"Well done, my dear," he said silkily. "And now I think the time has come for an end to meddling." He looked sharply at O'Leary.
"As for you, sir, I've already indulged your pretence of ignorance. Now let us down to business. What is it you really want?"
"Raf trass spoit, " Lafayette said casually, watching Frumpkin for his reaction, which was to stagger back a step as if he had been struck. Then his look of amusement was replaced by one of determination.
"You wouldn't dare," he hissed.
"Would I not?" Lafayette countered in an indifferent tone. He moved casually around the central table, and across toward Frumpkin, who stood his ground, though looking nervous. Behind him, Lafayette could hear sounds of feminine weeping.
"You promised!" Betty Brassbraid's tearful voice charged, and Frumpkin half-turned to shake off her clutch at his arm. At that moment, O'Leary stepped in and administered a knuckle-first blow to Frumpkin's solar plexus, which caused him to double over, presenting to O'Leary an unimpeded access to his head and neck. Lafayette carefully took a stranglehold, his forearm locked across Frumpkin's throat and levering upward, causing the Man in Black to utter croaking sounds which prompted Betty to shriek:
"Don't do it here, sir! The blackguard deserves to die, I don't doubt, but—I can't watch." She fled into gray shadows.
With his left hand, Lafayette found the flat-walker in his jacket pocket where Mickey Jo had placed it only a few hours before, though, Lafayette reflected en passant, it seemed like days. Steadying himself against Frumpkin's frantic efforts to break the hold, Lafayette oriented the Ajax device properly and, for some reason closing his eyes, he stepped back against the stone partition and pressed his body against the wall. He felt the familiar sensation as of wet cardboard parting before him. He was aware of Frumpkin's frenzied efforts to escape, and applied enough pressure to lift the Man in Black to tiptoe. As Lafayette stepped back, Frumpkin's weight became a heavy drag. He wondered briefly if he were doing any irreversible damage to his captive's internal arrangements, but he thrust onward, eyes open now to the expected vista of utter blackness broken by only a few randomly darting points of varicolored light. Then the syrupy resistance was gone.
A dim gray light infiltrated the darkness. He had only a moment in which to see two large fellows coming toward him before, with a sudden lunge, Frumpkin broke from his grip. There was an explosion that hurled O'Leary down into hot blackness. He came to rest lying with his cheek against a carpet. He opened one eye and saw faded red-and-purple curlicues; then hard hands were hauling him to his feet.
"Fool!" Frumpkin said in a complacent tone. "Did you really imagine I'd permit you so easily to disrupt my plans?"
"I don't know anything about your dumb plans," Lafayette countered. The Man in Black stood before him, rocking casually on his heels, his torn and dusty uniform replaced by a crisp new one with gleaming gold braid.
"Your alibis will avail you naught," Frumpkin snapped. "My decision is made: In spite of certain minor inconveniences it will "occasion me, I will now dissolve your entire troublesome Plane into unrealized status." He turned abruptly and went across to the big central panel. Lafayette kicked the closest knee, broke from the clutch of its owner, and in two jumps was at Frumpkin's side, catching the black-clad arm as it reached for a safe-wired switch. Before he could do more, a gust of opaque mist wafted across his vision. He thrust Frumpkin back and tried to push through the sudden gray mist. Unwittingly, he drew a breath as a hand caught his arm and drew him aside. As he came clear, he released his grip on Frumpkin, who collapsed facedown as O'Leary braced himself against the grip on his arm.
"Slim!" the hearty voice of Sprawnroyal, the Ajax rep, cried. "So you finely made it! Come on, hows about a good feed to start with, and then we can bring each other up to date!"
Chapter Seventeen
Feeling dazed, Lafayette looked around at a well-lit room with neutral walls and a tall window with a vista of forested hills and jagged peaks in the distance. He allowed himself to be led to a long refectory table and eased into a chair. Sprawnroyal ignored the prone form of the Man in Black.
"Easy, boys," Sprawnroyal advised the two small fellows who had done their best to steady O'Leary's beanpole physique while working at knee level. "He's been through a lot; lucky he finely won his way to the Static Point, which, by the way, Slim, how'd ya know whereat it was located at? Top secret info, you know."
"Where it was located," Lafayette started wearily, but abandoned the didactic impulse as hopeless. "I didn't know it was a Static Point, whatever that is," he told his diminutive friend. "I went along to call on an alleged witch named Henriette in the Hill, and her apartment turned out to be Nicodaeus' old lab, from back in Artesia. It seems Nicodaeus anchored it so well that it stays in place no matter what happens to the locus. Strange, too: I was sure the lab was going to be in an ill-fitting room at the top of a shaky-looking structure back in the town."
"Look, Slim," Sprawnroyal put in seriously, "we got a real problem on our hands here. I tole you last I seen you, when I run into you out in the woods in one o' them hick loci: Some time back we took on a private security job for some kind o' local headman type name of Frodolkin, and pretty soon he come up with this Number-One-Public-Enemy-of-all-time deal, which we hadda go beating the bushes for him. And after we seen you, things really got rough. We got into some kinda swamp where the desert oughta be, and never did find this duke fellow."
"That's just as well," Lafayette told the little man. "Bother's not a bad fellow; actually he's an agent working out of Prime. Why did you want him?"
"This Frodolkin character hands us a dossier on him that'd make the Murderin' Turk look like Baby Leroy. Seems he's out to break down the whole EQ, and let the whole plane slide off the deep end into unrealized space-time. Nacherly, we hadda try and stop him, even if we din't have a contract, which we did have one. But like I says, we never seen the bum. We report in, and old Froddy gets all excited and says he's gonna do what he called a emergency dump on the whole level.
"That sounded bad, but it's just talk, we figger, and I and my boys get back onna job and pretty soon we're sort of swimming around like goldfish in a bowl, two guys watching us. After a while they pour us out on a cement slab, and we just about croak before we get straightened out and get it together, which we wasn't really goldfish, natch. And after a while we got used to breathing again and all, and then we found out we were really in the soup. We really gotta thank you, Slim. If it wouldn't of been for you giving us the old password from time to time, we'd prolly still be wading around in that swamp, or worse. But seems like every time we were really up against it, we picked you up again ... But I can tell you, Slim, you nearly slipped off the grid that one time, and we thought you were really a goner, and us too. But old Raf trass spoit"—Sprawnroyal broke off to glance cautiously about as he lowered his voice to speak the arcane words—"did the trick, and we homed back in on you. And now—here you are!"
"Right," Lafayette agreed. "But where am I? That's not Aphasia III out that window; there's hills and trees, and Aphasia III is all mud-flats."
"Cripes," Sprawnroyal muttered, as Lafayette went on to describe the bleak locus.
"... And so," Lafayette concluded, "it seems she not only isn't Daphne, but she decoyed us here to turn us over to this Frumpkin, alias the Man in Black."