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 happy 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?”
“Your information makes that appear more likely,” he answered, maddeningly evasive and dispassionate as usual.
I was too tired to get angry at him. I just pushed ahead; “If it was the Aztedans, why did they attack the Garuda Bird?”
The CI spook hesitated—I must have asked the right question. “The answer which immediately springs to
