"Yes, yes, Sir, ah, I'm sure things can't be as bad as all that. We at Central—" The voice stopped as a deafening barr-room! blasted in O'Leary's ear. He rattled the receiver hook frantically.
"... Please note this line is for limited official use," the mindless voice parroted again. "Please cite—"
"Shut up, brainless!" Lafayette yelled. "Listen to me!"
There was no reply. O'Leary groaned. "It's a recording," he called over his shoulder to Bother, and tried again:
"Hello, Central!" he yelled into the instrument. "Are you still there? What happened—" Then an ironclad hand closed on his arm, tugging him gently away.
"Easily, lad, be calm," Bother urged him. "Hast lost thy wits, Sir Knight? Why talketh thou to this ugly object here?" Gingerly, he moved the receiver from Lafayette's hand and let it fall to swing from its cord, uttering quacking sounds.
"It's a telephone, Bother!" O'Leary protested. "You're supposed to talk to it! Listen, somebody's on the line now. Let me hear what they're saying!"
"... Your supervisor," a cold voice snapped. "I repeat: This is a limited access line. Identify yourself, please."
"I already told that dumb broad," O'Leary said, suppressing a desire to yell and choke the telephone. "Do I have to start all over? This is a crash emergency! Everything's coming apart, or it will if a screwball named Frumpkin has his way! Get me a squad of your best harness bulls in here double pronto. And no tricky undercover types like Mickey Jo and Lard-Ass! Plain old uniformed coppers with big billy clubs and packing plenty of iron—and ready to use it! Got me?"
"This is your final warning, sir," the unyielding supervisory voice said. "Do not attempt to make use of this classified circuit for personal calls. You will be traced and service discontinued."
"Discontinued?" Lafayette yelled. "What service have I gotten that you can discontinue? AH I've had is a dumb recording and a dumber bureaucrat! This is disaster, I'm telling you. Do something!" He was cut off by a click and a prolonged buzz.
"No use, Your Grace," Lafayette told Bother dispiritedly. "It's up to us. I should have known better." He hung up the phone, then leaned close to examine the heavy black-insulated cable which ran from the base of the instrument through a hole in the cabinet.
"This is strange," he told the uncomprehending duke. "Back in Aphasia I, this line had been cut and the phone was gone. Now it's back again." O'Leary's eyes went to the gilded skeleton dangling in the gloom above. "And Mr. Bones hasn't been here for years. Something's funny here. Somebody's been tampering ..." O'Leary sat in the decrepit chair beside the marble-topped counter, deep in thought.
"What troublest thee, Sir Lafayette?" Bother inquired.
Lafayette slapped the counter-top. "This isn't really the lab," he stated. "It's a fake someone rigged up for some reason. Probably Frumpkin's work. If I'm right that leaves the upstairs room back in town! You see, the lab is so firmly grounded that even though the loci come and go around it, it stays forever the same. That's why it's fifty feet above the ground level, and they had to build that scaffolding up to it. So let's go back, and this time I'll get inside!" As he concluded, Lafayette noticed a tiny vibration from the flat-walker still in his hand. He raised it to his ear:
"OK, Slim," Roy's voice came through, more clearly than before, "I'm going to try that area of permeability. If I don't make it in the next ten seconds, call out a strainer squad to look for me. Here goes!" The last words, spoken in full voice, came from behind O'Leary; he whirled to see the stumpy figure of Sprawnroyal standing by the wall, looking shaken.
"Wow," the Ajax rep said feelingly, "for a hour or two there, I thought I wasn't gonna make it. But then I thought to home in on the field from the flat-walker, and here I am."
"Glad to see you, Roy," O'Leary said. "But it's been only a second or two since you said you were on the way—but I know time gets all distorted in half-phase. Roy, it just dawned on me that this room is a fake—"
"It's Nicodaeus' old lab, isn't it?" Roy interrupted, looking around curiously. "I remember the alchemy department and the astrology section"—he indicated the star-charts on one wall, and paused, looking puzzled—"but seems like there was a high-tech electronic panel right next to it. When did he remodel?"
"I don't think he did," Lafayette persisted. "This is apparently a duplicate of an earlier stage of the lab. The question is, why?"
"Hard luck, Slim," Roy said mildly. "If it was the real thing, we coulda used the homing box we just installed a couple weeks ago."
"What's a homing box?" Lafayette demanded.
"A new item in our line," Roy explained. "One of Pratwick's best ideas—"
"Sure, but what does it do?" Lafayette cut in.
"Well, Slim, it's what ya might say versatile, is what it is," Roy explained in a leisurely way. "Instantaneous transport is the main function, but it's also useful for fast search-and-rescue jobs, you know? It's good as a substitute for a supply warehouse; you can tune to whatever you happen to need—got a zillion megabit storage capacity or something."
"But how could we use it?" Lafayette demanded, coming over to confront the Customer Service rep.
"What's it matter?" Roy countered. "After all, it ain't here. We onney installed it maybe a couple weeks back, and like you said, this is a copy off a early stage, prolly not long after Nick first set it up in Artesia."
"Never mind, Roy, just answer me. How could we use this gadget if we did have access to it?"
"Shift us right to the Ajax main office on Plane Two," Roy said. "Solid locus. From there we could gather in all the clues and find out what's going on."
"Why didn't you do it before?" O'Leary pressed. "If you had that kind of capability, why were you out beating the bushes in Aphasia I, instead of going right to the top?"
"Shoulda, I guess," Roy conceded. "But I had my orders. We didn't exactly realize how bad things were until it was too late, anyways. I tole you they cut our power source."
"Oh. Well, Roy, I think I'll try something: I'm going to make a real try to focus the old Psychical Energies—"
"What good's that gonna do, Slim?" Roy queried, frowning. "It's OK for you to duck out, maybe— though it ain't like ya—but how's about me and yer sheet-metal pal, here?"
"Oh, Roy, this is Duke Bother-Be-Damned," Lafayette made the intro hurriedly. "Your Grace, Sprawnroyal, Customer Service rep from the Ajax Novelty Works, Melange branch. And what do you mean 'duck out'?" Lafayette went on hotly. "If my idea works, we're all home safe!"
"Well, it won't hurt to try, maybe," Roy conceded. "Go ahead."
"Just one thing first," Lafayette demurred. "I'm going to find Henriette and get a few answers."
"They'll all be 'no', Sir Lafayette," Bother told him. "Many's the wight who's assailed my lady's virtue, but none, it's said, has scored."
"That's not what I had in mind," O'Leary advised the duke. "At least, not exactly. And I could have told you those local Romeos would bomb out. Daphne's true-blue—even if she's not really Daphne."
"I know, my boy," Bother said kindly. "None can expect reason and logic from a man bewitched by a maid. Seek out this witch, the while I search for the wily Frumpkin. He must have hid hereabouts; no man can, after all, walk through a wall!"
"Actually, Your Grace," Roy spoke up, "the scamp is well-trussed and locked in a garde-robe at this moment. We'll collect him in due course."
Chapter Eighteen
"That reminds me," Bother said testily. "Talking about walking through walls, how'd you get in here? I never seen you come through the door."