The Galaxy Builder (16 page)

            "You're all ready," he commented.
"Good. We're a bit early, but no matter."

            The other man busied himself closing the door,
and it was some moments before Lafayette caught a clear look at his warty face,
which he recognized at once as that of Fred, one of the two giant faces from
the hallucination about being hooked like a fish.

            "It's good to see a familiar face,
Fred," Lafayette said glibly. "There are a few points I wish you'd
clear up for me. First, where was I when you and Les found me?"

            Fred gave Lafayette an astonished look, then
turned to his colleague: "Hasn't this subject received initial
conditioning?"

            "Well, as to that..." Mel hesitated.
"You recall this is a special case, referred in by Number One
personally."

            "Say, fellows, if you'll excuse me,"
Lafayette cut in heedlessly. "I think I'd better see to my tropical fish.
See you soon. Ta." He jostled past Fred, still hovering in the doorway and
set off briskly down a long, well-lit corridor.

            "One moment, there!" Fred's
authoritative voice rang out belatedly. Lafayette ignored it and went through a
door on the left marked 'Private. No Entry', and found himself at the top of a
steep flight of gray concrete steps with a rusted handrail improvised of
two-inch I.D. galvanized pipe. He went down three steps at a time until he
heard feet on the landing he had just vacated, accompanied by Fred's hoarse
cry: "Stop, there!"

            As O'Leary grabbed the newel to whirl around the
next turn, he felt a sudden vertigo, as if he had spun around and around ...

            The gray room again, Lafayette realized in
frustration. Still, perhaps it was as good a hidey-hole as any—if he was really
here and not just dreaming. He tried a step forward, found the faded rug
normally firm underfoot. Neither Frumpkin nor Daphne was in sight. The big
panel was off to the right, a trifle dim through the curiously semi-opaque air.
He went to it and on impulse threw a large knife-switch marked MAIN STAGE ON
OFF. As it slammed home, the dimness seemed to flicker for a moment, and at
once Frumpkin's hoarse voice rang out. "No! Get away from that!"

            Quickly, Lafayette opened and closed other
switches at random, noting no effect other than a busy blinking among the idiot
lights on the panel.

            "Look here," Frumpkin said more
calmly, from near at hand now. "I'll... make a concession," he
offered. "Stop now and there's no great mischief done, except perhaps for
a few relatively minor astronomical oddities, the odd meteor, that sort of
thing. Stop your sabotage at once, and I shall arrange for a retroaction in the
case of Henriette. What say? Is it a gentleman's agreement?"

            O'Leary glanced around at the renegade, looking
haggard now, his once immaculate uniform dusty and rumpled.

            "I don't know any Henriette,"
Lafayette said coldly, "and I wouldn't make a deal with you anyway. I
don't trust you, you slimy little toad."

            "Very well! Beverly, then, or Androgorre,
or possibly Cynthia; whatever you choose to call her: the female upon whom
you've anchored your defense, as young fellows will do. You're a fool. She sold
you out at once when I mentioned the furs and jewels and other trifles she'd
possess as a willing collaborator. Don't be a fool, O'Leary! Throw in with me
and end this needless contest! There's plenty for us both in all the worlds of
if!"

            "If you knew how silly you sounded,"
Lafayette told Frumpkin, "you'd blush purple. Now bring Daphne here, right
now, or I'll have to close the big one marked "PROGRAM DUMP."

            "Certainly, lad, whatever you say; but
she'll be disappointed, just you watch! Kindly just step back from the panel a
trifle. And why here? You'll be trapped."

            O'Leary put a hand on the DUMP switch. "Get
going," he ordered. "You've got ten seconds."

            "No! I mean, of course!" Frumpkin
gabbled. "But it will take at least half a minute! Do nothing hasty, Mr.
O'Leary!" Frumpkin backed away, still gibbering, then turned and ran,
disappearing in the dimness. The room seemed to tilt, then began to slide sideways.
Lafayette clung to a convenient post as the room whirled around him. Now he was
leaping down narrow concrete steps, feeling dizzy; he staggered, caught
himself, went on, down, down, into dusty daylight.

            Lafayette reached another landing and whirled
through a wire-glass door into a narrow foyer with elevator doors.
I'll ask
all the questions later,
he promised himself, and punched a button at
random; a moment later feet clattered hastily past the door behind him; then
the door to his left whooshed open and Lafayette stepped in among fat ladies
and a spidery old fellow carrying a paper-wrapped package.

            "Come on, ain't got all the day," the
old boy said in a ratchety voice.

            "Sorry I'm late, sir," Lafayette
replied diffidently. "Want me to take over now?" He eased the big
flat package from the oldster's hands and glanced at the address:

            Global Presentation, A.G., 113 Bayberry Bldg,
Suite B. Attn: Dr. Glovewelt.

            "Say, that's square of you, fellow,"
the elderly courier cried, exercising his arm in exaggerated mime of severe
cramping. "Goes on
my
ticket, o' course," he added.
"After all, I'm the one signed for it."

            "Hurry back and tell 'em you were mugged in
the park," Lafayette suggested. "Just in case."

            "Hey," the septuagenarian protested.
"You
will
exercise due care and all like it says, won't you,
fella?"

            "Count on me, Pop," Lafayette
reassured him; as the car stopped and the doors jolted open, he extracted
himself from the plump matrons and headed for the door marked Tire Stair—Emergency
Only.'

            After an interminable descent, Lafayette saw the
glow of daylight below and soon reached a littered floor with a big blue
cold-drink machine, and stepped out into a narrow alley. He turned right and
quickly emerged on the street he had seen from his room. Marv was no longer in
sight, but Lafayette went across anyway and meandered casually to the corner
where he had seen his erstwhile comrade. He found nothing but a candy-bar
wrapper to indicate that anyone had loitered there. His eye was caught by a
neon sign reading COLD BEER glowing in a dusty window across the narrow street.
He started across, adroitly dodging a cab which took an abrupt right turn,
nearly grazing his shins, and pushed through the heavy plate-glass door into a
dim interior redolent of generations of slopped-over beers. He took a table and
two deep breaths before a large man in an apron like a four-master's tops'l
over an expansive paunch bellied up to the table, shifted a toothpick in a
meaty face, and said, "You want sumpin'?"

            "Why, no," Lafayette said seriously.
"Actually I just stepped in to get out of the blizzard." He had
dumped his package on the table before him. Now he stripped off the tape and
tore away the brown wrapper, exposing an inner wrapping, removed that and was
looking at a stack of fourteen-by-twenty-two glossies. The top print, in gaudy
color, showed an ornately decorated interior, all red-and-white marble and gold
wainscoting. He shuddered and examined the figures in the foreground. One,
standing in advance of the others, was undoubtedly Frumpkin, in black no
longer. He was wearing a species of brocaded toga, somewhere between a pope's
robes and Roman senator's bedsheet. To his left was Daphne, looking relatively
drably clad in a gown of shimmering silver. The others were strangers, except
for a fellow who looked remarkably like Marv occupying a pew for one, raised
above floor level in the background.

            The other prints showed other angles of the same
ceremony, except for the last, which showed a gold-uniformed Frumpkin standing
in a stiff Napoleon pose amid the ruins of what seemed to be the same rococo
hall.

            The big man was still hovering. He shot a glance
at the translucent window with
REEB DLOC
on it, and muttered. "Wise
guy, hah? I got a good mind to throw you right back out in your own snowdrift,
crum-bum, you get smart with me, which I own this here dump." He reached
for O'Leary's collar with a hairy arm bigger than most peoples' leg. Lafayette
dodged casually, fixed a steely gaze on the red-rimmed eyes of the
owner-bouncer.

           
"Raf tras spintern,"
he said
distinctly.
"Raf tras spoit."

-

           
The big fellow checked his grab and
rearranged the salt and pepper shakers and paper napkin dispenser instead.
"Whyn't you say so?" he demanded, then straightened up, looking over
O'Leary's head. "Sorry, sir. Been on-station too long, I guess. Kinda
forgot the routine. You wanna wait right here, I'll have a contact man here in
a sec." He backed away from the Presence, then fled.

            "I see you and Special Ed are old
pals," a chipper feminine voice spoke up at O'Leary's ear. He jumped, then
turned to see a small dark-haired girl with a neat figure in a tight
electric-blue dress. She had a pretty face, marred by an excess of eyelash goo
and an oversize slash of gore-red lip rouge. She took the seat opposite him and
dumped a wicker handbag the size of a small suitcase on the table, shoving the
photographs aside.

            "Hi," she went on breathlessly.
"I'm Mickey Jo. You sure put the fear into old Ed, all right. Who are ya?
Ain't seen you around here before, I don't think."

            "Actually," O'Leary said carefully,
assessing this new player moved onto the board, "I've never been here
before."

            "New on the job?" Mickey Jo frowned in
sympathetic inquiry.

            "Not
on
the job," Lafayette
replied. "Just trying to find Daphne and go home."

            "What's Daphne?" the girl asked.

            "Not 'what', Lafayette corrected. "
'Who'. She's a very beautiful young woman, and my wife."

            "If that's a hint to me to take off,"
Mickey Jo said regretfully, "I get it. Just sat down to rest the dogs,
anyway. Well, nice meeting you, Mr ..."

            "Brown," he supplied. "Lafayette
Brown.
Sir
Lafayette Brown in fact. Don't go. I wasn't hinting. I never
hint. I come right out and say things."

            Mickey Jo hesitated. "If you're sure
..."

            "I'm sure," Lafayette stated firmly,
realizing he meant it. "Frankly, I'm lonely. Stay and talk to me. Have a
drink?"

            The girl tossed her head half-defiantly,
half-decisively. She resumed her seat and at once emitted a short, piercing
whistle, directed at the proprietor still hovering in the background. He
hurried over.

            "Draw two, Ed," Mickey Jo ordered
crisply. "The
real
stuff, not that Milwaukee soda water."

            "Well, Mick, you know I always serve
nothin' but the best to my prime customers," Ed said in a hurt tone. He
made a ritual dab at the tabletop with a gray rag and departed at a trot, to
return at once with two sudsy schooners.

            "Now," Mickey Jo said comfortably,
"tell me all about this Daphne dame—excuse me—your wife, I mean. I suppose
she's one o' these classy broads which she don't ever let nothing slip—or slip
past, eh, sir?"

            "Just call me Laff," Lafayette said
tonelessly. "You remind me of a girl who used to call me that."

            "Laugh? That's a heck of a name, no
offense," the girl commented between drags on her tankard. O'Leary tried
his beer and found it to be an excellent, nutty brew. He took a long, healing
gulp and his morale improved at once. Outside, he noticed, it was almost
twilight.

            "Daphne and I were sitting in the palace
garden, just chatting about old times," Lafayette began his recital,
"and I happened to be looking at the stars; noticed if you changed things
a little the so-called Great Bear would look a lot like a unicorn or something.
So ..." he paused. "So I just twiddled with it a little, without any
intention whatever of tampering, you understand— and the next thing I knew we
were in the middle of a cloudburst. We ran for it—and somehow got separated. I
mean, there was only one door she could have gone through, and it led
nowhere—or only to the stairs to the Dread Tower, I mean. I went up and ran
into a couple of sharpies from Central, who tried to kidnap me. But I forgot:
before that, I was grabbed by a couple of thugs named Marv and Omar and dragged
into the presence of Lord Trog. He told me I was in Aphasia and nobody had seen
Daphne. And the palace was in ruins. You see, it was
almost
Artesia;
just the same, except nothing was the same—if you know what I mean."

            "I'm sorry, Laugh, I don't—see what you
mean, I mean," Mickey Jo responded. "It sounds like you been hit on
the dome once too often, maybe. So let's forget all that, and just talk about
us."