"I had a quick look at him," I said. "It couldn't have been, but.."
James nodded solemnly. "I could see him very clearly. It was Professor Slakey—with a bandage on the stump of his right wrist."
"Then who, who—?" I said, doing a stunned owl imitation.
"Who was at the controls, you mean? Who sent you to Hell and brought you back? That was also Professor Slakey. Working the controls with his good right hand."
"I have more news," I said. "There is a bright—red, long tailed and behorned Slakey in Hell."
The silence got longer and longer as we considered the implications, or lack of them, in this information, until Sybil spoke. "James whistle for the waiter if you please. Order up a bottle of something a bit stronger for the next round."
Nobody argued with that. Everything had happened so fast—and so incomprehensibly—that I had trouble puffing my thoughts together. Then memory struck hard.
"Angelina? Where is she?"
"Not in Hell," James said. "That was the first question I asked Marablis when I put him under. He admitted that much under stress. Fought bard not to answer where she was, almost surfaced from the trance. I put him deep under to bring you two back from Hell. When you were back safe I was going to press him really hard for an answer. But—you know what happened. Sorry..
"No sorry!" I shouted happily. "Angelina is not dead—but has been sent somewhere. Maybe Heaven. We'll find out. Meanwhile, you got us back. Sorry is not the word to use. We'll have to try and work out what happened, what all these puzzles and paradoxes mean. But not right now. There are two things that we must urgently do now. We have to get help. And we've been compromised enough. Slakey knew about Sybil and me when he knocked us out. Now he knows the whole family is after him. He might try and fight back so we have to stay away from the hotel room. Andwe must contact the Special Corps at once."
"All I need is a phone," Sybil said. "I have a local contact number that will be spliced through directly to Inskipp." "Perfect. We outline what has happened. Tell him to order a tight guard around that church. No one is to go either in or out. Then tell him to get Professor Coypu here soonest. Anyone who can build a working time machine as well as many other scientific miracles certainly ought to be able to figure out just what is going on with these Hell and Heaven machines. We'll stay out of sight until the professor has arrived—along with the Space Marines. Never forget—we have been to Hell and we came back. We're going to find Angelina and get her back with us the same way."
I suppose that I should have enjoyed the days of forced relaxation at the Vaska Hulja Holiday Heaven, but I had too much to worry about. Always lurking behind all the pleasures of swimming and sunbathing, drinking and eating, was the knowledge that Angelina was still missing. There was some reassurance in the fact that her kidnappers had admitted that she was alive, though not where she was. Small consolation; she was still gone and that could not be denied. A dark memory that would not go away. I knew that the twins shared these feelings, because behind all the horseplay and vying for Sybil's attention was that same memory. I would catch a bleakness of expression when one of them did not know he was being watched.
Nor was it all fun and games. We went to work. The first thing that we had done after checking into this hotel, with false identities, was to list everything we knew, had seen, had experienced. None of it seemed to make sense—yet we knew that it must. We forwarded all of this material to the Special Corps where, hopefully, wiser heads than ours might make sense of it.
They did. Or it did, a wiser head I mean. Our little trip to Hell seemed to have had a scrambling effect on my brain so at times my thoughts would dribble away. I also kept looking in mirrors to see if I was turning red. After awhile I stopped doing this but I still felt the base of my spine when I was showering to see if I was growing a tail. Disconcerting. This feckless state of affairs ended next morning when I came down early for breakfast and saw a familiar figure at our table.
"Professor Coypu—at last!" I called out in glad greeting. He smiled briefly with his buckteeth popping out between his lips like yellowed gravestones.
"Ahh, Jim, yes. You're looking fit, skin tanned but not red. Any signs of a tail?"
"Thank you, no, I have been keeping track. And you?"
"Fine, fine. On my way here I examined the remains of the destroyed machines at the church and have analyzed all your notes, examined the clothing you wore in Hell, thank you. It all seems fairly straightforward."
"Straightforward~ I see nothing but confusion and obfuscation where you..
"See the forest as well as the trees. I can inform you in full confidence that inventing the temporal helix for my time machine was much more difficult." His teeth snapped off a piece of toast and he chewed it with quick rodent—like enthusiasm.
"You wouldn't care to chop some of that metaphorical wood for me—would you?"
"Yes, of course." He patted his lips with his napkin, giving his protruding teeth a surreptitious polish at the same time. "As soon as I discovered that Jiving Justin was involved in this matter, the shape of future things to come became clear."
"Jiving Justin7' I burbled with complete lack of comprehension.
"Yes," he cackled, flashing his teeth at me. "That's what we used to call him at university."
"Who, who?" I was in owl overdrive again.
"Justin Slakey. He used to play the slide trombone in our little jazz quartet. I must admit to being fairly groovy myself on the banjo as well." "Professor! The point of it all, please—would you kindly return to it?"
"Of course. Even when I first met him, Slakey was a genius. Old beyond his years—which considering the state of geriatrics might have been far older than he appeared. He took the theory of galactic strings, which as you undoubtedly know has been around as theory for a long time. No one had ever come close to tackling it until Slakey invented the mathematics to prove their existence. Even the theoretical wormtubes between galaxies were clear to him. He published some papers on these, but never put everything together into a coherent whole. At least, until now, I thought he hadn't completed his theory. It is obvious that he has."
He washed some more nibbled toast down with a quick swig of coffee. I resisted more owl imitations.
"Stop at once!" I suggested. "Start over since I haven't the slightest idea of what you are talking about."
"No reason that you should. The reality of the worm holes between one universe and another can only be described by negative number mathematics. A nonmathematical model would be only a crude approximation—"
"Then crudely approximate for me."
He chewed away, forehead furrowed in thought, unconsciously brushing away a strand of lank hair that floated down in front of his eyes~ "Crudely put.
"Yes?"
Very crudely put, our universe is like a badly cooked fried egg. In a pan of equally badly cooked and stringy eggs." Breakfast had obviously inspired this imagery; I had eaten the eggs here before. "The frying pan represents space—time. But it must be an invisible frying pan since it has no dimensions and cannot be measured. Are you with me so far?"
"Yoke and all."
"Good. Entropy will always be the big enemy. Everything is running down, cooling down towards the heat death of the universe. If entropy could be reversed the problem would be easy to solve. But it cannot. But—" This was a big but since he raised an exclamatory finger and tapped his teeth. "But although entropy cannot be reversed, the rate of entropic decay can be measured and displayed, only by mathematics of course, and can be proven to proceed at a different rate in different universes. You see the importance of this?"
"No."
"Think! If the rate of entropy in our universe were faster than the rate of entropy in universe X, let us say. Then to a theoretical observer in that universe our universe would appear to be decaying at a great rate. Right?"