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opened one anyway, then another, and then called for help.
Every last envelope was empty. We had lost over a thousand Ghostgirls, Sid's whole
stock.
Well, at least it proved what none of us had ever seen or heard of being demonstrated:
that there is a spooky link--a sort of Change Wind contact-- between a Ghost and its lifeline;
and when that umbilicus, I've heard it called, is cut, the part away from the lifeline dies.
Interesting, but what had bothered me was whether we Demons were going to
evaporate too, because we are as much Doublegangers as the Ghosts and our apron strings
had been cut just as surely. We're more solid, of course, but that would only mean we'd take a
little longer. Very logical.
I remember I had looked up at Lili and Maud--us girls had been checking the
envelopes; it's one of the proprieties we frequently maintain and anyway, if men check them,
they're apt to trot out that old wheeze about "instant women" which I'm sick to death of
hearing, thank you.
Anyway, I had looked up and said, "It's been nice knowing you," and Lili had said,
"Twentythree, skiddoo," and Maud had said, "Here goes nothing," and we had shook hands
all around.
We figured that Phryne and the Countess had faded at the same time as the other
Ghostgirls, but an idea had been nibbling at me and I said, "Siddy, do you suppose it's just
barely possible that, while we were all looking at Bruce, those two Ghostgirls would have
been able to work the Maintainer and get a Door and lam out of here with the thing?"
"Thou speakst my thoughts, sweetling. All weighs against it: Imprimis, 'tis well
known that Ghosts cannot lay plots or act on them. Secundo, the time forbade getting a Door.
Tercio--and here's the real meat of it--the Place folds without the Maintainer. Quadro, 'twere
folly to depend on not one of--how many of us? ten, elf--not looking around in all the time it
would have taken them--"
"I looked around once, Siddy. They were drinking and they had got to the control
divan under their own power. Now when was that? Oh, yes, when Bruce was talking about
Zombies."
"Yes, sweetling. And as I was about to cap my arguement with quinquo when you
'gan prattle, I could have sworne none could touch the Maintainer, much less work it and
purloin it, without my certain knowledge. Yet. . ."
"Eftsoons yet," I seconded him.
Somebody must have got a door and walked out with the thing. It certainly wasn't in
the Place. The iunt had been a lulu. Something the size of a portable typewriter is not easy to
hide and we had been inside everything from Beau's piano to the reaewer link of the
Refresher.
We had even fluoroscoped everybody, though it had made Illy writhe like a box of
worms, as he'd warned us; he said it tickled terribly and I insisted on smoothing his fur for
five minutes afterward, although he was a little standoffish toward me.
Some areas, like the bar, kitchen and Stores, took a long while, but we were thorough.
Kaby helped Doc check Surgery: since she last made the Place, she has been stationed in a
Field Hospital (it turns out the Spiders actually are mounting operations from them) and
learned a few nice new wrinkles.
However, Doc put in some honest work on his own, though, of course, every check
was Observed by at least three people, not including Bruce or Lili. When the Maintainer
vanished, Doc had pulled out of his glassy-eyed drunk in a way that would have surprised me
if I hadn't seen it happen to him before, but when we finished Surgery and got on to the Art
Gallery, he had started to putter and I noticed him hold out his coat and duck his head and
whip out a flask and take a swig and by now he was well on his way toward another peak.
The Art Gallery had taken time too, because there's such a jumble of strange stuff,
and it broke my heart but Kaby took her ax and split a beautiful blue woodcarving of a
Venusian medusa because, although there wasn't a mark in the paw-polished surface, she
claimed it was just big enough. Doc cried a little and we left him fitting the pieces together
and mooning over the other stuff.
After we'd finished everything else, Mark had insisted on tackling the floor. Beau and
Sid both tried to explain to him how this is a one-sided Place, that there is nothing, but
nothing, under the floor; it just gets a lot harder than the diamonds crusting it as soon as you
get a quarter inch down--that being the solid equivalent of the Void. But Mark was
knuckleheaded (like all Romans, Sid assured me on the q.t.) and broke four diamond-plus
drills before he was satisfied.
Except for some trick hiding places, that left the Void, and things don't vanish if you
throw them at the Void--they half melt and freeze forever unless you can fish them out. Back
of the Refresher, at about eye-level, are three Venusian coconuts that a Hittite strongman
threw there during a major brawl. I try not to look at them because they are so much like
witch heads they give me the woolies. The parts of the Place right up against the Void have
strange spatial properties which one of the gadgets in Surgery makes use of in a way that
gives me the worse woolies, but that's beside the point.
During the hunt, Kaby and Erich had used their Callers as direction finders to point
out the Maintainer, just as they're used in the cosmos to locate the Door--and sometimes in
the Big Places, people tell me. But the Callers only went wild--like a compass needle whirling
around without stopping--and pobody knew what that meant.
The trick hiding places were the Minor Maintainer, a cute idea, but it is no bigger
than the Major and has its own mysterious insides and had obviously kept on doing its own
work, so that was out for several reasons, and the bomb chest, though it seemed impossible
for anyone to have opened it, granting they know the secret of its lock, even before Erich
jumped on it and put it in the limelight double. But when you've ruled out everything else, the
word impossible changes meaning.
Since time travel is our business, a person might think of all sorts of tricks for
sending the Maintainer into the past or future, permanently or temporarily. But the Place is
strictly on the Big Time and everybody that should know tells me that time traveling
_through_ the Big Time is out. It's this way: the Big Time is a train, and the Little Time is the
countryside and we're on the train, unless we go out a Door, and as Gertie Stein might put it,
you can't time travel through the time you time travel in when you time travel.
I'd also played around with the idea of some fantastically obvious hiding place,
maybe something that several people could pass back and forth between them, which could
mean a conspiracy, and, of course, if you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain
anything, including the cosmos itself. Still, I'd got a sort of shell-game idea about the
Soldiers' three big black shakos and I hadn't been satisfied until I'd got the three together and
looked in them all at the same time.
"Wake up, Gerta, and take something, I can't stand here forever." Maud had brought
us a tray of hearty snacks from then and you, and I must say they were tempting; she whips
up a mean hors d'oeuvre.
I looked them over and said, "Siddy, I want a hot dog."
"And I want a venison pasty! Out upon you, you finical jill, you o'erscrupulous jade,
you whimsic and tyrannous poppet!"
I grabbed a handful and snuggled back against him.
"Go on, call me some more, Siddy," I told him. "Real juicy ones."
10
My thought, whose murder yet is
but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man
that function
Is smother'd in surmise, and
nothing is
But what is not.
--Macbeth
MOTIVES AND OPPORTUNITIES
My big bad waif from King's Lynn had set the tray on his knees and started to wolf
the food down. The others were finishing up. Erich, Mark and Kaby were having a quietly
furious argument I couldn't overhear at the end of the bar nearest the bronze chest, and Illy
was draped over the piano like a real octopus, listening in. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]