The World Shuffler (16 page)

“Gladly—if I could! Wake up, numbskull! Maybe between the two of us we can do something!”

“Poo. You’re nothing but a figment. All I have to do is go back to sleep, and I’ll wake up back in Hatcher’s Crossroads, bagging groceries at Bowser’s.”

Lafayette laughed hollowly. “You remind me of a poor innocent nincompoop I used to know,” he said. “By the way, where’s this Hatcher’s Crossroads located?”

“In the Oklahoma Territory. But you wouldn’t know about that. It’s not part of this dream.”

“Oklahoma—you mean you’re from the States?”

“Oh, so you do know about the States? Well, why not! I suppose in theory you could know anything I know, eh? Well, ta-ta, I’m off to dreamland again—”

“Wait a minute,” O’Leary said urgently. “Are you saying you were brought here from the U.S.? That you’re not a native of Melange?”

“The U.S.? What’s that? And of course I’m not a native. Do I look as though I’d run around in a G-string, waving an assegai?”

“I don’t know, I can’t see in the dark. But if you come from Oklahoma, you must know what the U.S. is!”

“You don’t mean the U.C.?”

“What’s that?”

“The United Colonies, of course. But look, be a good imaginary character and let me catch a few winks now, all right? This was all rather lark at first, but I’m getting tired of it, and I have a hard day ahead tomorrow. Mr. Bowser’s running a special on pickled walnuts, and the whole county will be there—”

“Try to get this through your thick skull,” Lafayette snarled. “You’re here, in Melange, like it or not! It’s real—whatever real is! If they hang you or cut your head off, you suffer the consequences, get it? Now, look, we have to talk about this. It sounds as if you were shanghaied here the same way I was—”

“I never knew my subconscious could be so persuasive. If I didn’t know you were just a subjective phenomenon, I’d swear you were real.”

“Look, let’s skip that part for now. Just act as if I were real. Now, tell me: how did you get here?”

“Easy. A troop of Prince Krupkin’s cavalry grabbed me by the back of the neck and threw me in here. Satisfied?”

“I mean before that—when you first arrived—”

“Oh, you mean when I focused the cosmic currents?” Lafayette’s cellmate laughed hollowly. “If I’d known what I was getting into, I’d have stuck to my tinned kippers and jelly doughnuts. But no, I had to go intellectually questing, searching for the meaning of it all. And then I had the bad luck to stumble on Professor Hozzleshrumphs’s book, Modern Spellbinding, or Self-Delusion Made
Easy.
I tried out his formulae, and—well, one second I was in my room at Mrs. Ginsberg’s, and the next—I was in the middle of a vast desert, with the sun glaring in my face.”

“Yes? Go on.”

“Well, I started hiking east—that way the sun wasn’t in my eyes—and after a while I reached the hills. It was cooler there, and I found a stream, and some nuts and berries. I kept on, and came out in a tilled field, near a town. I found a lunch counter, and just as I was about to take my first bite of grilled Parmesan cheese on rye, the local police force arrived. They took me in to the prince, and he offered me a job. It all seemed pretty jolly, so I went along. I was doing all right, too—until I got a look at the Lady Andragorre.”

“Lady Andragorre? What do you know about Lady Andragorre?” Lafayette barked.

“I have to keep reminding myself this is just a dream” the unseen voice said agitatedly. “Otherwise, I’d be tearing my hair out!” Lafayette heard a deep breath drawn and let slowly out. “But it’s all a dream, an illusion. Beverly really isn’t in the clutches of that slimy little Krupkin; I haven’t really been double-crossed and thrown in a cell. These aren’t real hunger pangs I feel. And if you’d just shut up and go away, I could get back to my career at Bowser’s!”

“Let’s get back to Lady Andragorre!”

“Wouldn’t I love to? Those sweet, soft lips, that curvey little frame—”

“Why, you—” Lafayette caught himself. “Listen to me, whoever you are! You’ve got to face up to reality! You have to help me! Right now Lady Andragorre’s in the hands of these lechers—and I do mean hands—”

“Just last week Mr. Bowser was saying to me: Lorenzo, my boy, you have a great future ahead in the provisions game ...”

“Lorenzo! Then you’re the one that sold out Lady Andragorre!” Lafayette lunged in the direction from which the voice came, slammed into the wall, acquiring a new contusion to add to those already marring his head. “Where are you?” he panted, making grabs at the air. “You dirty, scheming, double-crossing, kidnapping, conniving snake-in-the-grass!”

“What are you getting so excited about?” the voice yelped from the opposite corner. “What’s Bever—I mean Lady Andragorre to you, you jailbird?”

“Jailbird, eh?” Lafayette panted, stalking the detestable voice. “You’re a swell one to talk, sitting here in your cell—” He jumped, almost got a grip on an arm, saw stars as a fist connected with his eye.

“Keep your distance, you!” the voice barked. “Troubles enough I didn’t have, they had to toss a homicidal maniac in with me!”

“You lured her out of the city with your sweet talk, just so you could turn her over to her aunt! I mean to the old bat who was fronting for Krupkin!”

“That’s what Rodolpho thought—but once I’d seen her, I had no intention of taking her there, of course—not that it’s any of your business!”

“Where were you taking her? To some little love-nest of your own?”

“As a matter of fact, yes, big nose. And I’d have made it, too, if something hadn’t set that gang of mounted police swarming through the woods. We had to run for it, and as luck would have it, that long-legged sheik, Lord Chauncy, was out hunting and nabbed us.”

“Oh. Well, maybe it’s just as well. At least here she has a decent bed.”

“Oh? What do you know about Bever—I mean, Lady Andragorre’s bed?”

“Plenty. I just spent an exciting half-hour under it.”

“You did say—under it?”

“Exactly. I overheard her fending off the advances of that Chauncy character. I had my flying carpet—I mean my Mark IV personnel carrier— waiting right outside on the balcony. Just as I was about to whisk her away, the palace guard arrived.”

“Yes, I warned Krupkin to keep an eye on Chauncy. Looks like they got there just in time, too!”

“Just too soon! I had her in my arms when they burst in on us—”

“Why, you—” An unseen body hurtled past O’Leary; he thrust out a foot and had the satisfaction of hooking an ankle solidly. The resultant crash went far to assuage the pain of his swelling eye.

“Listen, Lorenzo,” Lafayette said, “there’s no point in our flailing away at each other in the dark. Apparently we both have an interest in the welfare of Lady Andragorre. Neither of us wants to see her in Krupkin’s clutches. Why don’t we work together until she’s safe and then settle our differences?”

“Work together, ha,” Lafayette’s unseen cellmate muttered from a point near the floor. “What’s to work? We’re penned in, empty-handed, in the dark. Unless,” he went on, “you have something up your sleeve?”

“They cleaned me out,” Lafayette said. “I had some dandy items: a two-way intercom sword, a blackout cloak, a fast-key, a flat-walker ...” He paused, quickly felt for his belt. It was still in place. He unbuckled it, pulled it free, felt over the back, found the zipper tag there, pulled it.

“Hold everything, Lorenzo,” he said tensely. “Maybe we’re in business.”

“What are you talking about?” the other came back in his pettish voice. “Swords? Keys? What we need is a charge of dynamite, or a couple of stout crowbars.”

“I may have something better,” Lafayette said, extracting a flat two-inch by one-inch rectangle of what felt like flexible plastic from its hiding place under the zipper. “They missed the flat-walker.”

“What’s a flat-walker?”

“According to Pinchcraft, it generates a field which has the effect of modifying the spatial relationships of whatever it’s tuned to, vis-á-vis the exocosm. It converts any one-linear dimension into the equivalent displacement along the perpendicular volumetric axis, at the same time setting up a harmonic which causes a reciprocal epicentric effect, and—”

“How would you go about explaining that to an ordinary mortal?” Lorenzo interrupted.

“Well, it reduces one of the user’s physical dimensions to near zero, and compensates by a corresponding increase in the density of the matter field in the remaining quasi-two-dimensional state.”

“Better try the idiot version.”

“It makes you flat.”

“How is wearing a corset going to help us?” Lorenzo yelped.

“I mean really flat! You can slide right between the molecules of ordinary matter—walk through walls, in other words. That’s why it’s called a flat-walker.”

“Good grief, and I was practically outside, sneaking up on that long-legged son of a Schnauzer who pitched me in here.”

“That’s the spirit! Now stand fast, Lorenzo, and I’ll try this thing out. Let’s see, Pinchcraft said to orient it with the long axis coinciding with my long axis, and the smooth face parallel to the widest plane of my body, or vice versa ...”

“I suppose this was all part of their torture plan,” Lorenzo muttered, “to lock me in with a mental case. I should have known better than to get my hopes up. Poor Beverly. With me put away, there’s no one to help her. She’ll hold out for as long as she can, but in the end the ceaseless importuning of her captor combined with the prospects of ruling this benighted principality will erode her will, and—”

“I read the same book,” Lafayette said. “It was lousy. How about bottling up your pessimism while I conduct a test.” Lafayette fingered the flat-walker, found the small bump at the center, and pressed it.

Nothing happened. He peered disappointedly into the surrounding blackness.

“Damn!” Lafayette said with feeling. “But I guess that would have been too easy. We’ll have to think of something else. Listen, Lorenzo: how high is this room? Maybe there’s a hatch in the ceiling, and if one of us stood on the other’s shoulders, we could reach it.” He stood on tiptoes and reached as far overhead as he could, but touched nothing. He jumped, still found no ceiling.

“How about it?” he snapped. “Do you want to climb up on my shoulders, or shall I get on yours?”

There was no answer. Even the mice had stopped rustling.

“Speak up, Lorenzo! Or have you gone back to sleep?” He moved across toward the other’s comer, feeling for the wall. After he had taken ten steps, he slowed, advancing cautiously. After five more steps, he halted.

“That’s funny,” he said in the circumambient darkness. “I thought the cell was only ten paces wide ...”

He turned and retraced his steps, counting off fifteen paces, then went on another five, ten, fifteen steps. Abruptly, blinding light glared in his eyes. He blinked, squinting at what appeared to be a wall of featureless illumination, like the frosted glass over a light fixture. As he turned, the wall seemed to flow together; lines and flecks and blots of color appeared, coalesced into a normal though somewhat distorted scene: a dim-lit corridor, glass-walled, glass-floored, lined by heavy doors of black glass.

“I’m outside the cell!” he blurted. “It worked! Lorenzo—!” He turned, saw the walls expand as he did, stretching out into featurelessness, like a reflection in a convex mirror.

“Must be some effect of two dimensionality,” he murmured. “Now, let’s see—what direction did I come from?”

Squinting, he stepped hesitantly forward; the glare winked out to total darkness. He took fifteen paces and halted.

“Lorenzo,” he hissed. “I made it!”

There was no answer.

“Oh—he probably can’t hear me—or I can’t hear him—with this gadget turned on ...” Lafayette pressed the deactivating switch. There was no apparent change, except for the almost imperceptible sounds of moving air—and a muffled sob.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, buck up,” Lafayette snapped. “Crying won’t help!”

There was a startled intake of air.

“Lafe?” a familiar voice whispered. “Is it really you?”

Lafayette sniffed garlic? “Swinehild!” he gasped. “How did you get here?”

“Y-you told me not to follow you,’’ Swinehild was saying five minutes later, having enjoyed a good cry while O’Leary patted her soothingly. “But I watched the gate and seen you come through. Happened there was a horse tied in front of a beer joint, so I ups and takes off after you. The feller on the ferry showed me which way you went. When I caught up with you, you was smack in the middle of a necktie party—”

“It was you that yowled like a panther!”

“It was all I could think of in a hurry.”

“You saved my life, Swinehild!”

“Yeah. Well, I beat it out of there, and next thing I knew I was lost. I spent some time wandering around, and then my horse shied at something and tossed me off in a berry bush. When I crawled out of that, here was this old lady sitting on a stump, lighting up a cigar. I was so glad to see a human face, I waltzed right over and said how-do. She jumped like she’d set on a cactus and give me a look like I was somebody’s ghost. ‘Good Lord,’ she says. ‘Incredible! But after all—why not?’ I was just starting to ask her if she’d seen the big bird or whatever that’d spooked my critter, and she outs with a tin can with a button on top and jams it in my face, and I get a whiff of mothballs, and that’s all I know for a while.”

“I believe I know the lady in question,” Lafayette said grimly. “That’s three scores I have to settle with her—if not more.”

“After that I had some crazy dreams about flying through the air. I woke up in a nice room with a smooth-looking little buzzard that must of been the old dame’s brother or something; they favored a lot. He asked me a lot of screwy questions, and I try to leave and he grabs me, and naturally, I swat him a couple and the next thing I know a strong-arm squad is bum’s-rushing me down here.” Swinehild sighed. “Maybe I shouldn’t of been so fast with that right hook—but the slob had cold hands. But I should of known I didn’t have to worry. I knew you’d find me, Lafe.” Her lips nuzzled his ear.

“By the way,” she whispered, “I brought the lunch. How about a nice hunk o’ sausage and cheese? It’s a little crumbly—I been carrying it tucked in my bodice—”