"Now, son, no use adding Resisting Arrest to the charge sheet—" Tode broke off with a yell. Then O'Leary felt a tug at his knee, and Roy's voice urging him to follow.
"Now, how'd that feller kick me onna shin?" Tode was demanding of the circumambient darkness. He blundered away, calling to Cease.
Lafayette's feet groped over the strewn rubble, Roy tugging him along impatiently.
"Where are we going, Roy?" O'Leary asked.
"Got to find the wall," the little man answered. "You still got the flat-walker, right? But you can't walk through no walls if you ain't got a wall to walk through."
"Let's just go back up the stairs," O'Leary suggested. "Daph— I mean Henriette—is obviously not here."
"Prolly took the stairs and got off at the next landing," Roy hazarded. "Good thing, too. Too much of a fall fer a lady."
"Funny thing," Lafayette told Roy. "Somebody Tode calls 'Boss' knew I'd be here. He sent Tode and Cease ahead to put the arm on me."
"Figures," Roy replied. "I tole you Frumpy got aloose. He knew you'd go through that door and miss the top step. So he must be their Boss."
"Right. He told me he was planning on taking over the Cosmos, remember?"
"My boner, Slim, not securing the sucker better. But we'll find him—or he'll find us." Roy's pull at the knee of Lafayette's gold-striped breeches stopped. Abruptly, O'Leary slammed against a solid barrier of compacted rubbish. He called to Roy, but there was no reply. Carefully, he got out the flat-walker, oriented it approximately parallel to the irregular wall before him, and pressed.
Bright light, blinding him; a strident alarm bell. A voice shouting "—is it! Plane One, activate!" all cut off like a broken film. Then a deep-toned vibration that shook the floor beneath his feet—no, the bare earth, with tall weeds, dim lights, moving in curious patterns; the tolling of a bell, the perfume of night-blooming flowers, a clamor of childish voices, and the odor of chalk dust; a glimpse of an octagonal clock with the hands at high noon, the rush of water, a dash of cold spray; splintering sounds as of timber shattering before a high wind, the grating of massive stone grinding massive stone to rubble in utter darkness; the glare of a great blue-white sun, unshielded, close at hand; heat, turbulence, a deafening explosion ...
Lafayette shook his head and sat up, astonished to find himself alive and, as far as he could see, intact. The floor under him was smoothly carpeted.
"Good," he said aloud. "I'm out of that garbage bin, at least," he went on, and called Roy's name. No reply.
"You think it good, do you, fellow?" a cold male voice said above him. "Let us hope you're clever enough to ensure that you continue so to believe."
"Is that you, Frumpkin?" Lafayette demanded of the darkness above. He got to his feet, tucked the flat-walker away, and took a tentative step in the direction from which the voice had seemed to come. He tripped over something soft and fell heavily.
After half an hour of blundering about in what appeared to be a large room furnished with overstuffed furniture, pursuing the voice which spoke mockingly from time to time, O'Leary felt his way up onto a long chaise longue and collapsed, winded. He closed his eyes for a moment.
Chapter Nineteen
First Lafayette was aware of a mild clamor of voices, then of dim light. He sat up and saw that he was far from being alone in the big room. In divans, easy chairs, couches, davenports, and settees arranged in conversational groupings all across the rather faded pseudo-oriental carpets, were people of all ages, both sexes and many degrees of apparent cultivation. Most, but not all of them, were at least vaguely familiar to him. Only the Man in Black, now clad in a wine-colored brocaded dressing gown with a satin shawl collar, was near him. He stood rocking slightly on his heels, glass in hand, looking down at O'Leary with an expression of mild distaste.
"The time has come at last," he said blandly, "for me to confront you directly, my boy, and to discover precisely what has motivated your unexampled persecution of me. You've had a nice nap; would you care for a bite, or perhaps a spiritous beverage? Later we shall dine."
"That's a good one," O'Leary said bluntly. "I've been persecuting you, have I? Funny, I thought it was the other way around. Anyway, we've been all over that."
Frumpkin's eyebrows went up in a shallow mime of surprise. "Why would I, in my position, trouble to persecute such a one as you, Sir Lafayette?"
"Maybe to get even for all the times I made you look like a jackass," Lafayette hazarded, a remark which netted a comfortable chuckle.
"You mistake me, boy," the dandified Frumpkin commented before taking a sip from his glass. "I employed a number of my analogs, of course, a few of whom you encountered in your mad course. It would be foolish of you to mistake any of them for my actual Prime-line self."
"What is this place, Frumpkin?" O'Leary demanded, looking around the big room—the gray room, he realized belatedly, which he was seeing for the first time in a good light. He noted the standing bridge lamps with their fringed, orange-parchment shades, the framed rotogravures on the flowered, brownish wallpaper, and on a nearby would-be Hepplewaite side-table, an Atwater Kent radio in a walnut-stained wooden cabinet. "It looks like a set for a Nils Asther movie," he commented. "Except for that." He nodded toward the control panel.
"I chose the decor for its ambience of complacent respectability, far pleasanter than bare, functional collapsed-matter," Frumpkin replied lazily. "As for the Big Board, it is of course a necessity. And you will call me 'Lord of All'."
"I doubt it," Lafayette said. "As soon as your keepers find you, you'll be back in a padded cell."
"There's no need to be rude," the Lord of All complained. "I've told you I brought you here for a nice chat, after which we shall no doubt have agreed on a mutually satisfactory division of spheres of influence. I'm quite willing to go half-and-half with you, so long as my half is the larger." He finished his drink and put down the empty glass beside the radio, which he absent-mindedly switched on.
"Seem like to me, Brudder Andy," a resonant baritone voice said amid static, "you is jest temporaciously regusted wid de taxicab business. But when de Kingfish tell you about how we gonna redisorganize, you goin' be singin' anudda choon."
"I indulge you, boy, out of admiration for your ingenuity, no more," the Frumpkin lookalike said grandly.
"Where's Daphne?" O'Leary demanded, rising abruptly to confront his host, who stood his ground, looking a trifle uneasy.
"That silly alibi again," Frumpkin commented and flopped his arms as one despairing of reasonableness. "Think, Sir Lafayette!" he urged. "Once you've made your peace with me, you'll have second choice of all the wonders in all the worlds that are or might have been!"
O'Leary himself was surprised to see his left fist shoot out in a straight jab to the middle of the fellow's smug face. Frumpkin went down on his back, bleating. Heads turned. O'Leary saw Chuck of Chuck-and-Chick take a quick look and busy himself with lighting a cigar. Sheriff Tode took a step his way and abruptly changed his mind, pausing to engage in conversation with Mickey Jo. Her cowgirl outfit was badly stained, but her hairdo was in place. Neither looked directly at him. Only Marv came forward, and with an apologetic look at Lafayette, bent over the furious Frumpkin and helped him to his feet.
"Don't waste your sympathy on that skunk, Marv," O'Leary said disparagingly. "He's the one who's responsible for all the problems we've been having. Where've you been, anyway? I lost you in the crowd back in Mudville."