The Galaxy Builder (2 page)

            On impulse, Lafayette uttered a low, anguished
moan, as of a spook in distress.

            "Listen! You hear that, Marv? It sounded
like maybe he's dying! Allegorus healthy is bad enough," he went on,
"but wounded—and thirsting for revenge—lemme out of here!" The sounds
of pounding feet and a brief scuffle followed.

            Satisfied with the effect, O'Leary groaned
again. More sounds of departing feet; and the chamber seemed deserted again. He
stepped boldly forth, and at once found his head enveloped in a coarse and
dusty cloth, held in place by more than one pair of hard hands. He managed to bite
a thumb, eliciting a yell of pain, but the enveloping folds were only pulled
tighter. He kicked, felt a satisfying impact against what felt like a knee,
then swung both fists in haymakers which failed to connect. Then a rope clamped
around him, both binding his arms and securing the dusty cloth tightly. He
sneezed violently.

            "Hey!" one of the coarse voices
yelped. "No sneeze-spells now, or we'll hafta clobber ya good, which ya
might never come to!"

            Desperately, Lafayette suppressed a second
sneeze, choking it down to a muffled snort. At once, a loose block of masonry
fell from the ceiling, knocking him end-over-end. He had time only for a pang
of dismay that he had somehow done it again, before all thought faded away.

            It was going to be one of those tedious dreams,
O'Leary realized, the kind where you know you're dreaming but having to go
through with it, just as if you were awake. Only this one was surrealistic:
nothing but a face, an angry—or frightened—face, yelling at him at close range,
demanding, threatening. The face of a man. The man was dressed in a drab gray
smock, Lafayette saw, and behind him in the dim gray-lit room he caught a
glimpse of Daphne.

            "Very well, then, fool!" the angry man
said clearly. "If you refuse to cooperate, I shall consign you to the
unresolved continua of your own meddlesome making. Begone!"

            O'Leary tried to lunge past him toward Daphne,
who was gone now, but he tripped and hit his head hard. He got to his feet shakily.

            He was standing—barely—supported by a man on
either side who gripped his arms with hands like C-clamps. The ache in his head
was approximately three feet in diameter, he estimated. He was back outside, he
realized, smelling the fresh night air. Dimly, through a haze of pain, he saw a
squat but mightily muscled man with bushy whiskers sitting on a broken gilt
chair before him. The man was wrapped in badly cured furs. For some reason,
O'Leary had the feeling the stubby Hercules had seated himself only a moment
before. A small pink mouth opened amidst the whiskers, exposing chipped yellow
teeth.

            "Got any last words, traitor?" the
pink mouth said. "Too bad if you do," the seated man continued after
a momentary pause. "I'm Lord Trog. I got no time to listen to
excuses." The beady red eyes which went with the whiskers seemed to
O'Leary to be boring into him like hot pokers. Beyond the hacked-out clearing
he stood in were some woods and, in the background, the pale silhouette of a
ruined tower. He returned his attention to Lord Trog.

            "You shoulda never of came out,
hotshot," the gravelly voice went on. "Overconfidence, I guess."

            "Where's Daphne?" O'Leary blurted.
"I don't know who you are, or what you think you're doing, invading the
palace grounds and grabbing me. When the palace guard grabs
you,
you'll
wish you'd been a little more subtle."

            "Yeah, well, about the palace guard, they
took the year off, see? And I don't know no Daphne." The squat man paused
to poke a grimy finger into what O'Leary assumed was an ear, buried somewhere
within the nearly spherical mass of untrimmed, greasy-looking hair which
enveloped the fellow's head.

            "Sounds like a dame," Trog added
indifferently. "Boys," he turned his attention to one of the men
holding O'Leary's arms, "boys, you seen any strange dames around the place
lately?"

            "Seen no dames at all, Chief," the
fellow replied. "No dames, no booze, no smokes, no card games—we don't get
to have no fun at all. Never figgered I was ennerin a monastery when I joined
up."

            "That will do, Marv," the Chief
grunted. His eyes flicked to the other man beside O'Leary.

            "You, Omar? Any complaints? By the way, put
Marv in irons at once, in the lower dungeon."

            "Who, me, Chief?" Omar replied in
tones of astonishment. "Why, no, sir, I'm perfectly content, just a loyal
retainer glad to do his job. Do I really hafta stick old Marv down the hole? I
mean, maybe he was just kidding, like."

            The bearded man fumbled inside his furs, brought
out a gray plastic object the size of a cigarette pack, and pressed a button on
it as he brought it to his mouth.

            "Top Dog to Pup One, over," he
muttered. "Come in, Pup One. OK, skip the routine, but get the duty hit
squad over here pronto. Over."

            "Hey, boss, I was onney kidding
around." Omar protested. "Me and Marv, we're nothing if not
true-blue—" His protests were cut off abruptly as three louts in ragged
blue knee-breeches and faded pink-and-yellow jackets with chapped elbows showing
through the patches arrived on the scene, ominously clacking the actions of
short-muzzled machine pistols.

            "These here bums, Chief?" the foremost
of the trio inquired, eyeing Marv and Omar dubiously. "Or this one?"
He swiveled to cover Lafayette, who at once began mentally reviewing Professor
Doktor Hans Josef Schimmerkopf's instructions for Focusing the Psychical
Energies:

            "... whilst at all times aware of the
distinction between the outer, or objective Reality and the inner, concentrate
on those as-yet-not-realized aspects of the Scene the outcome of which remains
problematical; and by an Effort of Will, bring into Focus that eventuation most
conducive to satisfaction ..." In spite of the old boy's pompous style,
Lafayette reminded himself, his methods had worked well enough to transport him
to Artesia in the first place, and to several less desirable alternate
realities thereafter. But at the moment, all that was necessary was to divert
the whiskery fellow—

            "I'm Lord Trog and I'm the Chief Honcho
around these here parts, just in case you don't know it, Al," the whiskery
chieftain growled, squinting at O'Leary. "And I don't put up with no guys
on my trusty guard staff which they ain't trusty. So—throw 'em away,
fellows," he commanded the duty squad. "These here two
miscreants," he clarified, with a nod at Marv and Omar.

            "Don't bother to shoot 'em up much, just
yet, but a stretch in the lower dungeon will do 'em a lotta good,
discipline-wise." He waved a calloused hand in a negligent gesture.
"Take 'em away."

           
Gosh,
O'Leary thought confusedly,
it
worked, sort of! Maybe the old Psychic Energies are flowing again. That means
... well, I'm not exactly sure what it means,
he conceded,
but now that
I've got Trog's mind off having me shot, the first thing I've got to do is find
Daphne. She must have gone up those steps ...

           
"Where is the Countess?"
O'Leary demanded sternly of Lord Trog, who, he thought, bore a considerable
resemblance, under all that hair, to Yockabump, the court jester—and to Sprawnroyal
of the Acme Novelty Company. The whiskers parted in a cavernous yawn.

            "Back to that, huh?" His Lordship
grunted. He looked about him as if suspicious of eavesdroppers.

            "Level with me now, Bub, and maybe you can
save yourself some trouble—and make a better-looking corpse, too: Are you
really
the fell necromancer Allegorus, like Marv and Omar said?"

            "Where did they get that silly idea?"
O'Leary demanded.

            "Well, after all, ya
did
materialize
outa thin air yonder in the Dread Tower, din't ya?"

            "I came down the steps and they were
waiting for me," Lafayette corrected. "Anyway, what's so dread about
the Tower? It's just an old ruin." He smiled condescendingly. "I just
ducked inside to get out of the weather, as it happens. So what?"

            "You mean—you admit you were beyond the
forbidden door, up inna top o' the Tower?" His Lordship drew a ragged
circle in the air in front of him.

            "A few steps up, was all," O'Leary
explained. "You see, Daphne must have gone up there—unless Marv and Omar
got
her,
too," he amended.

            "If she did, pal, she's a goner. Too bad.
We got a like critical shortage of dames here just now. What's she look
like?"

            Lafayette indicated Daphne's graceful contours
with his hands. "Dark hair," he added. "Prettiest face in the
known universe."

            "Cheeze," Lord Trog mourned.
"Wit' them statistics, she mighta qualified for my personal favor."

            "I guess it's just as well she went
up," O'Leary concluded. "What's up there that's so scary?"

            "If you're really Allegorus, you already
know," Trog reasoned. "And if you ain't, why should I give away any
info?"

            "It might weigh in your favor at your
trial," O'Leary suggested. "What are you doing here in the palace
gardens anyway?"

            "Keepin' a eye on the Dread Tower, o'
course, Al," Trog said as one stating the obvious. "And a good thing,
it looks like, seein's you picked now to come out on one o' yer trouble-makin'
raids."

            "It appears," O'Leary said, feeling
suddenly tired, "that you're in need of psychiatric attention, milord. Why
don't you just go away quietly now, before your keepers find you; and I'll try
to smooth things over with Her Majesty—as soon as you release Daphne unharmed,
that is."

            "Sounds like a square deal, Bub," Trog
replied, showing his teeth in a wide grin. "Onney there's one little
problem area: I ain't seen no Daphne, nor not even a Piggy-Lou."

            "Stubborn, eh?" Lafayette said grimly.
"You'll sing a different tune when you're clapped in irons with the royal
PPS working you over with the latest in ballbearing joint-presses and the fully
automated hydraulic rack, not to mention the computer-controlled
foot-roasters."

            "Sure, I heard all that old jazz
before," Trog said indifferently. "But you're in a funny spot to be
threatening me wit' the attentions of a Physical Persuasion Specialist, which I
got a pretty good boy on my staff my own self. Now, cut the comedy and give me
the straight dope: Do you admit you're Allegorus the Awful, or don't ya?"

            "Maybe you'd better tell me a little more
about this fellow you're so scared of," O'Leary suggested. "Then I'll
tell you if I'm him or not."

            "Me, I'm a reasonable guy," Trog said,
indicating himself with a grimy thumb. "Maybe you just like to hear people
talk about ya, huh? Got a little ego problem, eh? Well, I'll play along:
Everybody knows he comes out every three hundred years or like that, stirs up a
bunch of trouble and then goes back inna tower for another three centuries—an'
nobody never sends in no eats or drinks, so he always comes out wit a appetite
on him like three harvest hands; and he likes beans—hu-mern beans."

            "Is that all?" O'Leary demanded
sarcastically. "Sounds like a pretty dull fellow."

            "Not when he gets wound up good, he
ain't," Trog declared defensively.

            "Anyway, I'm not him," O'Leary stated
with finality. "And even if I were, what right do you and your gang of
thugs have to interfere with the movements of a nobleman of the realm?"

            "You was seen goin' into the Dread Tower,
which nobody don't go in there except old Allegorus hisself!"

            "I was merely taking shelter from the
rain," Lafayette countered. "It was the only building in sight, so
naturally—"

            "Rain, huh? Well, Bub, you coulda picked a
better alibi. All Aphasia's been in the like grip of a drought these last six
years or more," Trog stated flatly, reaching down as he spoke to take a
pinch of dust from the ground beside his chair. He rolled it between his
gnarled fingers, letting it dribble away in a fine stream which spread and
dissipated like smoke before it reached the ground. Lafayette looked down and
saw dry mud caked on his elegant purple patent-leather court pumps, which were
firmly planted in drifted dust. Not so much as a stunted green weed testified
to the former existence of water here. Still, his shirt clung, sodden, to his
back, though the air seemed noticeably warmer now.

            "Oh, yeah?" he said in an attempt at a
casual tone. "In that case, how'd I get soaked?"

            "Marv and Omar figgered you'd fell in the
well you must have inside the tower," Trog said. "Maybe that's why
you come out—you was shook up from the misadventure which it coulda been fatal
all alone in the dark and all."