“Um. Probably no one working at this time, no late shift, but at least I can get an idea of what the place is like, as long as I’m here.” He mentally kicked himself for taking off in such a flurry of desire to solve the riddle of the fortune papers. “I should have waited till reasonable working hours, tomorrow morning. Ah, well...”
He walked across the street, stepping quickly in and out of the smudge of light thrown by a lone, remarkably, unshattered street lamp. Henry glanced nervously behind him.
Far off, back the way they had come, he could see the rapidly disappearing taillights of the taxi.
“Why the devil didn’t I ask him to wait?” Henry had no answer for himself, though one did, in fact, exist: the mindclouding power of curiosity. Now he would have to walk far in the wind, the cold, the dark, to the nearest hack stand or at least an inhabited thoroughfare.
The building loomed over him. He went up to the front door. Locked solid; steel bolts welded to the frame.
“Hmm. Locked up for good.” He glanced at the dirty CONDEMNED sign beside the door. Then he muttered, “Odd,” with uncertainty, because there were fresh truck tire treadmarks in the mud of the street. The tracks led around to the rear of the warehouse. Henry found his interest in this problem mounting. Piqued, piqued, piqued. Deserted, condemned: but still getting deliveries, or pickups? Curiouser and Curiouser.
He walked around to the rear of the warehouse, following the truck tracks. They stopped beside a number of square indentations in the mud. “Somebody left a bunch of crates here.”
He looked around. The rear of the building bulked uglier than the front-if that was possible. All but one of the windows was boarded, and that one...
Henry realized he was looking at light streaming through the window, there on the top floor. It was blanked out for a moment, then came back. As though someone had walked in front of it. But that light’s in the ceiling, Henry thought wildly. I can see the edge of the fixture from here. How can anyone walk in front of it?
His wonderment was cut short by still further signs of activity in the building. A circular opening in the wall next to the window-quite dark and obviously a pipe-shaft of some sort-was emitting large puffs of faintly phosphorescent green fog.
“There’s someone up there,” Henry concluded, ever the rocket scientist.
The Urge rose in Henry Leclair once more. The problem thumped and bobbed in his mind. Curiosity, now a tsunami, had utterly overwhelmed even the tiniest atoll of caution and self-preservation. You’re the one, you say? You’d better believe it because here I come!
He carefully examined the rear of the building. No doors. But a first floor window was broken, and the boards were loose. As quietly as possible, he disengaged the nails’ grip on the sill, and prized the boards off. Dragging two old crates from the dumpster across the alley, Henry stacked them, and climbed into the building. Curious is, as curious does. (Did anyone hear a cat being killed?)
It was pitch, night, ebony, lusterless, without qualification dark inside. Henry held his pipe lighter aloft and rasped it, letting the flame illuminate the place for a few seconds.
Broken crates, old newspapers, cobwebs, dust. The place looked deserted. But there had been the light from above.
He sought out the elevator. Useless. He sought out the stairs. Bricked off. He sat down on a packing crate. Annoyed.
Then the sound of glugging came to him.
Glug. Glug. And again, glug. Then a sort of washed-out, whimpery glug that even Henry could tell was a defective: Gluuuuuug!
“Plummis!” swore a voice in shivering falsetto.
Henry listened for a minute more, but no other sound came to him. “Oh, that was cursing, all right,” murmured Henry to himself. “I don’t know who’s doing it, or where it’s coming from, but that’s unquestionably someone’s equivalent of a damn or hell!” He began searching for the source of the voice.
As he neared one wall, the voice came again. “Plummis, valts er webbel er webbel er webbel...” the voice trailed off into muttered webbels.
Henry looked up. There was light shining through a ragged hole in the ceiling, very faintly shining. He stepped directly under it to assay a clearer view...
...and was yanked bodily and immediately up through many such holes in many such ceilings, till his head came into violent contact with a burnished metal plate in the ceiling of the top floor.
“Aaargh!” moaned Henry, crashing to the floor, clutching his banged head, clutching his crushed hat.
“Serves you qquasper!” the shivering falsetto voice remonstrated. Henry looked around. The room was filled with strangely-shaped machines resting on metal workbenches. They were all humming, clicking, gasping, winking and glugging efficiently. All, that is, but one, that emitted a normal glug then collapsed into a fit of prolonged gluuuuuuging.
“Plummis!” Falsetto cursing: vehemently.
Henry looked around once more. The room was empty. He glanced toward the ceiling. The unie was sitting cross-legged in the air, about six inches below the ceiling.
“You’re...” The rest of it got caught somewhere in Henry’s throat.
“I’m Eggzaborg. You’d call me a unie, if you had the intelligence to call me.”
“You’re...” Henry tried again.
“I’m invading the Earth,” he said snappishly. The unie completed the thought for Henry, even though that was not even remotely what Henry had been thinking.
Henry took a closer look at the unie.
He was a little thing, no more than two feet tall, almost a gnome, with long, knobbly arms and legs, a pointed head and huge, blue, owl-like eyes with nictitating eyelids. He had a fragile antenna swaying gently from the center of his forehead. It ended in a feather. A light blue feather. Almost robin’s egg blue, Henry thought inanely.
The unie’s nose was thin and straight, with tripartite nostrils, overhanging a tight line of mouth, and bracketed by cherubic, puffy cheeks. He had no eyebrows. His ears were pointed and set very high on his skull. He was hairless.
The unie wore a form-fitting suit of bright yellow, and pinned to the breast was a monstrous button, half the size of his chest, which quite plainly read:
CONQUEROR.
The unie caught Henry’s gaze. “The button. Souvenir. Made it up for myself. Can’t help being pompous, giving in to hubris once in a while.” He said it somewhat sheepishly. “Attractive, though, don’t you think?”
Henry closed his eyes very tightly, pressing with the heels of both hands. He wrinkled his forehead, letting his noticeably thick-lensed glasses slide down his nose just a bit, to unfocus the unie. “I am not well, “ he said, matter-of-factly. “Not well at all.”
The shivering falsetto broke into chirping laughter.
“Well enough now!” Eggzaborg chortled. “But just wait three thousand years-just wait!” Henry opened his left eye a slit. Eggzaborg was rolling helplessly around in the air, clutching a place on his body roughly where his abdomen should have been. The unie bumped lightly against the ceiling, besotted with his revelry.
A thin shower of plaster fell across Henry’s face. He felt the cool tickle of it on his eyelids and nose. That plaster, thought Henry, was real. Ergo, this unie must be real.
This is a lot like being in trouble.
“You wrote those fortunes?” Henry inquired, holding them up for the unie to see.
“Fortunes?” The unie spoke to himself. “For...ohhh! You must mean the mentality-crushers I’ve been putting in the cookies!” He rubbed long, thin fingers together. “I knew, I say, I just knew they would produce results!” He looked pensive for a moment, then sighed. “Things have been so slow. I’ve actually wondered once or twice if I’m really succeeding. Well, more than once or twice, actually. Actually, about ten or twenty million times! Plummis!”