Quentin, following a croaking raven and carrying an entrenching tool, went off to do his spooky business there, while we shivered in the cold, waiting. Warlocks are something like doctors, I guess. No matter how much you like them personally, there is quite a bit of nasty mess involved in their line of work.
By the time Quentin got back, Vanity was casing the joint through the snowy twigs of the hedge, and listening to Colin and Victor give her completely contradictory advice about a plan of attack.
Vanity asked us all to report on what we could see.
I was standing farther from the hedge, two paces down the slope. I did not bother to turn my head in the direction of the modern building.
Now was my chance to show my time on the island had not been all wasted. I took my glass globe out of my pocket, unfolded it into a hypersphere. In that thick light, I could examine the immediate fourth-dimensional environment. A trick I'd learned allowed me to send the light down one of my limbs (a part of my body that looked like a strand of music) to shine it against distant objects. Down that same strand, I reached a cluster of sense- receptors.
The three-dimensional building was laid out before me like a blueprint. To my fourth- dimensional eyes, it looked flat. I could see internal natures, utility, monads, all that 4-D stuff. But now, I could agitate the photons in the area, give just enough of them free will to ask them to carry information back to my eyes, so that the number of nonconformist photons who went giggling off as rainbows was relatively small. In effect, I had just made the dimensional periscope Vanity mentioned earlier. Into any one of the squares of the rooms or corridors, I could dip a photon-freeing note of energy and get a 3-D picture of what was in there, too.
I reported my findings. 'He's alone. Sleeping on a cot in a cell. Window has steel netting across it, and the door is locked. I can see wires on the main doors into the wing, but no security cameras or anything like that. The alarms back on campus were more sophisticated. There is one guy on guard duty, two floors down, and he is sleeping in his chair.'
Vanity said, 'Can you confirm that this is the right guy?'
To them, it must have looked like I merely reached my hand up into the air and had it bend strangely, turn red, vanish, and reappear. In my hand was a clipboard. I had merely picked it up with a gleaming whiplike tendril, pulled it 'blue' an inch or two, and then pushed it 'red' into the hand of my three-dimensional cross-section. One hundred yards in three-space, slightly longer than that in four-space, I could reach with some straining.
'Mortimer Finklestein,' I read off the top sheet. 'List of the stuff they are doping him with. What he eats, when he cra-uh, goes potty. Hunh. Here is the diagnosis and history. He was out hunting in Teesdale. Wandered off by himself. When his friends found him, he had the mind of a five-year-old.'
Colin said, 'I thought hunting was illegal now. No more toffs trampling through other people's gardens, you know, killing innocent foxes.'
I checked the date. 'This was years ago, back when Englishmen still had rights. He was in the estuary below Middlesbrough, hunting small game birds, which were every one as guilty as sin, I'm sure. Anyway, the diagnosis here is of a trauma to the diencephalic- mesencephalic core-anyone know what that means?'
'It's part of an auto,' Colin offered.
'It's part of his head,' Quentin said. 'Cephalic is from the Latin for 'head.''
'The chart mentions severe cognitive impairment. And something happened to his Ommaya and Gennarelli. No, wait, that's the name of the scale he was tested against.' I breathed a sigh.
'Leader, I'm sorry. I've studied grammar, logic, rhetoric, as well as astronomy, music, arithmetic, and geometry, but I cannot read a medical chart. This is written in another language only remotely related to the Queen's English. At a guess? Mortimer here went into the marsh and came out stupid. They think he fell and hit his head.'
We had discussed the plans for this exhaustively during the boat fide. Vanity stepped down toward the road, found a manhole cover, which, at Victor's gesture, flew open silently. She descended a ladder to where, not by coincidence, she 'found' a large underground river. She called her boat.
Then she scampered back up the ladder.
She said, 'We have our escape route, and our getaway boat coming. Amelia, is it obvious?'
I had to say, 'Sort of. To me it looks like this big tube filled with river water just dipped out of the parallel plane where the dreamlands are and intersected the Earth continuum. I dunno. There are other fourth-dimensional topography features here, stuff from the cathedral and old Roman ruins, other old roads through hyperspace, hidden groves of trees at right angles to normal space. Druid stuff, I guess. Someone like you was really active here, years ago. Your river might pass unnoticed if a siren walks by, but it's not exactly hidden, either.'
Vanity frowned. 'In that case, let me keep the secret-passage-making to a minimum. We go in the front way. Victor, your turn.'
He walked across the snowy road and we followed him.
I noticed invisible forces leaving his body and reaching up to nearby lampposts. 'Victor!' I whispered. 'Are you knocking out the cameras? I think those are just for traffic, not part of the hospital. You know, to catch jaywalkers and stuff. They're innocent.'
