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."
Chapter Five
"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."