“Curse. Thought I’d disconnected.” She took the tea with her and shuffled off to hunt through the jangling jungle for the phone and answer it.
It was Amanda’s voice, high with agitation. “Zillah’s gone! She hasn’t slept in her bed. So’s Marcus. Gladys, she’s taken Marcus and gone! I can’t feel where she is. All I get when I try for her is nothing. Gladys, where is she?”
Gladys held the tea mug against her ear, warming it against Amanda’s insistence. “Lovely bell-like voice,” she muttered. “Clear and high. Like a damned carillon or an alarm clock.”
“Oh, sorry,” Amanda said without much contrition. “You must be so tired after last night — but, Gladys, can’t you try for Zillah? Can you get any idea where she is?”
“Just a moment.” Gladys sighed and took a warm, warming gulp of tea. Zillah. Amanda’s younger sister, the one with the little boy — Mark’s child, Gladys had always suspected. “Damn it, Amanda, I only met your sister twice.” Reddish hair. Sense of unrealized abilities about her that could be even stronger than Amanda’s. In fact, Gladys recalled, where Zillah’s abilities were concerned, the sky was the limit, if only the silly girl could bring herself to realize it! At least someone with that kind of strength ought to be fairly easy to trace. She drank more tea and put her mind to it. The trace was there. It led—“Oh, all the powers, Amanda! She went in that capsule and took the child!”
A sharp silence on the other end was followed by an even sharper cry of horror. “Gladys! Are you sure? Are you still in contact with the capsule?”
“No.” Gladys sighed again and tried to explain. “They went out of contact as soon as they crossed over, Amanda. All I know is that the trace leads to the capsule and stops.”
“But she was inside the capsule the other day — and so was Marcus. Mightn’t that be what you’re feeling? I mean, she definitely wasn’t there, or in the warehouse, when I left the team there. I know she was at home with Marcus. I could feel. There was no way for her to get there. The team wouldn’t have let her on board if she did go there.”
Hope, Gladys thought, was a heavy thing and would do no good here. “Amanda, I’m sure. I don’t know how Zillah did it, but that is what she did.”
“Really sure? Gladys, please try and trace her further! I have the strongest precognitions of disaster for the capsule anyway!”
So had Gladys. Some of the foreknowledge was, to her regret, the result of calculations she wished she had not had to make. “I can’t try to trace her now. For one thing, I’m tired to death. For another, I know I was lucky to make contact with the Laputa-Blish thing anyway. I got in on them when they were exchanging messages and people with their home universe, and I’m going to have to wait for them to start doing that again before I can see anything clear about our folk. Don’t worry. I’ll keep trying. I’ll let you know as soon as I find them again.”
“And can we fetch her back? Gladys, I don’t know what Zillah thought she was doing, but if she did go there—! Gladys, she hasn’t a clue — really. She didn’t know it was supposed to be an attack.”
“Well, obviously, or she wouldn’t have taken Marcus. Amanda, do try to get some sleep. There’s nothing you can do until we know more.”
It took a while to persuade Amanda. Gladys put the phone down at last and made her way back to the kitchen, rolling like a badger from foot to foot out of weariness. “Nothing we can do,” she repeated to herself, pouring more tea. It had gone strong and orange and tepid by then. She drank it all the same, full of guilt and sorrow. Cats were appearing, on windowsills, on the draining board, out of cupboards, treading warily with sympathy. “Don’t tell Amanda,” she said to them guiltily. “Nothing we can do.” It was something Maureen had accepted — but then Maureen was like that — but they had both tacitly agreed that there was no point in telling Amanda that the only way for the raiding party to get back was to force the inhabitants of Laputa-Blish to tell them how. Which meant they had to win first. Now, with this feeling of disaster she had, winning did not seem likely. “Did it ever?” she asked Jimbo, crouching beside her aching feet. Never had she felt so weary and old.
“I’ll get onto it first thing tomorrow,” she said. “Not now, not now.”
3
For two days, life on Arth proceeded in its usual pattern, apparently undisturbed by the survivors from the capsule. The capsule itself had been consigned to Housekeeping and Maintenance, who could use the metal, and it was almost as if the women had always been there. When the High Head, as part of his routine duties, sampled the vibrations, they seemed normal and healthy. There was, it was true, the occasional accelerando in the rhythms, in which everything seemed to pulse several degrees faster, but he was able to discount that. A small tide was coming up, when communication would once more be possible between Arth and the Pentarchy, and these sudden quickenings were quite often associated with tides. The High Head was able to discount the phenomenon — in fact, he would readily have forgotten the tide if he could, since the opening would certainly bring renewed demands from Leathe to hurry up the work in otherworld. And here was a mystery. The experiment had succeeded: he was sure of it. Otherworld had done its usual lateral thinking and taken action of some kind, quite recently too. But of his three main sources, only one was reporting, and that in the vaguest terms. The agent watching the young female had cut off completely. And, to his exasperation, so had his wild native contact. He had to conclude, after unprofitable hours spent trying to raise both, that otherworld had become aware of them and taken steps to silence them. It was imperative to get another agent on the scene as soon as possible. But this was going to take time and planning.
Meanwhile, the women seemed to be settling down to wait for Arth to send them home — as if Arth could, when they were all so ignorantly vague about where they had come from! At least they were causing surprisingly little trouble. There had been one complaint, from Brother Instructor Cyril of Ritual Horn, that the woman Flan Burke had attempted to undermine his authority. But when the High Head asked High Brother Nathan to investigate, Nathan reported that Brother Cyril now unreservedly withdrew his complaint, saying that the young woman was sent by the Goddess to perfect Her rituals.
If the High Head was inclined to think Brother Cyril’s retraction was rather suspiciously fulsome, his doubts were set at rest when he interviewed Flan. He questioned the women once a day at first, trying to sift their vague answers for clues to their home universe, though he became increasingly sure that he was going to have to rely on Calculus to find it.
“Brother Cyril and I had what you might call an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation,” Flan told him. “And,” she added cheerfully, “he came around to my point of view.”
As for the others, Brother Gamon of Calculus Horn soon asked for permission to interview Sandra himself so as not to interrupt the work he was doing with her. He fancied he was close to discovering a new and improved procedure. Observer Horn made a similar request about Roz. She was, they said, giving them some aspects they had found they were missing up to then, and they wished to continue working closely with her.
Very commendable, the High Head thought, although he wished the other one whose name he always forgot — Helen, that was it — had not decided to work closely with Kitchen. Mealtimes were steadily becoming a distinctly sensual experience. The High Head, who preferred to eat in the same way that one stoked an engine, and then forget the matter, found this distracting. It surprised him that so few Brothers agreed with him. Even Brother Milo raised no objection. He said, rather obscurely, that Helen was a challenge to himself and his Oath.