There was one more possibility, he reminded himself, sternly rejecting hopelessness: the most important item of all—the special telephone to Central, in the cabinet beside the door. He turned to it, ready to utter a cry of relief, but instead he groaned. The door of the compartment had been ripped from its hinges, and the interior was empty but for a scattering of dust and a number of bits of waste paper. A stub of wire, rudely hacked short, projected from the cabinet wall near one corner.
Aha! This was more like the old O'Leary luck. He could scrape the insulation away, cross the bare wires, and tap out an SOS. Surely some on-the-ball operator at Central would get the message, trace it, and—
"Move not, on your life!" A harsh voice called so close to O'Leary's ear that he uttered a yelp and started violently. Hard hands grabbed his arms, half-supporting, half-restraining him. He considered stamp-kicking the man behind him, but upon seeing the other man, in front of him, he chose discretion.
Chapter Three
Fists on hips, clad in a close-fitting outfit of black trimmed with silver, a large businesslike handgun in his fist, stood a man only half a head shorter than Lafayette's six-one, his face thrust forward to bring its expression of hostility within an inch of O'Leary's own features. It was the face from the dream.
"Caught you red-handed, simpleton!" the familiar voice barked. "Did you actually imagine you could commit these outrages against the august peace and security of Reality Prime with complete impunity? Saucy rogue, eh, Chief, thus to bait Belarius in his very den?" The stranger's gaze went past O'Leary's shoulder to the man behind him.
"Did you say 'Belarius'?" Lafayette croaked.
"So, you recognize the name of the fabled Scourge of Scoundrels, eh?" Suddenly Lafayette was spun from behind.
"You're not Belarius," he blurted, nose-to-nose with a stocky fellow, also in black-and-silver uniform and gun, his outfit also trimmed with black-and-gold tracings at the wrist and collar.
"You picked the wrong name, wise guy!" O'Leary went on hotly. "I happen to know Belarius personally, even if he is a big shot; in fact, I was instrumental in getting him out of a serious scrape once. He's a big fellow —six inches taller than you, at least, with these really piercing blue eyes, blue like a cave of ice, and a beak on him like an eagle; not that he's not a distinguished-looking old boy—and he's lots older than you. Go on, kid me some more ..."
"The description you offer is that of my grandfather's grandfather, Belarius I," the self-styled Belarius said coldly. "Is your remarkable longevity another trivial detail to be dismissed with a wave of the hand?"
"I'm not really three hundred and thirty-one years old," Lafayette replied with dignity. "That is, maybe I was born three hundred and thirty-one years ago, but I've only lived thirty-one years."
"So, having been cut down in your boyhood, you rose from the grave after three centuries to resume your mischievous ways, is that it?" the imposter demanded sarcastically.
"That's not what I said!" O'Leary yelled. "Don't start trying to put me in one of those dumb false positions again! I'm Sir Lafayette O'Leary, and I know you're not Belarius!"
"Am I not?" the fellow replied coolly. "That would come as a great shock to my lady mother, who reared me as the fifth of that ilk."
"Oh, I forgot this is three hundred years later," O'Leary gobbled, his sarcasm lost on his impassive captor. "You can let go my arm now; I won't fall down. But that was quite a shock, having you creep up on me in this spooky place. How did you fellows get in here?"
"Rather tell me how you gained ingress to the Sealed Chamber," Belarius demanded, releasing O'Leary.
"And why, as well," his partner chimed in from behind. "What sought you here which was worth the forfeit of your existence out to eight parameters from your native locus?"
"Locus? You know about loci?" Lafayette babbled in relief. "So you must be from Central, right? You discovered something awful had happened to Artesia, and they sent you out to investigate, right? Boy oh boy, am I glad to see you!"
"A defense of insanity will avail you naught, wit-told!" Belarius snorted. "As for Central, be assured that it is four levels of command inferior to Reality Prime, and that regardless of what chicaneries with which you may have deluded petty Central, your career of crimes against reality has now come to an end!"
"I didn't do anything, fellows," O'Leary protested wearily. "For once, I'm really innocent. I was just sitting in the garden admiring the stars with Mrs. O'Leary—I mean, Countess O'Leary, Daphne, my wife, you know, and all of a sudden—"
"Yes?" Belarius prompted, "go on."
"All of a sudden it was raining; and that's strange because I had just been reflecting that, from locus to locus, the weather never changes, even when everything else does."
"You may as well confess all, Mr. 'O'Leary', as you have the effrontery to style yourself."
"I didn't style myself," Lafayette objected. "That's the name they gave me at the orphanage. In honor of Mrs. Beldame O'Leary, the founder, you know. And there's nothing to confess," he added. "What is it you think I've done, anyway?"
"The primary charge," Belarius said coldly, "is that you did willfully and with malice aforethought commit an act or acts of the third level of malfeasance, thereby creating an anomaly of Category Ultimate, the full repercussions of which act or acts having not yet been manifested. Shall I go on?"
"No. Go back," O'Leary suggested. "What's the third level of whateveritis, and what does Category Ultimate mean?"
"It means, quite simply," Belarius said harshly, "that you have forfeited whatever claim to continued existence you may have had. You're under arrest, and will be taken at once to a designated holding locus and there terminated."
"He means killed," the other man contributed, "all in compliance with the Code, of course. It's quite a coup for His Lordship: he deduced you'd be here—and we've caught you red-handed."
"I never heard of this code of yours," Lafayette stated flatly.
"Ignorance of the law is no excuse," Belarius quoted. "But you could hardly have failed to notice the class-AA security barrier around the Chamber, or the crack regiment of guards patroling the area, or the prominently posted notices reading 'NO ENTRY', to say nothing of the type-Z combination lock on the door itself, all of which you somehow broached. Now, it will be of some interest to know how you did it, never mind 'why?' for the moment. Begin with the steel-and-concrete legtraps. The Chief of Security assured me personally that they were impassable. How did you pass them?"
"I didn't notice 'em," O'Leary said. "Where are they? Must be so well camouflaged they're invisible as well as ineffective."
"What of the Guards regiment, then? Do you claim to have slipped past the alert sentries of the most highly honored organization in the entire Service?"