Euglane explained carefully that he and Guin would assist Hester out of her wheelchair for a short walk across the room and back. He made that sound plausible, too. Hester looked doubtful—working at it, just a little.
“Suppose something goes wrong?” she said.
Guin’s voice: “It’s a simple, non-invasive technique, Ms. MacEvoy. If something goes wrong, the technique won’t work; and in that case, to be quite frank, you’ll be neither better off nor worse off. The technique will either work or it will not; and—based on Dr. Rasczak’s records and measurements—we feel quite sure that it will.” Decisive and professional, just as if she’d been talking about something real.
There was more talk, and a little more objection from Hester—but her bluff had been called, and there was nothing for her to do, in the end, but play out the hand. The foolery of putting the helmet on her head, hooking up wiring, getting the blinking lights going, and so on, went by without anyone visibly smiling—or scowling, for that matter.
And, after fourteen minutes’ worth of blinking lights, and absolutely nothing else, Hester walked—a little less timidly, past the first three steps, than might have been completely plausible, but she did a fair job of pretending it was her first vertical foray in years. She mimed great weariness—total exhaustion, in fact—after about thirty steps back and forth, and Guin and Euglane put her back in her chair.
“You’ll need practice, of course,” Guin’s voice said. “But the technique clearly does work, Ms MacEvoy. We’ll return, probably tomorrow—either Euglane or I will phone you first, of course—but in a very few days you should be walking normally.” I thought she might have sounded a little more triumphant about the thing, but the crisp professional tone worked well enough.
“It’s wonderful,” Hester said mournfully. “How can I thank you enough?”
“Rest and relax,” Euglane said. “We’ll see you tomorrow, I hope.”
There was a little more on the tape, and we watched it, but it didn’t matter. When it was over, I looked around and congratulated the actors.
“I very much hope,” Guin said, “that no one will ever mention this again.”
“The police have got to see it,” Mirella said. “With an explanation—you know that, right?”
“Lance-Corporal,” Euglane said, “I’m sure you and Knave can handle the explanation for them; neither Dr. Jenn nor I will be needed for that. We’ll be available to confirm, of course; but from this point on, you can transport the ball.”
“Carry the ball,” I said, and Mirella said:
“I got it, I got it.” Then, to Euglane: “Sure. We’ll do that.”
And we dropped the subject, cheerfully —Mirella and I would get the tape into official custody in a short while, and the persons who would visit Hester he next day would be police persons—and went back, less cheerfully, to Job One: Folla.
Euglane hadn’t heard from the Governor-General, and I suggested that he put in a call. He agreed—“From my office, in half an hour or less. By sixteen o’clock—four L. P.” And he and Guin took themselves off.Meanwhile, I asked Mirella, what the Hell were we going to do to stop the alien invasion?
“Alien invasion,” Mirella said. “It’s like old-time science-fiction, all of a sudden coming to life on me.”
“Well,” I said, “we know about Folla and Dube. They might be the only two aliens—but they might be the first of thousands.”
“All by themselves they are enough,” Mirella said. “Anything that can pull some of the tricks they pull—getting into people’s dreams, arranging Hester’s head so she walks, pushing a good cop into suicide—moving a ship, for God’s sake, all that way in zero time—does not need a cast of thousands to make trouble.”
“So how do we stop them?” I said. The ghost of an idea was nagging at me, but it wasn’t more than a ghost.
“We shut the door,” Mirella said. “Somehow, we have got to make it so they can’t get in.”
That much was obvious, damn it. And then, very, very slowly, I began to see how. We were going to need Euglane— and we were going to need the Master.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
“The key,” I told Master Higsbee over dinner, “is in the whole idea of travel—and travel time. In dreams.”
We’d gone back to Murray’s Basement for dinner—people wandered by now and then, but the noise level was high enough for privacy. This time, I tried cubes of beef in a mild cheddar sauce, peas in a butter-and-garlic arrangement that was, in several small details, both new to me and worth careful attention, and zucchini, of all things, in a red sauce that seemed to have chili in its ancestry somewhere. Mirella stuck to her french-fries, along with octopus fried in batter, and the Master went for the Classical: cubes of beef and bread in a spiced cheese sauce.
Watching the Master manipulate the skewers and make his way around the vats kept Mirella in a state of blank astonishment. “You’re sure he’s blind?” she said, while he was away loading a plate. “I mean, he has got the cane, but how much can a cane do?”
“He’s really blind,” I said. “Truly. The cane’s just for his leg. He can load the skewers by touch—and by smell, I think, picking out what to load, and picking out which vat to use. He keys on the vats by heat signal. How he gets around the room—avoiding tables and chairs—I have no damn idea. I would not put it past him to have got a braille map of the place before he ever came here. There is not much I would put past him.”
“He is something else,” Mirella said. “How come you know him? He hired you on for something, once?”
I swallowed some peas, and chased them with the spiced wine I’d remembered from last time. “More the other way around,” I said. “I was a brand-new Survivor, and I had the idea I could use some helpful hints. The Master got mentioned, and I came and looked him up. That was a lot of years ago.”
Mirella took in some wine, and nodded. “Helpful hints,” she said. “I bet he gave you some doozies.”
“Mostly,” I said, “he told me I could find my own answers. He told me that often enough so I found out I really could. He finds his own answers, God knows—he just finished a job for Playtime Wispies, he told me.”
“Playtime Wispies?” Mirella said. “Hey, could I ask him to get me a few? I never yet tried one.”
But that had to wait. Master Higsbee, carrying a plate in one hand and working his cane, almost idly, with the other, got back to us and sat down. I didn’t see him feel for the chair with one leg, but of course he did; he was just very, very good at it.
He’d offloaded the skewers at the vats, as everyone did, and he took a couple of bites before he said anything. Then he nodded. “Satisfactory,” he said. “A fascinating restaurant, this.”
“Nothing like it,” Mirella said.
“Now,” he said. “Travel. In dreams. Gerald, you will have to expand on that just a bit.”
The ghost of an idea I’d had was coming back to me. But I had to start by clearing the ground. “I talked to Euglane about two hours ago,” I said. “After he’d called the Governor-General.”
“I would assume that Lord Batesman had wished to do a very little research before he talked again to Euglane.”
“Right,” I said. “He’d done some checking around—a few planets, at any rate.”
Master Higsbee gave us a little smile of satisfaction. “I did say that imagination would not be wholly dead in him.”
“So you did,” I said, “and it isn’t. He followed through. The Emperor will get the word out—and according to a very fast check by Batesman, there have been exactly zero instances of somebody being asked to do something, in a dream, that affects his waking life.”
The Master nodded. “It would, of course, be an extremely difficult thing to check,” he said. “We have nothing like sufficient data—but even a small indication is grist to our mill.”
“Batesman said, according to—”
“Lord Batesman, please, Gerald,” he said. “Politeness is a necess
ary counterpoise to the manifold frictions of the world.”
All right. “Lord Batesman told Euglane that he’d checked around with some of the oddity groups here and there. Not all of them, not even most of them—it’d be two months’ work—but a few of the ones he thought most likely. On Kingsley, Earth, Illawarra, the Haven system.”
Mirella said: “Oddity groups?”
“There are people who believe in contact with aliens,” I said. “People who believe they’ve been contacted. There always are—there always have been, whether you call them aliens or devils or God knows what.”
“It is a common affliction,” the Master said, “to think yourself the object of some strange and unknown being’s rapacity. You are quite right, Gerald: before space travel, there were devils to conjure up out of imagination; since, devils and alien beings have shared the stage.”
“Anyhow,” I said, “he checked. Nothing resembling Folla or Dube—by those names or any others—turned up. Just the usual run of monsters and demigods—the kind of thing Euglane’s been collecting all these years.”
“Again,” the Master said, “a small indication, but a cheering one.”
“It begins to look,” I said, “as if Folla and Dube really are limited to Ravenal. Possibly limited to City Two.”
“Possibly even, just maybe,” Mirella said, “limited to not a lot of people in City Two. MacEvoy, Harris France, Hilda—”
“And me,” I said. “The same list, four people long. Maybe they really can’t go anywhere else—or not yet.”
“But they can,” Master Higsbee said. “Folla was present eleven thousand light-years away, at your ship.”
“True,” I said. “And nowhere else. Maybe—just maybe— whatever it is about the four of us—stubbornness or whatever, plus something else—maybe there’s something peculiar about our ears, or our toes—it had to be me he could get in touch with. Once I’d got lost, I mean, and turned up where he could perceive me. Me, he could find, once I’d put myself out there somewhere—though location doesn’t seem to matter to him, much.”
“And the others were here,” the Master said. “He was able to come here, clearly, not because he could find you, but because he could find another of his sort—Dube. Dube had been here before, speaking to Hilda, and to Hester, and that probably in her dreams, though she never quite specified.”
“One thing,” Mirella said. “Again: why isn’t Hester building his machine right now?”
“She said she wouldn’t do that,” I told her. “I doubt she meant it, quite—she went and killed Cornelia Rasczak, after all—but she may have been hesitating. And whatever the machine is, it’d be a job of work for one small, out-of-condition woman alone. And it would cause talk—whatever materials she had to get, somebody might notice.” I thought for another second. “I think she was hesitating,” I said. “Remember, Folla said no other discussion had reached the point I got to with him— and I don’t think he can lie, I really don’t.”
“Folla would like someone better, to be sure,” the Master said. “And that he has not found someone better we can be sure; or he would not be interested in you, Gerald.”
“The odd thing,” I said, “is that he talked to me twice—on my ship, and in a dream—without asking me for help.”
“Not odd,” the Master said. “His first encounter with you was a puzzle for him: he did not clearly know you were human. And when he reached you again, he was performing a—a check. A ranging shot. Making certain that this human among humans was in fact the same being he had before encountered.”
I nodded. “Right,” I said. “And now we get to it—but let’s adjourn, once we finish dinner, to a quieter spot.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
“Time first,” said, when we were settled in my hotel room, with coffee available. “Folla appeared to Hilda months ago. He said he’d come back. He never did. He waited six weeks or so between the first time he met me and the first time he turned up as a small dog in a dream. He gave me some help in that dream—my head distorted it into using a wire or something to pull the front off a safe, but I think he must have had the magnet and chain in mind.”
“So far,” the Master said, “we repeat old material.”
“But,” I said, “it’s the time that kept getting to me. I kept seeing the clues, and not observing hem. Look: time in dreams is very strange. It doesn’t just pass the way time does out here in old, familiar, three-dimensional space. It can cover three years in a minute and a half, or take thirty seconds and stretch it out over what seems like months.”
“This may be the effect of our own distortions,” the Master said. “Even in waking life, the passage of time, though even, does not always seem to be so.”
“It may not be distortion, too,” I said. “Time may be entirely different in the dream spaces.”
The Master shook his head. “Not entirely,” he said. “It remains unidirectional, from past to future, so to speak. But I gather that you feel Folla may be behaving so oddly simply because his time rate differs from our own.”
“His time rate, or his experience of it,” I said.
“So he waits, and then he shows up,” Mirella said. “So why does this matter?”
“It gives us a little room to plan,” I said. “To prepare. But it’s not the important thing— the important thing isn’t time, it’s travel,” I said. “Folla—and Dube, apparently—can get to a few people here. We can’t be the only four humans alive who share whatever it is—there are a hundred inhabited planets, more or less, and some of them are even more densely inhabited than Ravenal.”
“Soon or late,” the Master said, “they will begin to search otherwhere. They will develop what they lack, be it capability or understanding, and their search will widen.”
I nodded. “If they can,” I said. “And we have to assume they can—or can learn how. But when they do, we can stop them.”
“Nice to know,” Mirella said. “How?”
“The warning we got out is the start,” I said. “We’ll amplify it—we’ll send the Emperor the full story, in detail. That will keep the thing alive—it’ll get built in, and a lot harder to forget. We’re going to have a murder case to tie into it.”
“So how does MacEvoy tie in—not for us, we know about it, but for the Comity people?”
The Master was smiling; he’d seen this, of course. I gave him a grin—who knows? He might get it, some way—and told Mirella: “Hester can walk. We have tapes. And we have the firmest possible testimony that she can’t. How was this managed?”
She thought for a second. “It might work,” she said.
“It’ll work,” I said. “When—whenever—Folla and company pop out, anywhere in the Comity, we’ll be ready. We’ll stop them, just the way we’re going to stop them now.”
“You have some method for doing that,” the Master said. “I will confess I have not seen it.”
I gave him a bigger grin. “The Josephson junction,” I said. “That’s the key.”
He sighed. Not as theatrically as Mirella, but he made it count. “Gerald,” he said, “the effect is, in the ancient terminology, a quantum effect. That Folla can utilize it on a large scale does not mean that we can do so. It is true that the knowledge that a thing can be done is a very great help in accomplishing it—but a period of years would be required for any development of he effect on a large scale—years at a minimum. This is not a minor quibble, Gerald; it seems fatal to your notion.”
“Well,” I said gently, “maybe not. Suppose we could set up a Josephson junction—so that when Folla popped up, he was in its focus. At point A. Suppose it was keyed to send him to a point B we selected—somewhere very far away. Not to the spot he found me in—he knows where that is, and how to get here from there. To someplace else. Say the Magellanic Clouds. Greater or Lesser, take your pick.”
He sighed again, but this time it was a real sigh. I had something, and he knew that—an he had no idea what the Hell it was.
/> It was a memorable moment.
“Very well, Gerald,” he said after that. “Expound.”
“We know that a Josephson junction can be built big enough to transport my ship sixteen thousand light years. We don’t have to know how—we don’t need the specs for it. Dreams don’t work that way.”
“Gerald,” he said after a couple of seconds of silence, “you surprise me. You have seen a path out of our difficulties, and it is a good path. You will yet learn to think.”
It was like being presented with a medal. Mirella gave the moment its space, and then said:
“Okay, so I don’t get it. So just for me, Jerry, expound a little bit more.”
I nodded. “Look,” I said. “If Euglane can put me into dreamland—which turns out to be a real land, damn it—and instruct me on what to do when I get there—and he can do that, he’s done it—then he can tell me to have a Josephson junction ready when I get there.”
“So you can have a dream thing in your dream,” she said. “So what good will that do? This Folla, he is not a dream.”
“He affects those spaces, and he’s affected by them,” I said. “The things in dreams are real—they’re just not what they seem to be. We distort them all to Hell and gone, we use them to tell ourselves things, remind ourselves, warn ourselves, everything—whatever the laws of those spaces are, they let us do the distorting—but if it’s a real place, there can be real things in it.”
“You can build this junction thing, without knowing how?” she said.
“I know it’s possible,” I said, “and I know it can be built. So I can dream it. And because I know it can work—it’ll work. We’ll need specs on our point B—wherever we send Folla—but the Master and I can provide enough data to do the job—in the dream world.”
Very slowly, she nodded. “Tell me,” she said. “If you dream, say, six pounds of that good caviar, you can bring it over to my place?”
I grinned at her. “It doesn’t cross over,” I said. “Folla can use a Josephson junction in our spaces, because he knows the mechanics. I won’t know the mechanics—so I can only use it where dreaming about it can build it. And nothing in dreams crosses over into our space.”
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