"And that was that. My dearest Angelina was there and whisked us back here and you know the rest."
"Well, well, well!" Coypu said when I had finished, jumping to his feet with excitement and pacing back and forth.
"Now we know what he is doing and how he is doing itwe just don't know what he is doing it for."
"Perhaps you know, Professor, but some of us are still in the dark." "It's all so obvious." He stopped pacing and raised a didactic finger. "Heaven is the seat of all of his activities, we can be sure of that now. It matters not in the slightest where the mineral is mined. Because it was brought to Heaven after you and the male slaves extracted it from the ground. Dropped through an interuniversal field to end up in Heaven where it is ground finely and bombarded in a cyclotron—" "A what?"
"A cyclotron, that is the machine that you saw in the tunnel. Your description was quite apt, even if in your ignorance you did not know what you were looking at. It is an ancient and rather clumsy bit of research apparatus that is not used much anymore. It is basically a very large, circular tube that has all the air inside evacuated. Then ions are pumped in and whirled around and around through the tube, held in orbit away from the tube walls by electromagnets. After building up tremendous speeds the ions smash into a metallic target."
"Why?"
"My good friend, how did you manage to obtain an education without studying basic science in school? Any first—year student would remember the simple fact that if you bombard platinum with neon ions you obtain element a hundred and four, called unnilquadium. It follows, obviously, that if you hit lead isotopes with a beam of chromium you will obtain unnilsextium." "What is that?"
"A transuranic element. In the Stone Age of physics there were believed to be only ninety—eight elements, the heaviest of which was uranium. As new ones were discovered they were named, we think, after household gods. Curium after the god of medicine who cures disease, that sort of thing. Anyway, after the discovery of mendelevium, nobelium—and such, the elements were numbered in an ancient and lost language. One hundred and four is unnilquadium, one hundred and five unnilquintium and so forth. Slakey has created a new element, much further up the atomic number table I am sure. It is obviously generated in very small quantities and comes out of the cyclotron still mixed with the original ore. Machines cannot detect it or they would have been used for this onerous task. But obviously women, and not men, can find it. Angelina will tell us more about that…"
"About what?" she asked. Making a glorious entrance in a green space juniper that went beautifully with her now red—gold hair.
"What were you and the other women looking for in the grit?" I asked. "I have no idea."
"But exactly what were you doing?"
"An interesting phenomenon. All the bits of sand and gravel looked exactly alike. But some of the grains, when you touched them they felt—slow? No, that's not right, perhaps the other grains felt faster. It's almost impossible to describe. But once felt never forgotten."
"Entropy," Coypu said firmly. "That's Slakey's special field of research. I am certain now that he is producing particles with different entropy"
"Why?"
"That is what we will have to find out."
"How?" I asked. Puzzled, bothered and bewildered.
"You will find a way, you always do," Angelina said, patting me on the arm.. Her smile turned to a frown when she looked at her filthy fingertips. "Go burn those clothes," she ordered. "Then wash until your skin glows, then wash some more."
I went willingly, well aware now of the stench, itch and scratch of my battered body. In the guest suite a burst of flame in the bathroom burner incinerated my clothing. I punched for antiseptics as well as soap in the bath, sank with a sigh under the warm water with a weary whew..
Woke up drowning as my nose slipped beneath the surface. Hawked and spat out water; I must have fallen asleep. My body was giving me a message that I was happy to receive. Dried and dusted I went on all fours into the bedroom, crawled dizzily into bed and knew nothing more.
Angelina and I were having a relaxed drink before dinner. The twins and Sybil were off somewhere, while the professor was busy in his laboratory. We had a few moments alone.
"Any particular way you would like me to kill Slakey in Heaven?" I asked. "Messy and painful. Though he wasn't really that awful to me. But he was an irritating, fat old git. Cackling with joy when the surgicalbot cut out the implant. Painless really, just messy. He couldn't have cared less after that. I was just another woman for his slave labor at the tables. That terrible one—eyed robot grabbed me—now that is one piece of rusty iron I intend to dispatch personally—and took me off to the sorting place. One of the other women let me touch a grain she had found and that was that. Unlike those other poor creatures I knew that I could leave at any time, so it wasn't too awful. I also knew that you would be making a breakout from somewhere somehow as soon as you could, so I didn't mind waiting. I worked along with the others until I saw you and your friend running away from the robot. That was when I decided that it would be better if we all came back here."
Better! Not a word of complaint about what she had gone through to rescue me. My angel, my Angelina! Words could not express my gratitude, but some fervid kisses did get the message across. We separated when Coypu arrived. I ordered him his favorite cocktail while Angelina went out to do whatever women do when their hair is mussed.
"A question, if you please, Professor."
"What?" He sipped and smacked his lips happily.
"How are you doing with that little difficulty you hadabout not being able to send machines through between the universes? You will recall that when we went to Hell the only weapons that worked were salamis."
"I do recall it—and that is why I instantly tackled the problem. It is solved. An energy cage protects any object you wish from the effects of transition. You have an idea?"
"I certainly do. You will remember that my son James hypnotized that old devil Slakey in Hell."
"Unhappily, unsuccessfully. He was too insane to be questioned easily. And there wasn't enough time to do more."
"What if you had him or any other of the Slakeys here?"
"No problem at all then. We have highly skilled psychologists who work with computerized probes that can track thought processes down through all the levels of the brain. Mental blocks can be removed, traumas healed, memories accessed. But we don't have him here or any of the others. And the one in Hell. We know that he has been there too long. He will die if he is moved out."
"I know—and I'm not suggesting that. Now run your mind back to the adventurous past. You must recall the time war when the Special Corps was almost destroyed?"
"Was destroyed!" He shivered and sipped. "You restored us to reality when you won the war. Shan't forget that."
"Anything to help a friend. But what I am interested in now is the time fixator. The machine you built when reality was getting weaker and people were popping out of existence. You told me that as long as a person remembered who he was he was safe from the effects of the time attack. So you put together the machine that records the memories of an individual and feeds them back every three milliseconds."
"Of course I remember the time fixator—since I invented it. We have plenty in stock now. Why?"
"Patience. Then you will also remember that I took your memories with me~ Then, when I had to move back through time again, I let your memories take over my body to build a time helix, the time—traveling machine that is also your invention."