Michael told me what your trouble was. I’ll pray for you.”
Rose is one of the good people. If God was in a mood to listen to anybody. He’d listen to her. “I did have to do this,” I said. “It’s the stuff before that I shouldn’t have done.”
She waved that aside and started to say something more, but I was already on the way back to my office. No matter how much of a big, hairy thing I’d been, I found she’d faithfully taken my messages while I was out. One was from Henry Legion. I’d have to call him back, I thought Then I looked at the next one. It was from Judy.
IX
I don’t know how long I stood there staring at the little piece of parchment in my hand. Every feeling you can imagine ran through my mind—joy that Judy was alive, fear that she was in their clutches, hope, worry, rage, all of them jumbled together at once in a way that would have made me dizzy even if I hadn’t been running on no sleep and too much coffee.
Eventually I started thinking as well as feeling. The message, not surprisingly, left no return number. I ran back j down the hall (I almost ran into Phyllis Kaminsky, too) to | Rose, threw it on her desk. “I meant to tell you about this, David,” she said, “but what with the flowers and all, it went right out of my mind. I’m sorry.”
So even Rose could make mistakes. I hadn’t been sure it was possible. But it didn’t matter, not right then. “Never mind,” I said. “How did she sound? What did she say?”
“She just asked for you and hung up when I told her you were out of the office,” Rose said. “I didn’t know anything was wrong then.” She gave me a reproachful look; if I’d told her earlier, she might have been able to do more.
“You have to remember, I’ve only spoken with her the couple of times she’s come up here and occasionally taken messages for you—and no one ever sounds like herself on the phone.”
Miserable phone imps—But no sooner had that thought crossed my mind than I ran up the hall (and almost ran down Phyllis again; she let out an indignant squawk) back to my office.
I wished Michael were still here instead of up at the Devonshire dump. I’d read that a good wizard could sometimes trace a phone call even after the etheric connection between the imps at the opposite ends was broken.
Phone imps are nearly identical, one to another—that’s what ectoplasmic cloning is all about. Nearly, but not quite.
As Bacon’s Troscintto puts it. There’s a divinity that shapes our ends. Rough-hew them how we will.” Tiny imperfections get into the cloning process—macro identical, but micro different That’s why the phone switching system works so well: because the imps are so like one another and spring from the same source, the laws of similarity and contagion make establishing contact between any two of them easy. And because they aren’t quite identical, each can be assigned its own place in the telephone web.
“God, I’m an idiot!” I exclaimed a moment later. God, I presume, already knew this. Michael Manstein was a good wizard, sure, but he wasn’t the only good wizard involved in this case—the CBI had plenty of skilled mages, just two floors up. I called Saul Klein, told him what had happened.
“I’ll send someone right to you,” he said as soon as I was through. Henry Legion might have got down to my office faster than the wizard did, but I don’t think any mere mortal could have. She was a Hanese woman who came up just past my elbow, but she seemed smart and businesslike as all getout. She introduced herself as Celia Chang.
“What time would this telephone call have been placed?” she asked.
I looked down at the parchment. Rose, bless her efficient soul, had made a note of it. Ten twenty-seven,” I answered.
“And it’s now”—she paused to ask her watch—“five minutes past twelve. A little more than an hour and a half. The etheric trail should not be impossibly cold. Let me see what I can do, Mr. Fisher.”
From the efficient way she went about things, I gathered this wasn’t the first time she’d traced phone calls—probably not the fifty—first either. If anybody had to use that particular thaumaturgy a lot, it would be the CBI. I felt easier, I’d been wishing she were Michael, but now I decided I didn’t need to worry about it She opened her little black bag, took out what looked like a telephone handset but wasn’t (I’d never seen a blue porcelain phone, anyhow), and set it on the desk next to my phone. “Does the telephone consortium know you have gear like that?” I asked.
“Officially, no,” she said. Her smile made her look much younger and prettier than she had without it. “Unofficially—ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.” Like anybody else with an ounce of concern for the world to come, she was hesitant about being forsworn.
“Never mind,” I told her.
She took a copper cable from one pocket other lab robe, used it to connect her blue box to the real telephone. As she did so, she made a face. “Properly, this should be silver,” she said. “It’s a better conductor of sorcerous influences than copper—but it’s also more expensive, and so it’s not in our thaumaturgical budget. If I were in private practice—” She shook her head. “If I were in private practice, I’d be less useful. I’m sure you have to manage on fewer resources than you find ideal, too.”
“How right you are,” I said.
She was making small talk while she could, just to put me at my ease. When the need for serious conjuration came, she started ignoring me. That was all right; I hadn’t expect anything different. Wizards dealing with the Other Side don’t need their elbows joggled, even metaphorically.
Mistress Chang might have been Hanese by blood, but she used standard Western sorcerous techniques, ones that date back to the Species of Origen and some of them even farther. No reason she shouldn’t have; for all I knew, her ancestors might have come to the Confederation a couple of generations before mine. After censing the copper cable (and stinking up my office), she took two metal plaques, each inscribed with a demon’s seal, and affixed them to the cable.
“I don’t need a full manifestation from either Eligor or Botis,” she explained, “but I do require the application of some of their attributes: Eligor discovers hidden things, while Botis discerns past, present, and future. Now if you will excuse me—”
The first gesture of her elegantly manicured hand was a wave to get me to move back a couple of steps. The next was a pass that accompanied her conjuration. Calling up demonic attributes without getting raw demon, so to speak, is a tricky business; I watched quietly and respectfully while she did what she had to do.
It was more like coaxing than commanding: no impressive circles or pentagrams, no manifest thyself or eternal torment shall overwhelm thee. At the climax of the incantation, she just said, “Help me, please, you two great Powers.” I tell you, modem sorcery lacks the drama it had in the good old days.
But we can do things now that our ancestors never dreamt of trying. When Celia Chang pointed to the plaques on the cable, the seals that bound Eligor and Botis, which had been black squiggles on silver metal, began to glow with a light that outshone the St Elmo’s fire on the ceiling.
The light started to fade, then grew again. They’re searching through time for the etheric connection,” Celia Chang said. Just then, Botis’ seal blazed for a moment; I had to blink and turn my head aside. The CBI wizard softly clapped her hands together. “We have the fix in time. Now to see whether Eligofs allegory algorithm can uncover the missing phone number.”
I didn’t know what we were waiting for—probably for Eligofs seal to flare up the way Botis’ had. That didn’t happen; its squiggles continued to shine as they had before. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Eligor’s seal: it looks rather like an open mouth with a rubber arrow threaded through its upper lip.
Arrow or not, though, that sort of a mouth up and spoke like the old Roman godlet Aius Locutius: one number after another, until there were ten. Celia Chang and I both wrote them down as Eligor gave them to us. By the time we’d recorded the last one, the lines on both plaques had stopped glowin
g.
“Let’s compare them,” the wizard said. I handed her the scrap of parchment on which I’d taken down the numbers.
She held out the one on which she’d written them. We’d both heard the phone number the same way. She asked, “Is this number familiar to you?”
“No.” I shook my head. “It’s not Judy’s; it’s not any phone number I’ve seen before.”
“I expected as much, but you never know,” she said.
“We’ll have to go to the telephone consortium, then, and learn to whom the number belongs—if anyone, of course. It might be a public phone.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” I said in a hollow voice. Hard for me to imagine kidnappers having a victim make a call from a pay phone in the middle of the morning, but it was possible, especially if they knew of one that couldn’t be easily seen from the street.
Mistress Chang said, “We’ll be in touch with you as soon as we learn anything, Mr. Fisher.” She packed up her sorcerous impedimenta, nodded to me—still businesslike, but with, I thought, some sympathy, too—and strode out of the office.
My stomach growled, fortunately a couple of seconds after that. What with all the coffee I’d poured down there, it had been growling on and off for a while now, but this was a different note. It wanted food. No matter what your mind tries to do to you, your body has a way of reminding you of life’s basics. I went over to the cafeteria and bought myself a vulcanized hamburger—as a matter of fact, it was cooked so hard that Vulcan, had he been of a mind to, could have carved the battle reliefs that he’d put onto the shields of Achilles and Aeneas right onto the surface of the meat. I ate it anyhow; at the moment, I didn’t much care what I fed my fire, as long as it filled me up. And I washed it down with more coffee.
The stuff was starring to lose its power to conjure up my demons. I found myself yawning over the last of my fries.
But no rest for the weary; I plodded back to the office to see what I could accomplish.
In short, the answer was not much. Part of the reason was that I jumped halfway to the ceiling every time the phone yarped, hoping it would be Judy again. It never was. None of the calls I got was of any consequence whatsoever. Every one of them, though, broke my concentration. In aggregate, they left me a nervous wreck.
Along with hoping one of the calls would be from Judy, I also kept hoping one wouldn’t be from Bea. I just didn’t have it in me to play staff meeting games right then, and I wasn’t real thrilled about having to bear up under sympathy, either.
Atlas carried the whole world, but right now I had all the weight on me I could take.
But Bea, to my relief, didn’t call. Except for relief, I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Looking back, though, I think she didn’t call precisely because she knew I couldn’t deal with it. Bea is a pretty fair boss. I may have mentioned that once or twice.
The phone squawked yet again. When I answered it, Celia Chang was on the other end. “Mr. Fisher? We have located that telephone whose number I traced a little while ago. It is, unfortunately, a public phone up on the comer of Soto’s and Plummer in St. Ferdinand’s Valley.”
“Oh,” I said unhappily.
“I am sorry, Mr. Fisher,” she said, “but I did think you would want to know.”
“Yes, thank you,” I said, and hung up. I never have figured out why you thank someone who’s given you bad news - maybe to deny to the Powers that it’s really hurt you, no matter how obvious that is.
After Celia Chang’s call, the phone stopped making noise for a while. I tried to buckle down and get some work done, but I still couldn’t make my mind focus on the parchments in front of me. I’d write something, realize it was either colossally stupid or just pointless, scratch it out, by again, and discover I hadn’t done any better the next time. All I could think about was Judy—Judy and sleep. In spite of all that coffee, I was yawning.
About half past three, someone tapped on my door. Several people had been in already; news of what had happened was getting around with its usual speed in offices. I knew they meant well, and it made them feel better, but it just kept reminding me of what Judy had gone through and might be going through now. Still, once more couldn’t make me feel much worse than I did already. “Come in,” I said resignedly.
It was somebody I worked with, but somebody who already knew what was going on. “Hello, David,” Michael Manstein said. “I trust I am not intruding?”
“No, no,” I said—someone else would have been, but not Michael. “Here, sit down, tell me what that thing—that Nothing—I mean—in the Devonshire dump is.”
He folded his angular frame into a chair, steepled his long pale fingers. “First tell me if you have any word of your fiancee,” he said. So I had to go through that again after all. He listened attentively—Michael is always attentive—then said, “I am sorry you were out of the office when Judith called. I wish I could have been here when the CBI wizard traced the call, as well. I have had occasion to attempt that twice, but succeeded in only one instance. An opportunity to improve my technique would have been welcome.”
I had the feeling he was more interested in the magic for its own sake than the reason it had been used, but I couldn’t get angry about that—it was Michael through and through. I tried again to make the carpet fly my way: “So what was that Nothing? Did you analyze it?”
“I did,” he answered. “As best I could determine, it is—Nothing.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I know I sounded peevish—nerves, exhaustion, coffee again.
Michael didn’t notice. What he’d found intrigued him too much for him to pay attention to details like bad manners.
He said, “It is, in my experience, unique: an area from which all the magic has been removed, not externally, as would be normal, but internally. Whatever Powers are involved are still contained within the barrier established around them, but have in effect created that barrier to shield them from the surrounding world—or vice versa. I have no idea how to penetrate the barrier from This Side.”
“Could whatevers in there burst out from the Other Side?” I asked.
“It is conceivable,” Michael said. “Since I am of necessity ignorant of what lies inside the barrier—think of it as an opaque soap bubble, if you like, although it is almost infinitely stronger—I cannot evaluate the probability of that possibility.”
I worked that through till I thought I understood it. Then I said, “Why does the, the Nothing make everything behind it look so far away?”
“Again, I cannot give a precise answer,” Michael said, “I believe I do grasp the basic cause of the phenomenon, however: the barrier is in effect an area where the Other Side has been removed from contact with This Side. The eye naturally attempts to pursue it in its withdrawal, thus leading to the impression of indefinitely great distance behind it.”
“Okay,” I said. That made some sense—certainly more than anything I’d thought of (which, given my current state, wasn’t saying much). But it raised as many questions as it answered, the most important of which was, how do you go about separating This Side and the Other? They’ve been inextricably joined at least since people and Powers became aware of each other, and possibly since the beginning of time.
Michael said, “If your next question is going to be whether I have a theoretical model to explain how this phenomenon came to be, the answer, I regret, is no.”
“I regret it, too, but that’s not what I was going to ask you,” I said. Michael raised a pale eyebrow; to him, finding a theoretical model ranked right up there with breathing. My mind was on simpler things: “I was going to ask if you’d come with me to inspect Chocolate Weasel tomorrow morning.” I explained how more and more of the evidence was pointing toward an Aztedan connection.
“Beaten a hermetic seal, have they?” Michael murmured; again, the thaumaturgy interested him more than anything else. He went on, “We’ll be seeing learned articles on that for some time to come. But yes, I will be ha
ppy to accompany you to Chocolate Weasel. Where is the facility located?”
“In St. Ferdinand’s Valley, near the comer of Mason and Nordhoff,” I answered. That wasn’t a part of the Valley I’d learned yet; the Devonshire dump was north of it, while the businesses and factories I’d visited were farther south and east. I figured Michael or I could find it, though.
He said, “Shall we take my carpet again, and meet here as we did yesterday?”
“All right,” I answered. I was just as glad that he’d fly us up into the Valley; at the moment, I wondered whether I’d be able to get myself home tonight Michael headed for the lab, no doubt intent on catching up on whatever he’d had to abandon when I called him from the Devonshire dump. I asked my watch what time it was—a little before four. Not quite soon enough to go home, but too late to do anything useful (assuming I could do anything useful) to the parchments on my desk.
I decided to try to call Henry Legion. I realized there was an advantage in dealing with a spook rather than a person (the first I’d found, so I treasured it): even though it was just about seven back in D.C., he was likely to be on the job. At least, I didn’t think spooks had families to go home to.
And sure enough, I got him when I called. “Inspector Fisher,” he said. “I was hoping I would hear from you. What have you learned since this morning?”
So I told him what I’d learned: the hermetic seals, the quetzal feather, the fer-de-lance, the One Called Night, the Nothing. It took a while. Until I told him what all I’d found out in the course of the day, I hadn’t realized how big a forest it made; one tree at a time had been falling on me.
But, to shift the figure of speech, I had a lot of pieces. I didn’t have a puzzle.
“I shall convey your information to the appropriate sources,” he said when I was through. “Inspector Fisher, the Confederation may well owe you a large debt of gratitude.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, but right now that doesn’t matter much to me. All I want to do is get Judy back, and I don’t think I’m much closer than I was.” Maybe fitting some of the pieces together would help. I asked, “Is it the Aztecians that we’ve bumped up against here?”
The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump Page 30