"Where are you, Sheriff?" Lafayette inquired desperately. "I can't see you—just hear you."
"Why, I'm right here, settin' on this here fancy settee, just like the feller told me. Said he'd be right back, but I got a feelin' I been tooken. By the way, feller, where have you got to? Hear ya but cain't see ya nowheres."
"That's too complicated to explain, Sheriff. Just sit tight and hope for the best," O'Leary said silently.
At that point Lafayette became aware of the distant mutter of voices, distinct from Tode's hoarse croak, near at hand; more like people arguing in the next room, he decided. He tried a move toward the sound, a flick of the tail which sent him gliding from the deep shadow under the lily pads out into the dazzling, diffuse glare of open water—or open something, he corrected, noting that his gills were pumping nicely, sluicing cool, oxygen-laden something over the absorptive membranes.
"—told you it's a ghost bogie on number seven," an aggrieved voice said loudly from across the room.
"And I said you better check the Manual; this could be a type nineteen, for all we know," someone answered sharply.
"Fruits and nuts. It's just another dumb exercise they forgot to put in the OD book."
"Just humor me, Fred: run a six-oh-two on it. Please? Pretty please wit' sugar on?"
The pellucid something dimmed, grew thicker.
Lafayette waved his limbs slowly until the now rapidly jelling medium immobilized him. He made a mighty effort, managed to thrust with his pectoral fins. Cracks opened across the solid medium in which he was suspended like a fly in amber.
"Got something here!" Fred's voice yelled. "Les, maybe you better get off a Class One after alclass="underline" don't know if the field's gonna hold!"
"I'm way ahead of ya, Fred; got a net team on the way already."
"Seems OK now." Fred said more calmly. "Or maybe I lost it; don't feel nothing now ..."
Lafayette tried a tentative flick of the tail, was rewarded by a stab of pain from somewhere around the dorsal-fin area; he relaxed and the pain subsided, then became a steady pressure, tugging him in some undefinable direction. For a moment he went along, then made a sudden resolution: time to use the Psychical Energies.
He concentrated on the face of Daphne, her dark eyes and snub nose, her sweet lips and the delicate curve of her cheekbones. The lustrous dark hair ...
" 'Through the black of night, I gotta go where you are, ' " he hummed to himself. " 'And no place can be too far, where you are. Ain't no chains can bind me, if you live I'll find thee. Love is calling me. I gotta go where you are ..'."
"Lafayette?" Daphne's voice said uncertainly. O'Leary squinted through the gloom. It clarified into the familiar dimness of the gray room. Daphne was nowhere to be seen. Lafayette saw a door across the room, went to it, past big chairs arranged in conversational groups, from one of which a conversation was emanating:
"... too good of a offer to turn down," a harsh female voice was saying.
"Ain't saying it wasn't," a meaty male voice replied. "Only what guarantee we got?"
"You have my word," a voice that sounded like Marv's put in. "Hurry up," he added.
"Looky here," Meaty-Voice started, "we got— ouch! Don't go doing nothing like that feller! All's I said was—"
Lafayette reached the door, found it locked. Only then did he realize that he was no longer limited to swimming through gray Jello. He paused, considering: He no longer felt the pressure of the dim-glowing substance in which he was trapped. He thrust hard, burst through a membrane and lay gasping on a shaggy surface which, he realized, was a grassy bank sloping down to a mirror surface marred by ripples.
"Got him!" the gigantic voice of Les boomed out from far above.
"What is it?" Fred inquired in Olympian tones. "How'd it get into our Y-field anyway?"
"Probably one o' them," Les replied. "Just got a little too tricky for his own good. Let's get it up under the light and check it out."
The pain stabbed in Lafayette's back; he uttered a choked yell as the giant hook jerked him upward into blinding light where two large, homely faces peered down at him.
"Hooked from the outside," Les's voice said, issuing from the face on the left, the whiskery one. That meant the round face with warts belonged to Fred.
"Fred," Lafayette gasped, "Les. Help! I'm an innocent victim, not one of them."
"Les," Fred said casually. "Did you hear this thing say sumpin'?"
"Don't be silly," Les replied. "How could I of? Only folks can talk. Let's open it up and see what makes it tick."
Lafayette caught only a glimpse of a polished, razor-edged scalpel poised over him before the light winked out and he was back in pitch darkness. He waited, but no blow fell. He slept.
Chapter Nine
O'Leary woke slowly from vague dreams of strolling in the palace gardens at Artesia City. Reluctantly he became aware that he was lying on his side on what felt very much like a bed. Hard and rather lumpy, but still a bed. Fine! Maybe someone had finally dropped a net over him and carted him off to the booby hatch to start his cure. He moved tentatively: no stab of pain from his back, he noted with relief. He tried a leg, felt it respond. No more fins; that was good news. Obviously the shrinks had some effective techniques going for them nowadays. He'd only been in the pest house for a few hours and already he was thinking clearly, his hallucinations gone.
He opened his 'eyes to dim light and a tall woman standing beside the narrow cot.
"No more mischief now, sir," she said in a cool, melodious voice. "I'm Doctor Smith, and I want to help you."
"That's fine, Doctor," Lafayette replied briskly, sitting up. The woman at once bent to rearrange his pillows to support him in a half-erect position. "Please don't exert yourself, sir," she said in a no-nonsense tone. "And actually I must ask you to do nothing at all for the present; don't even think. The debriefing team will be along in a moment to wire you up and set things to rights."
"Wire me up?" Lafayette echoed vaguely. "I don't think I like the sound of that."
"Please, sir—"
"My name's Lafayette," he stated, feeling a vague impulse to stabilize the situation. "I've had a bad time of it, but I'm better now, I think. Is Daphne OK? Is she here?"
"I'm sorry, sir. The DB team will handle all your queries. You may sleep a little now, and they'll be here." Then she was gone with a rustle of starched whites.
Let's hold it right here, O'Leary said sternly to himself. This has gone far enough. They've been herding me along like a sheep to the slaughter. I haven't been just wandering around at will, he told himself with dawning comprehension. Someone's been manipulating me— and the time has come to break the cycle! He rose from the Spartan hospital bed and discovered he was clad only in a threadbare purple pajama bottom. There was a steel locker against the wall. Inside, Lafayette found his once splendid court suit, sadly worn and stained but freshly cleaned and pressed. He at once checked the trick pocket. The flat-walker was still in place.
"But that's what's been messing me up," he said aloud. "Every time I used it, I got in deeper; so I won't touch it again until I'm back at Ajax—or an Ajax field station." With that decision, he felt a surge of confidence. "Now I can start unraveling this mess," he told himself. 'It's still not too late to rescue Daphne. But I've got no time to waste."
He dressed quickly, then went to a window and looked down on a city street bathed in afternoon sunlight, lined with cars parked by shops bearing signs announcing Giant Sales and Discounts up to 70%, and Your Credit's Good. For the first time in years, Lafayette remembered his old life in Colby Corners as a junior draftsman at the foundry, living on a diet of Tend-R Nood-L soup, sardines, and crackers, and saltwater taffy, his sole indulgence—except for his scientific work, of course. And that was what was needed now, he realized with sudden insight. The mundane bustle in the street below seemed to him to restore a correct perspective to the mad jumble of events of the last day or so. Now, before committing himself to another move, it would be well to sum up, to reexamine affairs in the cold, precise light of the scientific method. First, as he had already concluded, it was clear that he had been manipulated, herded along from one blunder to the next. But for what purpose? That point would have to await furthur clarification. Basically, the thing that had been nagging at the back of his mind was the problem of energy imbalance. Formerly, in simply shifting himself by means of the Psychical Energies from one locus to an adjacent one, the transfer of energy had been slight, and as had been explained to him by Nicodaeus, the equation had been balanced by an equivalent displacement of inorganic matter at scattered points. Thus, when he had first changed loci from Colby Corners to Artesia, a number of small items equal in mass to his own one hundred thirty-eight pounds had, quite unknown to him or to anyone, slipped across from Artesia to the Corners, causing some Artesian housewife, perhaps, to wonder what had become of her antique ginger jar, while some ragpicker in Colby Corners had come upon a perfectly good cannister marked GINGER in an ash-can on his regular route. A loose stone on an Artesian road might have disappeared when no one was looking and just as unobtrusively appeared on the potholed tarmac of the Springs Road. So that part—as had been explained to him at length by Nicodaeus on the latter's last visit to Adoranne's court—was rational enough. But these shift-overs he'd been making lately to loci well outside his home widerange involved massive energy demands across wide stretches of E-space. That fact, in turn, implied that someone, somewhere, for some reason, was supplying the required energies. Question: who? Also, why, how, etcetera, Lafayette reflected in frustration. His fingers, idly exploring his pocket, encountered the angular shape of the flat-walker. Only slowly, and with a sense of shock, did he realize what he was fingering; with sudden awe, he brought out the waferlike device and studied it carefully, as if he had never seen it before. It looked like nothing more than a rectangle of bluish plastic embossed with wavy lines. Could this thing actually enable one to pass through solid matter? Again, whence the energy supply? It was too silly, he decided, and checked an impulse to toss it into the immaculate wastebasket beside the window. Had he been hallucinating? The question shook him. Some people did hallucinate, and if he were one of them, where did the imaginary begin? With Zoriel, or with Doctor Anschluss and the waspish Miss Gorch, or earlier, with Shurf Tode and Cease? Or the gray room that kept popping up? Or was it Frodolkin and his troops who had initiated the nonobjective phase of his mental life? Or Lord Trog—or Allegorus, the mysterious visitant to the tower? Or did it go farther back, to Artesia itself, to Adoranne and Alain, and Lod, the two-headed giant, or even to Daphne—dear, loyal, lovely Daphne? No! he almost yelled aloud. His bride of ten years was no figment: of that he was sure. But where was she now? Why had she been taken from him? Where was the gray room?