"She's right, Al," Marv put in. "How you gonna find this Daphne dame if you don't make contact?"
"I'm perfectly willing—" Lafayette began, but was cut off as the side wall of the spacious room burst inward, propelled by a wall of water which churned tables, chairs, and patrons together as it thundered toward the little group in the quiet corner. Lafayette felt his ears pop and quickly employed the Valsalva maneuver to equalize pressure. Marv was on his feet, yelling. Mickey Jo fell against Lafayette, her face next to his. It was a long, chaos-filled moment before he realized she was saying something:
"Use the flat-walker. Raf trass spoit."
He fumbled the Ajax device from his pocket even as the foaming flood engulfed him. He put it to his mouth, said, "Ajax—emergency! Get me out of here!" before he choked on a mouthful of muddy water. Through the translucent gray-green swirl, he saw a rectangle of gray light, struck out for it, slid easily into open air, and lay gasping on the faded carpet. Frumpkin came up out of his chair with a yelp of surprise and stood over Lafayette, looking down at him balefully.
"You're spoiling everything," he said mournfully. "Now I'll have to relocate my Prime Vault."
"I've heard of that," Lafayette said, coughing. "It blew up."
Frumpkin waved that away. "Not really. Just a small Schrödinger collapse; a diversionary tactic, you see. That was while I was still vulnerable, when Belarius attached himself to me—or so he thought."
"Where is this place?" Lafayette demanded. He got to his feet and looked about for a window, but the long, dim expanses of wallpaper were unperforated except for the door behind him.
"Ah, that is a question, eh, my lad?" Frumpkin said unctuously. "I fear you'll have to come to terms, Lafayette. Unless you put an end to your resistance, I fear you shall never find the headquarters."
"What resistance?" Lafayette demanded. "All I want to do is get back home with Daphne and go on having a swell life."
"Precisely. Your conceptualizations of the swell life are no longer viable, Lafayette. You must accept the new order—willingly."
O'Leary rounded on him truculently. "If your 'new order' means I'm supposed to like being kidnapped, thrown in dungeons, kicked from pillar to post, and kept in the dark about what's going on, you can forget it. Just call Daphne in, and we'll leave quietly."
Frumpkin snapped his fingers, and at once Daphne rose from the depths of a nearby overstuffed chair and came to stand before Frumpkin, seeming not to see O'Leary.
"Are you ill-treated, my dear?" Frumpkin asked her silkily.
She shook her head. "No, but that's not the point."
"Ah, the point, actually, is survival, eh, Dame Edith?" Frumpkin prompted. He turned to Lafayette. "As you can see, this young lady, by any name, is quite content."
"Daphne!" Lafayette cried; he took a step toward her but was thrown back by an invisible but resilient barrier; then the light faded abruptly.
Chapter Twelve
They lay on a long shingle not of sand but of finely granulated particles of the harder substances of which the streets and buildings of the city had been constituted. Before them stretched the breeze-ruffled surface of a broad lake; behind, an expanse gf grayish-black mud from which the steel framework of a former building thrust up, debris clotted on it. A late-model Auburn roadster lay on its side nearby, partially buried under a jackdaw's nest of broken lumber. No people were in sight, but in the far distance a few lights glowed, and somewhat closer a wisp of smoke rose almost vertically into the tranquil evening sky. Overhead, the bloated moon showed a tracery of red lines across its mottled face.
Lafayette was the first to sit up, his mind filled with the confused recollection of the gray room and Daphne, so close—then an interminable struggle in churning water, fighting upward toward dim light. He looked closely at Mickey Jo, lying unconscious beside him, her electric-blue dress sodden and clinging. Beyond, Marv raised himself on an elbow.
"Why'd ya hafta go and do that, Al?" he inquired in an aggrieved tone.
"I didn't do anything," Lafayette replied. "I was just about to try that crabmeat salad. It looked awful good."
"I et mine," Marv commented. "It was plenty OK, onney I wisht I'd of had time to try a bite of that steak, too."
"There's smoke over there," Lafayette said, pointing. "Let's go over. There must be some food left somewhere in the ruins."
"I dunno," Marv countered. "What if they got guns?"
"I didn't propose to attack them," Lafayette said.
"Marv," Mickey Jo spoke up feebly. "Why don't you go? We'll wait here. No use in all of us getting kilt."
"Well, if you ain't a square-deal little ..." Marv's voice faded to a mumble. He got to his feet, slapping at the mud adhering to his soaked garments. He looked at O'Leary, who was looking at the girl, who was holding a small automatic pistol aimed steadily at Marv's head.
"Go on," she said harshly. "Git!"
"Now, wait just a minute," O'Leary objected. "There's no need for anything like that, Mickey Jo. I don't mind going with him."
"You're staying right here, O'Leary," she grated past clenched teeth. "You're both covered."
"You know my name!" O'Leary gasped. "Look here, Mickey Jo, it's about time for you to tell me what your game is. Who are you, really?"
"I got no game, O'Leary, I just do like the man says. I'm a Group III agent in the PSS. Play it nice, now, and you won't get hurt, as far as I know. They just want to reason with you."
"Who's 'they'?" Lafayette demanded, sidling to the left. The gun at once shifted aim by a few degrees to remain aimed between the two men.
"They're the Emergency Research Committee," the girl said. She was sitting up now, her wet hair strung across her face, from which the paint was gone, leaving her a remarkably wholesome-looking young woman.
"Sure. Now explain the explanation," Lafayette suggested. "And don't throw in a lot of weird names and places I never heard of."
"Some things just ain't simple," Mickey Jo answered. "But I'll try. After the disruption bomb on Nuke City, they slapped on Full Class One Security; then the Prime Vault blew, and we knew we were in deep trouble. That was in October. Before the TRAN meters blew out, they registered a force-seven anomaly. Got it so far?"
"No," Lafayette said. "But go on. Where does Belarius IV fit into the picture?"
"Nowhere. He was in the metering vault when it blew. But what do you know about the big shot?"
"He survived," Lafayette said. "He and another sharpy named Frumpkin. But that's enough double-talk. Let's get down to detail. How do you know my name? Even Marv here only knows me as Allegorus, a crazy idea he got just because he met me in the Dread Tower, as his bunch call it." Lafayette glanced at Marv, now fifty feet away and moving off slowly.
"You know what an entropic disjunction is, Mr. O'Leary?" Mickey Jo inquired coldly.
"Sort of," Lafayette admitted, "to the extent that the term is self-explanatory. But the idea is a paradox. So, it doesn't mean anything."
"When the entire mass of galaxy is expelled from its natural entropic lamina," Mickey Jo said in a tone of exhausted patience, "all kinds of anomalies are generated. The last time it happened, fifteen billion years ago, matter came into existence spontaneously at the tertiary level, where it had no business being at all. That's what's known as the Big Bang."
"What's that got to do with anything?" Lafayette demanded hotly.
"Everything," Mickey Jo returned firmly. "All this is the direct result of that unique event."