A sign above the door claimed OFFICE, and another on the door itself insisted EMPLOYEES ONLY. It was half open, and I walked through as though I belonged there, keeping a hand in my jacket pocket where I had the pistol.
There were several rooms back here, all leading off a short hall, all the doors closed. I rapped on the first one, and when a woman said, "Yes?" I opened it and checked out the room.
She was a stacked redhead in a leotard, doing ballet steps in front of a mirror to the sounds — now — of Megadeth. Ten chairs were lined up against the walls around the room, and in each chair sat a different ventriloquist dummy. Some held bananas in their wooden hands.
I didn't want to know any more about it.
"Sorry," I said. "Wrong room."
I closed the door and went to the one across the hall.
Graham Stone was there. He stood by the desk, watching me with those cold eyes. I stepped inside, closed the door, and took the Smith & Wesson out of my pocket to be certain that he understood the situation. "Stand real still," I said.
He didn't move, and he didn't answer me. When I started toward him, however, he sidestepped. I cocked the.38, but it didn't grab his attention like it should have. He watched disinterestedly.
I walked forward again, and he moved again. I'd had the word from Bruno that a bring-him-back-alive clause was not a condition of my employment contract. In fact, the bear had implied that any display of mercy on my part would be met with all the savagery of a Hare Krishna panhandler on a megadose of PCP. Well, he hadn't put it quite that way, but I got the message. So I shot Graham Stone in the chest, pointblank, because I had no way of knowing what he might be able to do to me.
The bullet ripped through him, and he sagged, folded onto the desk, fell to the floor, and deflated. Inside of six seconds, he was nothing more than a pile of tissue paper painted to look like a man. A three-dimensional snakeskin that, shed, was still convincingly real. I examined the remains. No blood. No bones. Just ashes.
I looked at the Smith & Wesson. It was my familiar gun. Not a Disney.780 Death Hose. Which meant that this hadn't been the real Graham Stone but — something else, an amazing construct of some kind that was every bit as convincing as it was flimsy. Before I had too much time to think about that, I beat it back into the corridor. No one had heard the shot. The thrashmasters on the bandstand were doing a fair imitation of Megadeth — a bitchin' number from Youthanasia—and providing perfect cover.
Now what?
I cautiously checked the other two rooms that opened off the hallway, and I found Graham Stone in both. He crumpled between my fingers in the first room, as solid in appearance as any face on Mount Rushmore but was, in actuality, as insubstantial as any current politician's image. In the second room, I shredded him with a well-placed kick to the crotch.
By the time I reached the dance floor again, I was furious. When you blew a guy away, you expected him to go down like bricks and stay down. That was how the game was played. I didn't like this cheap trick.
In the washroom, I rapped on Bruno's stall door, and he came out with his hat still pulled way down and his collar still turned up. Face wrinkled in disgust, he said, "If you people don't bother flushing, why even put the lever on the toilet to begin with?"
"There's trouble," I said. I told him about the three extra Graham Stones and demanded some explanation.
"I didn't want to have to tell you this." He looked sheepish. "I was afraid it would scare you, affect your efficiency."
"What? Tell me what?" I asked.
He shrugged his burly shoulders. "Well, Graham Stone isn't a human being."
I almost laughed. "Neither are you."
He looked hurt, and I felt like a blockhead.
"I am a little bit human," he said. "Certain borrowed genetic material… But forget that. What I should have said is that Graham Stone doesn't really come from any alternate Earth. He's an alien. From another star system."
I went to the sink and splashed a lot of cold water on my face. It didn't do much good.
"Tell me," I said.
"Not the whole story," he said. "That would take too much time. Stone is an alien. Humanoid except when you're close enough to see that he doesn't have any pores. And if you look closely at his hands, you'll see where he's had his sixth fingers amputated to pass for human."
"Sixth-finger-amputation scar — always a sure indicator of the alien among us," I said sarcastically.
"Yes, exactly. There was a shipload of these creatures that crashed on one of the probability lines seven months ago. We've never been able to communicate with them. They're extremely hostile and very strange. The general feeling is that we've met a species of megalomaniacs. All have been terminated except Graham Stone. He's escaped us thus far."
"If he's an alien, why the British-sounding name?"
"That's the first name he went by when he started to pass for human. There have been others since. Apparently even aliens seem to feel that being British has a certain connotation of class and style. It's also a constant on eighty percent of the time lines. Although there are a couple of realities wherein being from the island-nation of Tonga is the epitome of class."
"And what the hell has this alien done to deserve death?" I asked. "Maybe if a greater attempt was made to understand him—"
"An attempt was made. One morning, when the doctors arrived at the labs for a continuation of the study, they found the entire night crew dead. A spiderweb fungus was growing out of their mouths, nostrils, eye sockets…. You get the picture? He hasn't done it since. But we don't think he has lost the capacity."
I went back to the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. Someone came in to use the urinal, and Bruno leaped backward into the toilet stall and slammed the door. "Oh, yuck!" he growled, but the newcomer didn't seem to find anything strange about the bearish voice.
I had three minutes to study my precious kisser in the mirror until the head-banger left. Then Bruno came out again, grimacing worse than ever.
"Listen," I said, "suppose Stone was within twenty feet of me, back there in the offices while I was playing around with those paper decoys or whatever the hell they were. He could have tripped right out of this probability by now."
"No," Bruno said. "You're a receiver, not a transmitter. He'll have to locate someone with the reverse talent of yours before he can get out of this time line."
"Are there others?"
"I detect two within the city," Bruno said.
"We could just stake those two out and wait for him!"
"Hardly," the bruin said. "He would just as soon settle down here and take over a world line for himself. That would give him a better base with which to strike out against the other continuums."
"He has that kind of power?"
"I said he was dangerous."
"Let's move it," I said, turning to the steel door from the adjacent warehouse basement.
"You're marvelous," Bruno said.
I turned and looked at him, trying to find sarcasm in that crazy face of his. I couldn't tell what he was thinking. "Marvelous? I'm marvelous? Listen, one guy doesn't tell another guy he's marvelous — especially not when the two of them are in a bathroom."
"Why?"
"Never mind why," I said, starting to burn.
"Anyway, I'm not a guy. I'm a bear."
"You're a guy bear, aren't you?"
"Well, yes."
"So can it with this 'marvelous' crap."
"All I meant was, in the space of a few short hours, you have accepted the existence of probability worlds, an intelligent bear, and an alien from another world. And you don't seem shaken at all."