The Galaxy Builder (8 page)

            "Ulp," Iron-Head said blurrily, using
both hands now.

           
Oh, boy,
Lafayette said to himself,
feeling a surge of enthusiasm.
It's just like the old days, like the time
Count Alain was trying to keep me from getting to know Adoranne. I'm back in
business!

           
"Hey, Mike," George said,
emerging into view from the underbrush with his unshaved jaws working hard and
holding in his unwashed paw a vast sandwich minus one sizable crescent.

            "Wanna bite o' my
sardine-peaner-butter-and-ba-nana samidge?" he inquired, offering the
construction, the edges of which oozed ketchup and mayonnaise—or possibly blood
and brains, Lafayette reflected, averting his eyes. Iron-Head passed him at a
trot, bound for the shelter of a raggedly overgrown hibiscus hedge whence there
emanated almost at once sounds reminiscent of a brontosauras in labor, combined
with the eruption of a small volcano. As Frodolkin stared concernedly after his
stricken minion, Lafayette unobtrusively edged off toward the vine-grown and
mildew-stained tower still, surprisingly, looming above the trees against the clear
morning sky. He was halfway there when Marv's voice overtook him.

            "Hey, where ya goin', boss? Not back inside
the Dread Tower, huh? I mean, I been inside wunst and got out in one piece—I
ain't innerested in, like, tempting fate and all by venturin there again!"

            "Certainly, Marv," O'Leary replied
firmly. "That's where the action is. Come on." Even as he spoke,
O'Leary heard his voice take on a hollow, echoic quality. Mist was settling in,
blurring things, and again he saw the gray room around him. Frumpkin rose from
an overstuffed chair, and at once Lafayette grabbed his arm, no longer clad in
coarse gray, he noticed, but in the elegant silver-trimmed black he had worn in
the Tower.

            "Where's Daphne?" O'Leary demanded.
Frumpkin jerked his arm free and spoke to someone out of sight behind O'Leary.
He heard a movement, ducked too late, and fell endlessly; he struck hard, and
the light of day glared around him.

            "Grab them, lads!" Frodolkin's command
cracked like a whip. Lafayette turned as Marv hurried back the way he had come,
giving a wide berth to George who was advancing supporting Iron-Head Mike, who
came protesting. As they approached, O'Leary stepped close to Mike.

            "You may have an iron head," he said,
"but I'll bet you've got a glass gut." He feinted a jab to the
midriff; the big fellow staggered back, hands extended, fingers spread as if to
fend off an advancing juggernaut.

            "Have a heart, pal," he groaned.
"I ain't in my best form right now, OK? So maybe I'll give ya a break this
time, see? I'll just play like I din't hear him."

            As Lafayette eased around the giant and
continued quickly across the broken flagstones to the no-longer-collapsed
doorway, Marv caught his arm. He turned to shake him loose, and from behind him
an iron clamp closed on his shoulder, yanked him inside, and dropped him. The
door slammed and he was in darkness.

            The darkness lightened and he caught a glimpse
of the wide, featureless gray room. Daphne stood a few feet away, dressed in a
gown of pale yellow Lafayette had never before seen. He croaked her name. She
turned, seemed to look through him, and walked away to be lost in dimness.
Frumpkin hurried up. "This won't do, you know, my boy," he said in
mild reprimand. "We must come to terms."

            O'Leary knocked the Man in Black aside and
hurried after Daphne, but there was only darkness around him now.

            "Come back here, you vandal!"
Frumpkin's frantic voice shouted after him. "You'll ruin everything!"

            "It occurred to me, my boy," the
resonant voice of Allegorus said from the gloom, "that you'd be in need of
a trifle of assistance about now." There was a scratching sound, and light
flared. The tall figure of the mysterious Primary agent loomed over O'Leary,
holding a candlestick in one hand. With the other, still as hard as an iron
clamp, he hauled Lafayette to his feet.

            "Come along, lad," he ordered curtly.
"We have work to do—and not much time to do it in."

            "I was sure you'd have second thoughts, my
boy," Allegorus went on expansively, "when you realized what you'd
blundered into out there."

            "I thought the tower was collapsing,"
Lafayette said. "In fact, I
know
it was collapsing. How'd it get
put back together so quick?"

            "A mere temporal faultline,
Lafayette," Allegorus replied soothingly. "For a moment there, in
transit to Aphasia II, you were occupying a locus in which the tower happened
to be falling as a result of all the probability stresses set up by current
events centering on the lab."

            "What about the lab?" Lafayette
demanded, feeling a sudden stab of panic. "Is it still intact?"

            "No fear, lad. As I told you earlier, the
volume of space-time occupied by the installation has been thoroughly
stabilized; in some loci, where the tower itself has fallen, it appears to
float unsupported in thin air, a circumstance which is helpful both in
rendering it inaccessible to curious locals and engendering the aura of
supernatural dread which you've encountered here in embryonic form."

            "I just came back to get a few things
straight," Lafayette demurred, but he followed his rescuer up the
rubble-littered stairway. "By the way, what
did
I blunder into? It
seems there's been a change of administration out there in the last few
minutes."

            "That, my dear boy, is the least of the
changes which have occurred," Allegorus replied patronizingly.

            "Let's hold it right here," Lafayette
said, and halted. "Until we clear up a few things. And I'm definitely not
your dear boy. Anytime someone starts calling me 'dear boy', I know I'm being
set up for something. Why not come right out and tell me what it is? I might
even volunteer. And what do you know about a big gray room where Frumpkin's
keeping Daphne?"

            Allegorus, three steps above, turned to face
him. "Lafayette," he said almost kindly, "I have no wish to
delude or confuse you, but the situation in which we find ourselves is one of
the most extreme gravity, aggravated, I regret to say, by your own hasty
actions since you arrived here."

            "Sure, you mentioned the entropic
disjunction. Now tell me what it means," Lafayette demanded grumpily.
"Maybe we'd better hurry on up and just make sure the lab is still
there," he suggested, edging past Allegorus.
Especially the phone,
he
was assuring himself urgently.
The phone is still working.

           
"You're well aware, Lafayette, of
the manifold nature of what we choose to call 'reality', Allegorus
pontificated. "What is not so generally realized is that the laminar
paratemporal structure is more fragile than is at first evident. You found you
were able, of course, quite voluntarily to shift your personal ego-focus from
one plane to an adjacent one by a mere effort of will, which quite clearly is
only a slight extension of the inherent faculty of all matter to coexist on
multiple levels, shifting freely from one to another under pressure of
circumstance. But it is just there, at the question of circumstantial
pressures, that the crux of our problem lies. You see," Allegorus
continued less glibly, seating himself on the step and warming to his subject,
"when circumstantial forces are modified on a sufficiently wide scale, it
is not the individual who slips across the interplanar gap, but the locus
itself, this being the principle of the Focal Referent, a device with which you
are familiar. Vast events on a cosmic scale can equally exert such pressures.
And when such an event is triggered out-of-matrix by a freak occurrence, whole
categories of foci can suffer dissubstantiation, while in accordance with
Newton's well-known law, commensurate changes of equal and opposite scope bring
unrealized foci into substantive status. It appears, Lafayette, that is what
has happened. The ramifications are too complex to consider in any detail. The
least of such repercussions is the realization of this bundle of defective foci
known locally as Aphasia, replacing in the grand scheme the legitimate Artesian
bundle, and relegating the latter to the void of that which might have been."

            O'Leary jumped up. "You can't pin that one
on me," he yelled. "I told you, I was just sitting on a bench with
... uh ..." Lafayette paused, frowning. "Anyway, all of a sudden it
was raining, and from then on everything went to pot.
I
didn't do
anything!"

            "You see, already those identities which
have been relegated to nothingness fade from your memory," Allegorus
pointed out. " 'Daphne' was the name which escaped you just now, by the
way. Now, I want you to think carefully, Lafayette. Precisely what did you say
and do—and even think—as you sat on the bench? Try. This may be of monumental
importance."

            "Nothing," Lafayette said defensively.
"We were just admiring the stars—"

            "Any specific star?" Allegorus cut in
quickly.

            "No! I mean, well, maybe. It was in Boötes,
near the Great Bear, Ursa Major. I was just thinking bears don't have tails,
and that it looked more like a duck—or it would if it had another star for the
beak."

            "Lafayette," Allegorus said in a
stricken tone, "you didn't do—actually
do
anything? I mean to say,
it was no more than an idle thought, eh?"

            "I just played around with the idea of
moving a nearby star over to make the beak, as I said."

            Allegorus leaped up and slapped his forehead
with a crack like a pistol shot. "That's it! The Great Unicorn! Greenwich
was right! The E.D. does emanate from the vicinity of M-51!"

            As O'Leary was about to voice his impatience
with the renewed spate of nonsense he had once again received in response to
his request for a simple explanation, he felt the stone tip and shake beneath
him. A block of rough-cut masonry fell from the ceiling, just missing his left
foot. Allegorus seized his arm, tugging him upward.

            "Into the lab, man!" he cried, as more
stone fragments rained down and the stair bucked under him like a flatbed at
speed on a gravel road.

-

            Frumpkin's frantic face seemed to be swimming,
disembodied, in gelatinous mist.

            "Stop now!" he yelled. "This will
avail you nothing, O'Leary! And if you expect to see Daphne again—" His
voice ceased in mid-word and Lafayette caught a fleeting glimpse of Daphne's
face, her hair in disorder, her eyes wide with fear. He reached for her, but
there was only mist and dust and a deep rumbling underfoot. The powerful grip
on his arm urged him upward.

            "This is no time for wool-gathering,
Lafayette!" Allegorus' resonant voice shouted as from a distance. With an
effort, O'Leary focused his vision on the breaking stair-slab underfoot, and
managed to leap over it before it fell. Allegorus steadied him on his feet.

            "It happened again!" O'Leary shouted
over the rumble of falling stone. Allegorus hurried him on.

            They paused on the landing to catch their
breath, fending off a rain of gravel.

            "I thought you said the tower didn't really
collapse!" Lafayette remonstrated.

            "Oh, it collapsed, Lafayette, it collapsed
indeed—in a wide belt of loci into which we have no business straying just now.
I fear we've not yet felt all the repercussions of your folly."

            "My folly, nothing!" Lafayette yelled.
"Let's get out of here!"

            "The abnormal density gradient in Boötes
was first noted some decades ago," Allegorus said a bit breathlessly as
Lafayette urged him up the disintegrating stair. "A clear case of a
collapsed Schrodinger function on a vast scale, but as it was extragalactic in
origin, nothing was done. Then, mere hours ago—but you know all about
that."

            "All about
what!"
O'Leary
yelled.

            ."Consider for a moment, lad," Allegorus
urged quietly, thrusting Lafayette toward the plank door to the lab.
"Refresh your memory on the basics of quantum mechanics."

            "I never got around to the higher
physics," Lafayette protested. "I was too hung up with
Getting
Into Radio Now,
and
How to Speak Spanish Without Actually Trying ,
and
Auto Repair Made Easy,
and continental-style techniques of fencing, and
my synthetic rubber experiments, and making sardine sandwiches."

            "A full schedule, without doubt,"
Allegorus commiserated.

            "If you knew how bad I hated those sardine
sandwiches!" Lafayette said bitterly. "I liked taffy OK, up until I
got myself stranded in the desert with nothing else to eat."

            "Yours has been an adventurous
existence," Allegorus agreed. "But just now we'd best take steps to
ensure the present Adventure is not permitted to deteriorate into a Terrible
Experience." Then they were through the door and in the comparative calm
of the old laboratory, though the floor still vibrated underfoot. The walls,
Lafayette noted, were now decorated with zebra-hide shields, voodoo masks,
stone-tipped spears, a moth-eaten lion's head, and gaudy posters advertising a
weekend tour to tropical Antarctica. He pointed out the changed decor to
Allegorus, who waved it away. "A shift in locus of a few parameters can
often produce extensive superficial modification. Not to fear, my boy. Our link
to Central remains secure."