Chapter Twenty-One

 

            "What it boils down to," Bother was saying after hours of intense discussion, "is a contest of strength between the miscreant Frumpkin or his master, Marv, and you, Sir Lafayette—they with their vast technical expertise and all the potency of the apparatus to which Frumpkin is linked, and you with your native naiveté, your simple faith in some abstraction you think of as 'right', your single-minded devotion to this fair lady, for the which I blame you not, begad!"

 

            "What contest?" O'Leary demanded. "He's been sitting on the floor bragging about all the terrible things he's going to do, and I've been standing here wondering what I could do about it." His agonized gaze went to Daphne who, comforted by Betty, had been weeping.

 

            "What happened, Daph?" Lafayette implored her. "How did I lose you? You were right in front of me."

 

            "Two men," Daphne replied, calming herself. "These two villeins." She looked contemptuously at Frumpkin and at Marv, who was still protesting his innocence. "They fell upon me as I gained the terrace, threw a dirty cloth over my head, and dragged me away, then left me in a thicket. I heard you call, my Lafayette, but my own cries seemed remote, even to me. Then, later, I saw George, and together we bowled over someone called Omar, and fled to the woods. There was a flood, and we rode it here—or there—wherever it was, and then he came back one day." She indicated Frumpkin. "He demanded that I submit to him. I struck him, and he swore I'd never escape him. But I knew somehow you'd come, my Lafayette!"

 

            "I'm sorry it's taken so long," Lafayette said, going to her to embrace her slim form again. His eye fell on the faded pale velvet rag around her shoulders.

 

            "That was my brand-new cloak," he said. "It must have taken years to fade that much! How long has it been, Daph?"

 

            "I know not, my Lafayette," she replied, sniffling. "After the first year I lost count—everything was so strange."

 

            Lafayette patted her comfortingly. "Poor kid," he murmured. "For me, it's only been a few days—I think. But it's all over now."

 

            "Sir knight," Bother spoke up beside him, "pray forgive my intervention at this tender moment, but we must make certain decisions in haste. As you've heard, I am Chief Inspector Mobius, carrying Category Nine credentials, empowered to act for the Council. Now, it seems that if I'm to credit this fellow's boasts"—he paused to look without approval at Frumpkin—"matters are in an even more parlous state than we had assumed. I defer, of course, to your unique status; what's to be done?"

 

            "What is my 'unique status'?" Lafayette demanded of the stern-faced inspector. "I'm just a dumb guy who got in over his head!"

 

            "Be none so modest, sirrah!" Bother boomed. "The time for pretense is past. Now you must act!"

 

            O'Leary turned to Roy and squatted down to put his face on a level with the Ajax rep's. "What do you think, Roy?" he appealed. "What does he expect me to do? Who does he think I am?"

 

            "Beats me, Slim," Roy said sympathetically, "unless he knows about the Category Ultimate Anomalies and all. But how could he?"

 

            "He's an inspector, from Prime. Prime outranks Central, I understand. But what's a Category Ultimate Anomaly?"

 

            "Come on, Slim, you don't need to fake it with me. A CUA is what you make every time you focus, you know. By the way, I was right about Daph. The louse told her if she didn't cooperate he'd do you in, painful. That's why he kept pulling you back here, so she'd see you in trouble. But how do you focus the old PEs?"

 

            "I don't know, Roy. But if I did know, what should I do now—before the bubble closes in the rest of the way and squashes all of us?"

 

            "Except maybe me, Slim," Roy pointed out. "I'm not really here, remember? But to heck with that kinda talk. You use the flat-walker"—he handed it over— "and I'll see if I can punch a signal through to Ajax's field office for this quadrant. Doubt it, but I can try." Noting Lafayette's surprise at seeing the flat-walker, Roy added, "Marv lifted it off Frumpy when he was doing the Alphonse and Gaston routine, dusting him off. I taken it outa Marv's pocket. Right now, I got Marv on 'hold', till I can check out Frumpy's story."

 

            "What should I do with it?" Lafayette asked helplessly, holding the flat-walked gingerly.

 

            "Oh, just try the wall here." The concrete-like surface of the contracting sphere was only a few feet away now, crowding all its remaining occupants together like fraternity men in a phone booth.

 

            Lafayette took a last, lingering look at Daphne's anxious face, kissed it lightly, said, "Here goes nothing," and faced the wall.

 

            "If you get into trouble, Slim," Roy said behind him, "reorient the walker at right angles, OK?"

 

            Lafayette nodded and pressed forward, the flat-walker held parallel to his body. The wall yielded easily, like dense fog, and the display of darting lights was dazzling. He took a cautious step, then another. Then the floor was gone and he was falling—or so his first impression was. Then he seemed to be hanging motionless in still air. The tiny sparks of light whirled about him more quickly than ever, vast numbers of them, which became a dazzling, whirling glow that consumed him.

 

-

 

            The floor was hard and cold. Lafayette grabbed at it and willed it to stay under him. The darkness was as dense as the brilliant glare had been a moment—or an eternity—before. He blinked, saw a faint glimmer, held it, got to his feet, and groped toward a dim-glowing rectangle at a remote distance. He bumped against it and, feeling over it, found a door latch. He lifted it and the door swung outward, letting in cool night air. The light sprang up behind him.

 

            "No, no, over here, my boy," an urbane voice spoke behind the glare. Lafayette blinked and groped his way toward it, averting his eyes from the bank of fluorescents above the marble-topped counter.

 

            "I know you've had a shock, Lafayette," the voice said kindly. Lafayette turned toward it and saw a tall man in a black hooded cloak, sitting at ease in a large leather easy chair beside the crackle-finish instrument panel.

 

            "Allegorus!" Lafayette blurted. "And I'm back in the lab! How—what?" His voice trailed off as he covered his face with his hands. "Or am I just off on another bad trip?" He looked directly at Allegorus.

 

            "Ye gods!" O'Leary said feelingly. "Nicodaeus! Why the spook getup? If I'd recognized you the first time I ran into you, back when Frumpkin and Belarius V were conning me, we could have saved this whole thing! All the torment poor Daph has been through, for example."

 

-

 

            Allegorus/Nicodaeus shook his head. "No, Lafayette, life is not after all so simple. What will be, will be. One way or another, the equations had to balance, and just as Bother told you and Roy—in the end it had to come to a face-to-face confrontation between you and your opposite number, so to speak—Lord Marvelous, as he's calling himself. Yes," Allegorus held up an admonishing hand. "I am indeed Nicodaeus, or at least I am the Prime-line original of the ego-gestalt of which he is a manifestation—rather a close manifestation, too, only a few zillion parameters away. But in spite of that, when elemental forces are in flux, only a rascal (Frumpkin) or a fool (yourself—no offense intended) can influence them. You see, Lafayette, when an individual of ordinary potential places himself in the path of what we may loosely call destiny, he is simply ejected from whatever locus he is occupying; thus the unexplained disappearances and other weird experiences sometimes reported—and as often ignored by the more pedestrian personalities who indeed provide the stability of such mundane loci, as for example Colby Corners."

 

            "Sure," O'Leary dismissed the subject. "But just what was going on back there in Aphasia I? I saw the palace in ruins. And Trog, who turned out to be nothing but one of Frumpkin's hirelings, was in charge—or he seemed to be. I guess I was gullible to accept him at face value. And that Marv! Lord Marvelous, that's short for —he seems to be Mr. Big. Some disguise, coming on like a hired thug taking orders from his own servants."

 

            "Lord Marvelous is less elementary than he may seem, my boy," Nicodaeus pointed out. "Don't be misled by the persona of Marv which he was forced to adapt hurriedly when you appeared on the scene. He assumed you'd be dealt with by Frumpkin. But he reckoned without me," he added almost with a smile.

 

            "What did you do?" Lafayette demanded. "Except let me walk out there and get clobbered again."

 

            "I remained here, with my equipment at hand," Nicodaeus answered coolly, "until the moment when I could safely snatch you across the plenum to relative safety. I tried a number of times, actually: each time you ventured into half-phase. But I was blocked by your Lord Marvelous—though it did give me an opportunity each time to keep Ajax informed."

 

            "What connection do you have with Ajax?" O'Leary demanded.

 

            Nicodaeus raised a hand. "Quietly, Lafayette. No need to adopt that hectoring tone. I don't wish to pull rank on you, but after all I am First Secretary to the Prime Postulate at Nuclear City. Why, actually, it was I who established Ajax in a small way of business back in Artesia's early days, long before you were born, of course, Lafayette. Theiittle chaps proved surprisingly ingenious as well as industrious, and soon expanded the scope of their operations far beyond anything I had envisioned. Still, I never interfered. I did, however, keep them posted as to your constantly fluctuating position in the plenum, and even supplied the Words of Power of which you made such good, though random, use."

 

-

 

            "You mean, 'raf—' " Lafayette was cut off in midword by Nicodaeus' hand clapped over his mouth.

 

            "Never speak the Words of Power lightly, Lafayette," he said severely, then removed his hand and used it to pat Lafayette's shoulder. "Your pardon, my boy. I know you've been through a lot."

 

            "So has Daph!" Lafayette cut in. "And Roy and Bother, too, for that matter! I've got to get back to Daphne—you have to help rne! Roy told me he and his boys had planted something called a transfer box or something back here in the lab—the real lab, I mean." He looked up: The gilded skeleton was not in its accustomed place. "No skeleton," Lafayette told himself. "That's OK, because it was taken down right after the first time I was here."

 

            "Umm," Nicodaeus agreed. "Trifle too much, eh, lad? But let us remain calm. Transfer box: just where did Roy install it? Useful gadget, if it is indeed present."

 

            "We'd better hurry, Al," O'Leary said tensely. "That bubble's getting smaller by the second, and Daph's probably being squashed between Marv and Frumpkin!"

 

            "To be sure," Allegorus replied mildly. "A happier fate than those two deserve." The hooded man paused thoughtfully, then spoke soberly:

 

            "Understandably enough, Lafayette, you've expressed bafflement as to the motivation behind your persistent persecution ..."

 

            "In other words," Lafayette shot back hotly, "why does this big shot—Marv or Frumpkin or whoever— have it in for me? I'd like to know!"

 

            "Consider, Lafayette," Nicodaeus said soothingly. "Here we have a petty fellow who comes to a great realization. Performing menial labor in the Prime Probability Laboratory, he became aware in time that the forces being monitored there, the great basic flows which energize the fluctuation of any given alternative among the three states, could, if properly—or improperly in this case—manipulated, bring into actualization those elements of potentiality most conducive to the aggrandizement of his own ego-gestalt."

 

            "What are these 'three states'?" O'Leary asked humbly.

 

            "Why, you can deduce them for yourself, Lafayette. Consider: Reality is. Being reality, it is not subject to change." Allegorus paused significantly. "Consider," he went on. "While reality is immutable, our perception thereof is constantly undergoing modification. Any real event, artifact, or phenomenon, while existing eternally, can be perceived serially in anticipation, experience, and retrospect. This shifting viewpoint is the basis of the construct we call time. Now, time comprises, in its entirety, the past and the future. The plane of intersection of these two great realms, the zero-duration interface we call the present, persisting for no length of time, clearly has no 'real' existence. It is analogous to a line bisecting a plane, or indeed a plane which intersects a three-dimensional volume. It is merely a location, not an artifact." Allegorus pulled out the endless paper strip from a computer printout station on the counter-top. "Now, my boy," he said as he took a pair of shears from a drawer, "if I snip this strip in twain"—so saying he clipped the paper across —"every molecule, analogous to elemental units of reality, remains a part of one piece of paper or the other. The past"— he indicated the paper left on the roll—"or the future." He tapped the other loosly flapping end. "There is no paper between them. The cut—the present moment—is only a position on the seamless fabric of past/future."

 

            "Fine," Lafayette agreed impatiently. "But let's do something."

 

            "I'm getting to it, lad," Allegorus said soothingly. "It is, after all, a rather heavy realization with which you are about to be confronted, and it can't be simply dumped on you all unprepared."

 

            "I'm prepared to do whatever I have to do to get Daphne out of that hole," Lafayette rapped out. "If there really is anything I can do ..."he finished doubtfully.

 

            "There is, Lafayette," Nicodaeus reassured him. "Very well. Considering the fallacious nature of the conviction we all hold that only now is real, and the only reality, it should be clear to you that while in nature the flow of entropic energy must follow some specific course, there is no predetermined pattern which must of necessity be followed. Water will surely run downhill, but by precisely what path is a matter of random in-determinability. Thus, a pebble placed to block a potential outlet—a new channel cut across the route—and the trickle will be diverted. So it is with the realization of one chosen actuality among the myriad potentialities. Reality is, after all, not a sheet of paper. It is a book of infinitely numerous leaves, an endless library. The page we turn to is a matter of choice. With a small movement of the fingers, we can turn a page, or select another volume. So it was when our Lord Marvelous found himself free to reset the equipment in his care so as not only to monitor the entropic flow, but to redirect it. His plans were grandiose, complex—and even as he saw their fulfillment at hand, something went wrong, aborting his grand pattern, forcing the mainstream of actualization into channels not of his choosing. He took desperate measures, even altering the role of spontaneous conversion of energy to protons in the general area to which he had tentatively traced the mysterious counterforce. Inevitably, the new matter thus generated coagulated into galaxies, in turn influencing adjacent galaxies, all of course on the locus where he imagined his rival existed. Local observers who noted the resultant phenomenon of the diffuse X-ray background, attributed it to something they called bromsstrehlung, and ignored it, even as the newly created matter, created, as it must, a new galaxy."

 

-

 

            "You mean," O'Leary cut in, "that I didn't put a new star in the constellation Ursa Major?"

 

            "You mean Unicornis Maximus, I suppose, Lafayette," Allegorus corrected gently. "My boy, the Great Unicorn has been well-known from antiquity. It is in only a few anomalous loci that Marv's galaxy-building eliminated C-51, thereby producing the pattern usually called the Great Wain, or wagon. See for yourself." Allegorus/Nicodaeus indicated the sky visible through the open French doors to the balcony. There, upside down against blackness, he saw the familiar Great Bear.

 

            "It's not there!" he blurted. "There's no horn for the unicorn!"

 

            "In any case, Lafayette, it was Lord Marvelous, and not you, who tampered with the stars in the sky. You saw the results in the aborted loci to which your recent travels took you: the presence of a new major galaxy relatively near at hand—only twenty million lights distant, and thus an intruder in the Local Group—had massive repercussions in our familiar Milky Way, which perforce was distorted in response to the gravitational pull of the newly created universe. This distortion placed Sol in unexampled juxtaposition to a minor sun we may call Nova Centauri, at a distance of only a fractional light; thus the Solar System was perturbed and forced to strike a new equilibrium. Luna was thrust from its orbit by the approach of Ceres to within half a million miles of Sol, and began to fall, passed within Roche's Limit, and disintegrated. Thus the spectacular phenomena you saw during your sojourn in that clump of loci—and of course, in some loci the effects were even more drastic. You drifted for a while in matterless space, Lafayette, on a locus where Earth herself had fallen into the sun. Luckily, your passage in half-phase did not expose you to the local influences, to which you owe your survival. Ajax will be embarrassed to learn that it was due only to a malfunction of one of their devices that reality as we know it was preserved—or will be—as soon as we face up to the moment of truth. Are you ready, my boy?"

 

            "Ready?" Lafayette echoed incredulously. "I don't know what you're talking about! What's all this stuff got to do with getting Daph out of that trap?"

 

            "There is a force, lad," Nicodaeus/Allegorus said solemnly, "greater than the vast, blind workings of entropy: the force of human aspiration: the dreams of perfect harmony. Harmony, justice, peace, order, love, loyalty, truth, and beauty—these all are human inventions, Lafayette, along with honesty, decency, courage, integrity—all the qualities we think of as virtues. None exist in the impersonal extra-human universe. You, Lafayette, dreamed a dream that shattered the master plan of Lord Marvelous. Not that you knew; you merely opposed what you considered wrong, and thus aborted the false destiny of the madman."

 

            "Gosh," Lafayette said dully, "and I was getting myself all psyched up to step up and do something dramatic."

 

            "Drama aside, Lafayette, your moment is at hand." Nicodaeus/Allegorus rose and went to the wall cabinet housing the telephone. He lifted the receiver and spoke briefly, then hung up and turned back to Lafayette.

 

            "You'll recall," he said grimly, "that when you first encountered Frumpkin here in this room—so to speak— he was accompanied by one Belarius V, whom he deserted to his fate. Belarius is an official not without power, and due to his marooning in half-phase by his treacherous subordinate Frumpkin, he escaped the general dissolution of the existing power structure known as GHQ. He alone of the Presidium of the so-called Masters of Destiny, the not notably modest council controlling the Probability Laboratory at Prime—I myself am a member—survived. I found Belarius and showed him the route by which he could return here. He should be along at any moment."

 

            "So he's going to put everything back the way it ought to be," O'Leary said contentedly. "And I can relax."

 

            "Not quite, Lafayette," Nicodaeus said sternly. "Belarius V can assist you, but ultimately it is you versus Lord Marvelous."

 

            "Some match," a harsh voice spoke from the balcony. Frumpkin, once again immaculate and arrogant in his black costume, swaggered into the room. "It took me a few moments to marshal my resources so as to nullify the vacuole into which you tricked me, Allegorus. Now I shall dispose of you at leisure."