The Universe Twister (25 page)

He straightened his back. One more try. He
had
to be able to get back. It wasn't fair to get stuck here, now, after all he'd gone through! He squeezed his eyes shut, again evoking the recollection of the garden, the French doors behind him, the music of the Blatz waltz. He sniffed, recalling the scent of jasmine, the fresh fragrance of the garden, hearing the murmur of wind through the trees . . .

There was a clatter of metal, a groaning wow-wow-wow; an engine blattered into life. O'Leary stared dismally at the jalopy parked across the way; it dug off with a squeal of rubber and roared away down the street in a cloud of exhaust fumes. So much for night-blooming jasmine and the wind in the willows.

Something was wrong. Always before, when he hadn't been distracted by something like a dinosaur snapping at his heels, he'd been able to make the shift, if he just tried hard enough. But now—a total blank. It was as though his abilities had suffered a paralytic stroke. He couldn't feel so much as a tentative stir even when he focused every erg of Psychic Energy he possessed.

But there had to be
some
way. If he could only get word to Nicodaeus, tell him—

O'Leary stood stock-still, balancing a fragile idea. Nicodaeus. He had talked to him before, from the phone in the jail. And the number—it had ten digits, he remembered that . . .

He screwed his eyes shut and tried for total recall. The reek of the cell, the chill of the morning air—Artesia was unaccountably cooler than Colby Corners—the white-washed wall. The phone had been an old-fashioned one, with a brass mouthpiece. And the number—

It started with a nine . . . five three four, that was it; then a nine, two oh's, and ended with—was it two eleven? Or one one two? . . .

Lafayette looked along the street. There was a phone booth there, half a block away. He tried his pocket; it yielded a dime. He set off at a run.

The phone booth was small, cramped, of an old-fashioned design, with a folding wooden door. Inside, an ancient instrument with a brass mouthpiece and a hand crank hung crookedly from a wall thick with carved initials and frank anatomical sketches accompanied by phone numbers. He held his breath, dropped the coin, twirled the crank. There was a long silence. Then a click. Then more silence. Then a sharp ping! and a hum.

"Central," a bright voice said tinnily in his ear. "Number, please."

"Uh—nine, five, three, four, nine, oh, oh, two, one, one," Lafayette got off breathlessly.

"That number is no longer in service. Please consult your directory."

"Wait!" O'Leary yelled. "I have to talk to you!"

"Yes, sir?"

"I have to get back—back to Artesia," O'Leary gulped, rallying his thoughts. "I was there, you see. I belong there and everything was going swell; then, for no reason—here I was! And now—"

"I'm sorry, sir, where did you say you were calling from?"

"What? Why, from this phone booth—here in Colby Corners, on the corner next to the Schrumph's candy shop—what's that got—"

"An error has been made, sir. Calls from that sector are not authorized—"

"Let me talk to the supervisor!" O'Leary demanded. "It's a matter of life or . . . or exile!"

"Well . . . one moment, please."

O'Leary waited, hearing his heart pound. Half a minute passed. Then a distinguished-sounding voice said, "Yes?"

"Hello! Look, I've been the victim of some sort of mistake; I was perfectly happy there in Artesia—"

"One moment, please," the voice interrupted. Then in an aside: "Operator, this seems to be some sort of eccentric; the call originates in one of the null sectors, I note. Probably an inebriated local, dialing in by mistake. Lucky to get a line, at that. With the circuits as busy as they are, a fifty-year wait isn't uncommon."

"I'm not drunk! I wish I were!" O'Leary yelled. "Somebody listen! I'm King Lafayette the First of Artesia! This is all some terrible mistake! I want to talk to Nicodaeus! He'll tell you! Come to think of it, it's probably all his fault. He went to make his report, and he probably mixed things up and forgot to tell you I belonged there, in spite of having arrived sort of informally."

"Nicodaeus? Yes, I heard of his remarkable report, half an hour ago. You say you were involved?"

"I was there! You can't send me back here! I don't belong here! My little bride is waiting for me, my people demand their king, Yokabump needs a job, and the thought of the foundry—"

"Oh, yes, you must be the fellow Fishnet or something of the sort; quite a merry chase you led our man. Do you know you've been creating a Probability Stress of .8 for weeks now? A remarkable technique you worked out, but I'm afraid we here at Central can't let it go on. You've caused a rather severe power drain on the Cosmic Energy Source. The dinosaur alone—"

"I didn't do that! He was already there!"

"One was, true, but you seem to have brought along another. At any rate, a Suppressor has now been focused on you. It will hold you firmly in place in your present continuum. It will even eliminate all dreaming, so you can look forward to sleep uninterrupted by bothersome fantasies from now on."

"I don't want to sleep uninterrupted by fantasies! I want to go home! Back to Artesia! I belong there, don't you understand?"

"No, my dear fellow; I can understand your desire to return—a rather pleasant, though backward, locus, or so our man states in his report—but we can't have you grasshoppering about all over the continua, now can we? But thank you for your interest, and now goodby—"

"Wait! Call Nicodaeus! He'll confirm what I said!"

"I'm a busy man, Mr. Fishnet; I have a backlog—"

"If you leave me here, there'll be a . . . a Probability Stress! And with the loused-up filing system you've got, it will be forty years before you remember what's causing it. And by then, I'll be a retired draftsman, still subsisting on sardines—and no dreams!"

"Well, I'll just make a check. Hold the line, please; if you ring off, you may never get through again."

O'Leary gripped the receiver, waiting. Through the glass in the door, he saw a fat woman approach along the street, digging in her purse for a coin. She seized the door handle, yanked, then caught sight of O'Leary and gave him an indignant look.

He covered the mouthpiece. "I'll be through in a minute," he muttered, mouthing the words through the glass. The woman snapped her jaw shut and glared at him.

Another minute ticked past. There was no sound on the line but a wavering hum. The fat woman rapped on the glass. O'Leary nodded, made motions indicating that he was waiting for a reply. The woman caught the door handle, pulled it half open. "See here, you, I'm in a hurry."

He jerked the door shut, and braced a foot against it as the invading female shook it furiously.

"Come on," O'Leary muttered. "What's keeping you?"

The fat woman stalked away. O'Leary relaxed. What was that fellow on the line doing? It had been a good five minutes now. What if he never came back? A fifty-year wait, he'd said. Lafayette pictured a pert face with jet-black hair, an impish smile. Never to see her again . . . He blinked. Jet-black hair? But Adoranne was a blonde—

O'Leary turned at a sound. The fat lady was back, a large cop in tow.

"That's him!" He heard the shrill screech through the door. "Half an hour already he's been sitting there, just to spite me, not even talking. Look at him!"

The cop stooped and peered inside, looking O'Leary up and down, taking in the green doublet, the long yellow hose, the ruff at the neck, the medals, ribbons, gold chain.

"All right, you," the cop said; he hauled at the door. O'Leary braced himself, foot against the panel. The cop set himself, heaved—

The booth seemed to shimmer, faded to a smoky outline, and was gone. O'Leary fell backward off a marble bench beside the graveled walk under the towering dark trees.

He scrambled up, looked around at the palace gardens, the tall, lighted windows above the terrace, the colored lights strung around the dancing pavilion. He was back—back in Artesia!

He started across the grass at a run, emerged from a screen of shrubs and skidded to a halt. By a tinkling fountain just ahead Adoranne stood—kissing Count Alain.

O'Leary ducked back out of sight. "Alain, it's all so strange," the princess was saying. "I can't believe he's gone—just like that—without even saying goodby."

"Now, Adoranne, don't fret. I guess he meant well. But after all, he
was
some kind of warlock."

"He was fine, and noble, and brave, and I—I'll never forget him," Adoranne said.

"Certainly; I'm grateful to him for rescuing you—even if he did leave that infernal dragon eating rosebushes in the side garden. When the legend said he'd bring back the thing's hide, I never expected the dragon would still be in it."

"I'm so . . . so glad you're here, Alain." Adoranne looked up into the young count's handsome face. "You won't flit off and leave me all alone, will you?"

"Never, your Highness . . ."

The couple resumed their stroll, hand in hand. As soon as they had passed, O'Leary crept out, crossed to the terrace, went along it to a small door leading to the kitchens. Inside, a startled cook looked up.

"Shhh!" O'Leary cautioned. "I'm traveling incognito." He wound his way past the hot ranges and the tables laden with food, went out by a rear door, took the service stair to the fourth floor. There was no one in sight, here in the servants' wing. He hurried along the corridor, rounded a corner.

A chambermaid in drab gray glanced up from her dusting; O'Leary looked into the tear-reddened eyes of Daphne.

"Oh!" A breath-taking smile took the place of the girl's heartbroken expression of a moment before. "Your Majesty!" she breathed.

"Lafayette to you, girl," O'Leary said as he swept her into his arms. "Princess Adoranne is an adorable cutie, and I had an obligation to do what I could for her. But when it got right down to it, it was your face that kept haunting me."

"But—but you're a king, sire, and I'm just—"

"Let's leave the title to Adoranne and Alain. We've got too many things to catch up on to be bothered running the country."

Abstract from the log of Nicodaeus, inspector, serial number 786.

Ref: Locus Alpha Nine-three, Plane V-87, Fox 22 a-b (Artesia)

Subj: Recruitment follow-up on L. O'Leary.

" . . . since the double wedding performed the following day, having abdicated his claim to the throne in favor of the Princess Adoranne, subject appears mightily content, living with his bride, the Lady Daphne, in a comfortable apartment in the west palace annex. Communication equipment is still in place in a locked cabinet in the former laboratory of the present reporter. The line will continue to be monitored twenty-four hours daily. Qualified volunteers are in scarce supply, and a number of interesting assignments are waiting. On several occasions, subject has lifted the receiver and listened to the dial tone, but to date, he has not dialed."

It was a warm autumnal afternoon in Artesia. Lafayette O'Leary, late of the U.S.A., now
Sir
Lafayette O'Leary since his official investiture with knighthood by Princess Adoranne, was lounging at ease in a brocaded chair in his spacious library, beside a high, richly draped window overlooking the palace gardens. He was dressed in purple kneepants, a shirt of heavy white silk, gold-buckled shoes of glove-soft kid. A massive emerald winked on one finger beside the heavy silver ring bearing the device of the ax and dragon. A tall, cool drink stood at his elbow. From a battery of speakers concealed behind the hangings, a Debussy tone poem caressed the air.

O'Leary patted back a yawn and laid aside the book he had been idly leafing through. It was a thick, leatherbound volume on the Art of Bemusement, packed with fine print but, alas, deficient in specifics. For three years—ever since Central had relieved a bothersome probability stress among the continua by transferring him here from Colby Corners—he had been trying without visible success to regain his short-lived ability to focus the psychical energies, as Professor Doctor Hans Joseph Schimmerkopf had put it in his massive tome on the Practice of Mesmerism. Now
that
had been a book you could get your teeth into, Lafayette reflected ruefully. And he'd only read part of chapter one. What a pity he hadn't had time to bring it along to Artesia. But things had been rather rushed, there at the last—and faced with a choice between Mrs. MacGlint's Clean Rooms and Board and a palace suite with Daphne, who would have hesitated?

Ah, those had been exciting days, Lafayette thought fondly. All those years, back in Colby Corners, he had suspected that life held more in store for him than the career of a penniless draftsman, subsisting on sardines and dreams. And then he had run across Professor Schimmerkopf's massive tome. The prose had been a bit old-fashioned, but the message was clear: with a little concentration, you could make your dreams come true—or at least
seem
true. And if by self-hypnosis you could turn your shabby bedroom into a damask-draped chamber full of perfumed night air and distant music—why not try it?

And try it he had—with astonishing success. He had imagined a quaint old street in a quaint old town—and presto! There he was, surrounded by all the sights and sounds and smells that rounded out the illusion. Even knowing it was all a self-induced dream hadn't lessened the marvel of it. And then, when things got rough, he had made another startling discovery: if it was a dream, he was stuck in it. Artesia was real—as real as Colby Corners. In fact, there were those who could argue that Colby Corners was the dream, from which he had awakened to find himself back in Artesia, where he really belonged.

Of course, it had taken a while to discover that this was his true spiritual home. For a while it had appeared that he'd discover the answer to the old question as to whether a man who dreamed he'd fallen off a cliff would ever wake up. In his case it hadn't been a cliff, of course—but that was about the only form of demise he hadn't been threatened with. First there had been Count Alain's challenge, and the duel from the consequences of which Daphne had saved him with a carefully placed chamber pot dropped at the psychological moment from an upper window of the palace; then King Goruble's insistence that he hunt down a dragon—in return for his neck. And after that, a whole series of threats to life and limb, ending with his dispatch of Lod, the two-headed giant. And then the discovery that Lod had been transported into Artesia from another plane, along with his pet allosaur—the dragon with which he had terrorized the countryside—all at the order of the false King Goruble.