intersection was partly visible, and a drug store on the
corner. A dusty old Buick was parked on the side street, and a man stood
leaning on it, his arms folded. The man was Marv. Lafayette blinked and looked
again; there was no doubt of it. Old Marv, here, in this far-out locus! How had
he managed it? He was dressed in an anonymous suit and seemed quite at home,
gnawing a toothpick and idly gazing up toward Lafayette's vantage point. Marv's
head jerked in a mild double take. He was looking Lafayette squarely in the
eyes. He came away from the car, swiftly consulted his wristwatch, glanced
around him, and returned his gaze to O'Leary. He raised a hand and gestured a
furtive greeting. Lafayette ducked back, climbed quickly down, and without
hesitation thrust open the door and was back in the big airy room with the
narrow bed and faintly steaming tray on the table. Dr. Smith was gone.

            "Clever," Lafayette conceded.
"Just when I'd decided to play it my own way, they spring Marv on me, and
I nearly took the bait. It would have been an easy drop from that window to the
ledge, then to the adjacent roof, and no doubt all the way down I'd've found a
wide-open route. But I'm
not
taking it. So they'll have to think up
another one. But who is this 'they' I'm blaming everything on? Sounds
remarkably like paranoia. I'd better be careful what I think even." He
went across to the door the doctor had used; as he neared it he heard voices on
the other side:

            "... careful. A shock at this point, and
all our careful work could be undone. He's in a delicate condition, you must
remember, balanced on a knife-edge."

            "Sure, I know all that—but we can't just
sit on the case. You know as well as I do he'll expect expeditious
action."

            "Of course, Mel, and the first step is to
get him out of here to a safe place; so let's do it."

            Then the latch rattled and the door opened,
causing Lafayette to step quickly aside. A man whom Lafayette had never before
seen came through at a brisk pace. He paused to turn and look incuriously at
O'Leary.