"You mean, 'raf—' " Lafayette was cut off in midword by Nicodaeus' hand clapped over his mouth.
"Never speak the Words of Power lightly, Lafayette," he said severely, then removed his hand and used it to pat Lafayette's shoulder. "Your pardon, my boy. I know you've been through a lot."
"So has Daph!" Lafayette cut in. "And Roy and Bother, too, for that matter! I've got to get back to Daphne—you have to help rne! Roy told me he and his boys had planted something called a transfer box or something back here in the lab—the real lab, I mean." He looked up: The gilded skeleton was not in its accustomed place. "No skeleton," Lafayette told himself. "That's OK, because it was taken down right after the first time I was here."
"Umm," Nicodaeus agreed. "Trifle too much, eh, lad? But let us remain calm. Transfer box: just where did Roy install it? Useful gadget, if it is indeed present."
"We'd better hurry, Al," O'Leary said tensely. "That bubble's getting smaller by the second, and Daph's probably being squashed between Marv and Frumpkin!"
"To be sure," Allegorus replied mildly. "A happier fate than those two deserve." The hooded man paused thoughtfully, then spoke soberly:
"Understandably enough, Lafayette, you've expressed bafflement as to the motivation behind your persistent persecution ..."
"In other words," Lafayette shot back hotly, "why does this big shot—Marv or Frumpkin or whoever— have it in for me? I'd like to know!"
"Consider, Lafayette," Nicodaeus said soothingly. "Here we have a petty fellow who comes to a great realization. Performing menial labor in the Prime Probability Laboratory, he became aware in time that the forces being monitored there, the great basic flows which energize the fluctuation of any given alternative among the three states, could, if properly—or improperly in this case—manipulated, bring into actualization those elements of potentiality most conducive to the aggrandizement of his own ego-gestalt."
"What are these 'three states'?" O'Leary asked humbly.
"Why, you can deduce them for yourself, Lafayette. Consider: Reality is. Being reality, it is not subject to change." Allegorus paused significantly. "Consider," he went on. "While reality is immutable, our perception thereof is constantly undergoing modification. Any real event, artifact, or phenomenon, while existing eternally, can be perceived serially in anticipation, experience, and retrospect. This shifting viewpoint is the basis of the construct we call time. Now, time comprises, in its entirety, the past and the future. The plane of intersection of these two great realms, the zero-duration interface we call the present, persisting for no length of time, clearly has no 'real' existence. It is analogous to a line bisecting a plane, or indeed a plane which intersects a three-dimensional volume. It is merely a location, not an artifact." Allegorus pulled out the endless paper strip from a computer printout station on the counter-top. "Now, my boy," he said as he took a pair of shears from a drawer, "if I snip this strip in twain"—so saying he clipped the paper across —"every molecule, analogous to elemental units of reality, remains a part of one piece of paper or the other. The past"— he indicated the paper left on the roll—"or the future." He tapped the other loosly flapping end. "There is no paper between them. The cut—the present moment—is only a position on the seamless fabric of past/future."
"Fine," Lafayette agreed impatiently. "But let's do something."
"I'm getting to it, lad," Allegorus said soothingly. "It is, after all, a rather heavy realization with which you are about to be confronted, and it can't be simply dumped on you all unprepared."
"I'm prepared to do whatever I have to do to get Daphne out of that hole," Lafayette rapped out. "If there really is anything I can do ..."he finished doubtfully.
"There is, Lafayette," Nicodaeus reassured him. "Very well. Considering the fallacious nature of the conviction we all hold that only now is real, and the only reality, it should be clear to you that while in nature the flow of entropic energy must follow some specific course, there is no predetermined pattern which must of necessity be followed. Water will surely run downhill, but by precisely what path is a matter of random in-determinability. Thus, a pebble placed to block a potential outlet—a new channel cut across the route—and the trickle will be diverted. So it is with the realization of one chosen actuality among the myriad potentialities. Reality is, after all, not a sheet of paper. It is a book of infinitely numerous leaves, an endless library. The page we turn to is a matter of choice. With a small movement of the fingers, we can turn a page, or select another volume. So it was when our Lord Marvelous found himself free to reset the equipment in his care so as not only to monitor the entropic flow, but to redirect it. His plans were grandiose, complex—and even as he saw their fulfillment at hand, something went wrong, aborting his grand pattern, forcing the mainstream of actualization into channels not of his choosing. He took desperate measures, even altering the role of spontaneous conversion of energy to protons in the general area to which he had tentatively traced the mysterious counterforce. Inevitably, the new matter thus generated coagulated into galaxies, in turn influencing adjacent galaxies, all of course on the locus where he imagined his rival existed. Local observers who noted the resultant phenomenon of the diffuse X-ray background, attributed it to something they called bromsstrehlung, and ignored it, even as the newly created matter, created, as it must, a new galaxy."
"You mean," O'Leary cut in, "that I didn't put a new star in the constellation Ursa Major?"
"You mean Unicornis Maximus, I suppose, Lafayette," Allegorus corrected gently. "My boy, the Great Unicorn has been well-known from antiquity. It is in only a few anomalous loci that Marv's galaxy-building eliminated C-51, thereby producing the pattern usually called the Great Wain, or wagon. See for yourself." Allegorus/Nicodaeus indicated the sky visible through the open French doors to the balcony. There, upside down against blackness, he saw the familiar Great Bear.
"It's not there!" he blurted. "There's no horn for the unicorn!"
"In any case, Lafayette, it was Lord Marvelous, and not you, who tampered with the stars in the sky. You saw the results in the aborted loci to which your recent travels took you: the presence of a new major galaxy relatively near at hand—only twenty million lights distant, and thus an intruder in the Local Group—had massive repercussions in our familiar Milky Way, which perforce was distorted in response to the gravitational pull of the newly created universe. This distortion placed Sol in unexampled juxtaposition to a minor sun we may call Nova Centauri, at a distance of only a fractional light; thus the Solar System was perturbed and forced to strike a new equilibrium. Luna was thrust from its orbit by the approach of Ceres to within half a million miles of Sol, and began to fall, passed within Roche's Limit, and disintegrated. Thus the spectacular phenomena you saw during your sojourn in that clump of loci—and of course, in some loci the effects were even more drastic. You drifted for a while in matterless space, Lafayette, on a locus where Earth herself had fallen into the sun. Luckily, your passage in half-phase did not expose you to the local influences, to which you owe your survival. Ajax will be embarrassed to learn that it was due only to a malfunction of one of their devices that reality as we know it was preserved—or will be—as soon as we face up to the moment of truth. Are you ready, my boy?"
"Ready?" Lafayette echoed incredulously. "I don't know what you're talking about! What's all this stuff got to do with getting Daph out of that trap?"