The Galaxy Builder (27 page)

            "Fool!" Frumpkin said in a complacent
tone. "Did you really imagine I'd permit you so easily to disrupt my
plans?"

            "I don't know anything about your dumb
plans," Lafayette countered. The Man in Black stood before him, rocking
casually on his heels, his torn and dusty uniform replaced by a crisp new one
with gleaming gold braid.

            "Your alibis will avail you naught,"
Frumpkin snapped. "My decision is made: In spite of certain minor
inconveniences it will "occasion me, I will now dissolve your entire
troublesome Plane into unrealized status." He turned abruptly and went
across to the big central panel. Lafayette kicked the closest knee, broke from
the clutch of its owner, and in two jumps was at Frumpkin's side, catching the
black-clad arm as it reached for a safe-wired switch. Before he could do more,
a gust of opaque mist wafted across his vision. He thrust Frumpkin back and
tried to push through the sudden gray mist. Unwittingly, he drew a breath as a
hand caught his arm and drew him aside. As he came clear, he released his grip
on Frumpkin, who collapsed facedown as O'Leary braced himself against the grip
on his arm.

            "Slim!" the hearty voice of
Sprawnroyal, the Ajax rep, cried. "So you finely made it! Come on, hows
about a good feed to start with, and then we can bring each other up to
date!"

            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."