Amanda responded to the jeer. “Oh, perfect, Maureen! So we call their bluff. The only result, as far as I can see, would be that our world dies and the pirates simply start exploiting another one.”
“I didn’t mean—” Maureen and Mark began together.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Gladys interrupted. “We’re not in business to do nothing, are we, Jimbo? It’s obvious what we’ve got to do! We have to go into that universe and stop those pirates at their fun and games, for once and for all!”
In the ensuing silence, the creature called Jimbo appeared to climb into Gladys’s lap. She hugged it and stared at them, a mulish and stony old woman.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” she said. “It’s the only thing we ought to be discussing.”
After another long silence, Amanda said, “I agree. How do we get there? Whom do we send? And what would a raiding party do when it gets there?”
Maureen, subdued and still for once, added, “Yes, and how do we keep what we do secret from these people? They must have the best intelligence in the world.”
The discussion that followed this was, to begin with, slow and heavy and very, very serious. All four of them were overwhelmed with the nature of what they were discussing. This was war, against an enemy who knew all their weapons, and it made every other war look small and local and feeble by comparison. They knew their campaign had to be careful. It had to be good. And it had to succeed. It was clear to all four that, if they bungled, the pirates would finish them.
“Come on, come on!” Gladys said at length. “You’ve got to remember this is really no different from the way we went against Napoleon or Hitler. It’s just bigger and in a new place, that’s all. We need a smoke screen first. We’re going to need to make it look as if we’re powering up against this greenhouse thing. That’s what we’ll have to tell everyone else we’re doing. It’ll be too late when they find we’re using the power another way.”
“In that case we’ll have to tell the Outer Ring,” Amanda stated.
“Yes, we’ll be breaking the rules, not telling them,” Maureen agreed. “And—”
The Jimbo creature stirred in Gladys’s arms. “Oh, don’t give me that!” she said. “You young ones! You’re all for breaking the rules when it doesn’t matter, and when it does matter, you don’t seem to know how to do without your precious rules! One of the things Mark spent all last night proving is that there has to be an informer pretty high up among us. So we have to break the rules. None of this is to go beyond this house and the wards I’ve put around it. Is that clear?”
“I second that,” said Mark.
“You always were rather paranoid, Mark,” Amanda said, but she gave in. So, after a little squirming and some clamor, did Maureen.
The discussion proceeded much more efficiently after that. They forgot how momentous it was to wage war on another world and simply discussed how to do it. Breaking into that world was the first major problem. The defenses they had all in their different ways perceived seemed truly formidable. This had them at a stand for a while, until Maureen pointed out that the satellite they had all noticed was far more lightly warded than any other part.
“Could we get in through Blish City somehow?” she asked. “It seems to be part of the pirating setup too.”
“Somehow, somehow,” Mark said. “There must be a reason they don’t ward it so well. Can anyone think why?”
“Well, it can’t be there just to make an easy way in,” Gladys observed. “I sensed a lot of people there.”
“So did I,” agreed Amanda. “How is this for a working theory? Their defenses in the main world make it quite difficult for them to observe our world as closely as they want, so they have to build Laputa as a sort of observation platform. I saw Laputa myself as a sort of floating island — which is why I called it that, after Gulliver—but I suspect it’s more on the lines of a pocket universe.”
“I think you may be right,” Mark said soberly. “And if you’re right, then they won’t need wards on the place, because that’s where the main strength of their witchcraft will be.”
“All gathered to spy on us and exploit us,” Maureen murmured. “I think you’re right too, Amanda.”
“So an attack on Laputa ought to devastate them,” said Amanda. “Of course, we’ll need to research it more thoroughly, but let’s plan on those lines provisionally. Now, how are we going to get a strike force to the place? Transition between universes is bound to cause all sorts of problems.”
6
The discussion continued all that night and went on at intervals over the next month. Paulie Lister grew exasperated.
“Conferences, conferences!” she exploded to her lover. “Tony, I’m sure Mark’s got a new woman, and I bet you it’s that Maureen Tenehan! He only comes home to sleep!”
“Why do you let that bother you?” said Tony.
Maureen’s dancers grumbled too. Maureen, it seemed, had strained a shoulder and was forced to make frequent visits to the only osteopath she trusted, who, it appeared, lived in Ludlow. But as her absences went on, little Flan Burke began to prove such a good deputy that most of the troupe foresaw that Maureen would lose her place to Flan and end up simply teaching the younger dancers. Maureen’s boyfriend took the view that Maureen was doing it to spite him.
Somewhat the same opinion was held by Professor Amanda Fenstone’s teenage children. They grumbled to their aunt that Mum’s career seemed to mean more to her than they did. Why else was she always away giving lectures?
Only Gladys was spared human grumbling, and she often came back from another place to find herself in an accusing ring of cats long past their feeding time. For she took to sitting, hour after hour, on the Normandy beach forest borders of the pirate world, watching through notional spyglasses for any activity in Laputa-Blish (as it came to be called). Her skin grew flabbier and more blotched. Her feet were often numb, despite tartan socks and furry slippers, and she was tired. The other three worried about her. But Gladys was firm. This was the part of the task that she had set herself. As she said, she was the only one among them who was canny enough to watch without letting Laputa-Blish suspect it was being watched.
And her work bore fruit. One of the first things she was able to report was that there was always at least one observer in Laputa-Blish watching Earth. Often there were many more. They seemed to sit regular watches, and whenever the time came around for a group to be watching Earth, she became fairly sure that at least one was always focused upon the activities of the Ring.
“Let’s give them something to watch then,” Maureen said. “I’ll start having everyone power up on the ecology from now on, something cruel.”
“They’ll be expecting us to,” Gladys agreed, and went back to watching. As she moved away in her mind, she chuckled. Maureen was into ecology anyway. On the rare occasions Gladys had visited Maureen, she had found the flat full of tasteful green packages labeled ozone friendly and ecologically sound. The toilet roll had had recycled toilet paper printed on every sheet. Could one recycle toilet paper? she wondered, grinning as she drifted away, and if so, how?
During this stint of watching, she saw Laputa-Blish put out tenuous threads and translate them down to an earthly plane. Before she could trace them, they were gone. But she was ready for them next time they happened. She made one of her rare linkages with Jimbo and let him take her down, right down to his disquieting native ether. There she lurked, watching like a fox in a hole, and found that, as she suspected, the threads connected with the pirate world itself. She was lucky. It was a big joining that went both ways in all the planes of matter, and it lasted until her strength was almost gone.