"Is that right, mister?" Marv demanded of the no longer dignified Frumpkin, who was dabbing at the blood on his lip. "Is that what you told him?" Marv insisted. Behind him, Trog was making his way forward in haste, looking distressed.
"Hold on there, Marv," he called ahead. "I thought I tole you and Omar to consider yerselfs under house arrest!" Marv turned to look coldly at his whiskery boss. "Don't push it, milord," he said in a deadly tone. Trog responded by turning aside to join a conversational group including Dr. Smith, still in her starched whites, talking to a man of oriental appearance, and Special Ed. But his eyes searched in vain for a glimpse of the Lady Henriette.
"Some guest list," he said shortly to Frumpkin when the Prime agent had resumed his position facing Lafayette but out of range of left jabs now. "It's pretty clear that you were herding me every'step of the way," Lafayette went on. "And you had these people of yours planted to intercept me. Why? I think before this farce goes any furthur, we'd better clear up that point."
"As I've already told you, dear boy," Frumpkin began in an unctuous tone, "I acknowledge your expertise; you've unleashed forces which even I"—he paused to glance toward his guests, now busily chattering again as if no episode of violence had marred the tranquillity of the gathering—"skills which I admire, and indeed wish to learn from you. Do you have a drink, lad, and let's discuss way and means."
"Where is she?" was O'Leary's only response.
Frumpkin fluttered his hands. "Pray believe me, Lafayette, I haven't the faintest idea."
O'Leary shook his head. "Nope," he said. "I don't believe you."
"I have never so much as set eyes on this Daphne person," Frumpkin said loftily.
"You jostled her coming through the door of the lab not more than an hour ago," Lafayette stated flatly. Frumpkin threw up his hands.
"Dear boy, that was the Lady Henriette in the Hill, with her serving-wench, one Betty Brassbraid."
"Sure," Lafayette agreed. "I still want to talk to her. But you seem to forget that here in your gray room you call her 'Dame Edith'."
"Wait here," Frumpkin said, his tone of command once more in working order. Without awaiting O'Leary's response, he turned and made his way briskly across the wide room. Once more, Lafayette examined the familiar faces among those present. Of all those he had encountered in his wanderings since the sudden shower in the palace garden, only Duke Bother-Be-Damned, it seemed, was nowhere to be seen.
—and Roy, O'Leary told himself. He took out the flat-walker and held it to his ear:
"... Alpha Relay, via Forward Station Ten," a tiny voice whispered. "Kindly come in, whoever you are, Raf trass spintern!"
"Raf trass spoit," Lafayette said softly. "Get Roy on the line, quick!"
A different voice responded: "This is your Plane Supervisor. May I help you?"
"Where's Roy?" Lafayette demanded.
"Kindly speak up," the supervisor said sharply. "I have in excess of ten-to-the-thirtieth Roys listed. To which do you refer?"
"OK, Slim," Roy's more audible voice cut in. "What happened? We started through, and—zap!—there I was in ultraspace, alone! But—maybe I got it! Slim, I'm glad you're OK enough to talk, but did you maybe not orient the flat-walker precisely like it says in the brochure? You gotta realize Ajax can't accept no responsibility if the unit is not used as directed. Says so right in the guarantee."
"I don't know, Roy," O'Leary came back impatiently. "But don't worry, I'm not planning to sue. Listen, every so often I get snagged by Frumpkin into a place I call the gray room. His HQ, it seems. Right now he's staging some sort of convention. Everybody's here but Bother. Can you get your strongarm squad in here to nab Frumpkin in a hurry?"
"Don't worry, Bother's OK. He's here, in fact, putting away a stack o' flapjacks higher'n me. I don't know about the squad; you're almost out o' range, Slim, right outside the whole of explored space-time! Fact is, I'm surprised we even got the voice link—" With those words, his voice dwindled amid rising static.
"See here," Frumpkin said sharply. O'Leary looked up; the Man in Black was back, confronting him in challenging fashion, two troglodytic men in waiter's togs at his side.
"I've lost patience with you," Frumpkin snapped. "You will now give me your complete cooperation, or I shall simply destroy you. Now, speak up!"
"You're a lousy liar," O'Leary told the irate autocrat. "You pretend I just stumbled around after I met you burgling the old lab—or whatever you were doing there—but it's pretty clear now I was herded every step of the way. Every time I almost broke the pattern, one of your boys or girls was on hand to nudge me back in line." O'Leary's eyes went past Frumpkin to the crowd. "Look at 'em," he added. "What is this, a convention of your hirelings?"
Frumpkin dismissed the question with a flip of his well-manicured hand. "After all, lad," he murmured unctuously, "when one can call on unlimited resources, why be stingy? It's true my cadres are extensive; but, far from docilely following my wishes, as you suggest they forced you to do, you repeatedly committed a curious act which cut across my complex pattern of causality, plunging my carefully constructed scenario into confusion! At last my experts were able to learn that it was at moments when you, ah—to employ your own curious term—'focused the Psychical Energies', that my control of Destiny itself was broken. But"—Frumpkin paused to look triumphant—"they furthur established that it was also at precisely those moments that you were vulnerable to my own Prime Directive!"
"No bull?" Lafayette said contemptuously. "Professor Schimmerkopf didn't mention that part."
"I have also investigated this Professor Doktor Hans Josef Schimmerkopf, late of the University of Leipzig and the Homeopathic Institute of Vienna, in an obscure locus now forever dissolved both into the past and into the quasinothingness of the unrealized. He and all his works no longer exist and never did!"
"Too bad," Lafayette said carelessly. "I was going to write his estate a fan letter."
"You dare to jape at this, the crucial contretemps of all the cosmos?" Frumpkin demanded savagely. "Almost I incline to believe that you are indeed no more than an ignorant blunderer with an uncanny knack for precisely that paradoxical behavior which alone can seem to set my plans at naught. I say 'seems' because of course, in the end, I shall prevail!"
"You say Prof Schimmerkopf never existed?" O'Leary queried, unmoved by Frumpkin's outburst. "That has to mean that the locus he was a part of never existed, because without him it would be a different locus. And it follows that Colby Corners never existed, nor I— since he was on record in the local library, and he changed the course of my life. And if I never existed, then ... who am I?" He glared at Frumpkin, who smiled sleekly.
"You begin to see the magnitude of the problem, lad. Your one chance is to attach your trifling destiny to the great engine of my own fate, and then to refute the unacceptable. But I'm wasting time." Frumpkin turned to wave a hand, and at once the cocktail-sipping crowd begain to drift away. O'Leary noticed Marv standing nearby. Noticing Lafayette's eye on him, Marv came over and looked curiously at Frumpkin.
"Now what, Al?" he inquired genially. "I guess this is the like showdown, eh? I heard what His Nibs here was saying, about how it was you or him. But where does that leave me?" He looked more keenly at the haughty Man in Black.
"What you got in mind for a honest fellow like myself?" he asked in an edged tone. Frumpkin waved him aside. "Later, my man," he said coolly.
While the two talked, O'Leary again put the flat-walker to his ear.
"—outside our jurisdiction, Slim," Roy's voice peeped faintly. "We got one chance: Focus the Psychical Energies one more time, and I can get a hard fix and rotate a strong-arm gang in there fast. Maybe—"