"Can't blame Daph for that," Sprawnroyal reassured Lafayette. "She's a true-blue dame if I ever seen one, even if she is twice too high, no offense." His lumpy face looked unaccustomedly solemn for a moment. "But it's this Frumpkin character that intrigues me." Sprawnroyal paused to glance toward the now quietly groaning man on the floor. "He claims he's manipulating the exocosm wholesale, eh? Prolly just a nut like you said, but the fact is, somebody's been monkeying around on a big scale—"
"I'm afraid I'm to blame," Lafayette said miserably. He went on to tell Sprawnroyal of his idle tinkering with the Great Unicorn. Sprawnroyal waved that aside. "Don't figure, Slim. The energy requirement alone—"
"Don't talk theory at me, Roy," Lafayette protested. "I'm talking about what happened. I goofed and I'm ready to take the blame."
"This Aphasia place is nothing but mud-flats, you say," Roy changed the subject. "Sounds like a whole lot o' geology has gone down. But the moon was back to its old size, eh? Looks like you switched planes that time."
"I must have," Lafayette agreed. "But where are we now? That looks like Melange out the window, and those peaks must be the Chantspells. How'd I get here? And since when is the Ajax plant next door to the lab?"
"Easy, Slim," Roy said, holding up a calloused hand. "You got here by a little Ajax device we call a Come Hither. When you used the flat-walker, that gave us a hard fix and we just yanked you in. About the Works bein' next door to old Nicodaeus' lab, it ain't, natch.
... We coulda retrieved you to any place we liked, so why not right here to the head office? You're right about Nicodaeus really anchoring his lab right. Tied it to the Prime Postulates, and can't nothing short of total dissolution shake that. Lucky thing, too: gives us a good access to an infinite series of loci across nine planes, and well into the next manifold."
Frumpkin moaned and sat up on the floor, both hands carefully holding his head in place.
"I'll string yer innards out over an infinite series o' manifolds for this, you wretches!" he declared in a yell, rising to face O'Leary, who rose to confront him.
"Better quieten him down, boys," Sprawnroyal ordered his two handy men. They went briskly to the Man in Black, who shrank back with a yelp.
"Don't dare to lay hands on me, you miserable nits!" he commanded.
"No problem, Skinny," one of the sturdy little men said, and drawing a bright yellow, pen-sized tube from a clip at his belt, directed it at Frumpkin and released a jet of pink vapor.
"Ugh! Puce and lemon, a perfectly vile color combination," Frumpkin gasped as he sank to his haunches and squatted there, his face now on a level with the two Ajax men. His expression went vague.
"OK, Slim," Roy said to O'Leary. "One good sniff of Vox III and he's ready to tell us stuff he never even heard of before."
"I'd prefer to have him stick to what he has heard of," Lafayette protested.
"Just a like figger of speech, Slim," Roy reassured Lafayette easily. Lafayette followed Roy across to where the Man in Black squatted, and looked him directly in the face.
"What are you after, Frumpkin?" he demanded.
"You may address me as Sublime One," Frumpkin replied.
"And then again, I may not," Sprawnroyal replied, looking up to wink at Lafayette. "OK," he returned his attention to Frumpkin, "talk it up, Skin. What do you have to do with all this stuff that's been going on? Like running poor Slim ragged, and giving a hard time to I and my boys, and all?" Roy waved a stumpy arm to take in all the anomalies he had left unmentioned.
"To divulge what you suggest would be a gross violation of Cosmic Ultimate State Secrecy," Frumpkin replied in a grumpy tone.
"So, we pick up a little security violation, Skin," Roy returned briskly. "That's not as bad as this is it?" As he spoke he grasped Frumpkin's longish nose firmly between his knuckles and gave it a firm tweak. Frumpkin yelled and almost toppled. Roy hauled him up by the nose and said, "Talk it up, Skin. We got no time for games."
Frumpkin made muffled spluttering sounds and Roy tightened his grip. At once the Man in Black recoiled and said clearly:
"That did it, buster. You now occupy top spot on our personal hit list."
Roy adjusted his grasp on Frumpkin's now red nose and twisted it in the opposite direction. "You know, Skin, if that cartilage happens to get busted, you'll have a cauliflower nose; yer own old ma wouldn't reckernize ya." He twisted harder.
"Hurry up," he urged. "This is tough on a feller's knuckles."
"This isn't doing any good," O'Leary said unhappily. "He can't talk, anyway, when he's looking up his own nostrils."
"Slim," Roy said patiently, "you're a nice guy; that's yer problem: Yer too nice of a guy. With bums like Skin here, ya gotta squeeze. Maybe I'd have better luck with a ear at that—onney they break up awful easy." He shifted his grip to one of Frumpkin's generous ears. At once, the Man in Black yowled and blurted:
"All right, you nasty, ugly little monster! It wasn't my fault! If he hadn't continually interfered with me, I'd have never so much as known of his miserable existence!"
"My existence was far from miserable until you started tampering with it," O'Leary notified the irate Frumpkin, who glared at him and ground his teeth in fury.
"Aha! The technique of the Big Lie!" Frumpkin charged. "You, having had the temerity to seek to thwart my efforts to establish a New Reality, now charge me with the crime, directed against your petty person! Intolerable! You know perfectly well that it was you who initiated the series of antisocial acts aimed at destroying my life's great work!"
"Name one thing I did to bother you before you stuck your nose in my affairs," O'Leary challenged. "The first time I ever saw you, right here in this room, you handcuffed me and were all ready to kidnap me, when you panicked and ran."
"Panic? I?" Frumpkin echoed derisively. "Pooh. Are you attempting to maintain that you introduced no alternatives into the tranquil fabric of Reality during the' years directly preceding the confrontation to which you refer?"
"I don't actually know what you're talking about," O'Leary started, "but—"
"He means the times you kind of did some unauthorized shifts, Slim," Roy put in. "Like when you come to Melange and changed Rudolfo's plans for Ajax —and Ajax Novelty is grateful, even if it did louse up Skin's plans, here."
"All I did was focus my Psychical Energies a few times," Lafayette protested. "And that one time, I messed with a gadget from the Probability Lab, accidentally almost. But I never heard of Frumpkin until after ..." Lafayette paused to swallow. "... after I messed with the Great Unicorn," he finished lamely.
"Whatta ya talkin', ya messed with the Great Unicorn?" Roy challenged. "That's a constellation or something, right? How do you mess with a bunch of stars, some of 'em over a hundred miles away?"
"I didn't mean to," Lafayette explained. "I just happened to be looking at Ursa Major—that means the Big Bear, or the Bigger Bear, to translate precisely—and it seemed to me like a dumb name. Bears don't have tails; it looked a lot more like a horse with a horn on its head. That was the only thing—I needed one more star for the tip of the horn—so there it was."
"Just a minute," Roy said, and went across to stare at a large star-chart pinned to the wall.
"Funny thing, Slim," he said, pointing. "This here chart has been here since Prince Krupkin's time anyways; here's the Great Unicorn, just as big as life. The star at the tip o' the horn is, uh, looks like a dim galaxy, Slim. NGC-51a, it says. A irregular galaxy of the Local Group."