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“I would rather drink myself into an ulcer!” The thought of strong spirits and cold beer got my spittle flowing. I spat into the forest and watched a stem of grass dissolve. Good thing it never rained here.
I awoke with the sun on the morning of our sixth day of waiting, watching its green—striped disk shining through the multicolored foliage. It was no longer exciting to look at, nor did I wonder anymore what made the stripes. Angelina was pale and drawn, moaning under her breath as she slept. I didn’t want to wake her; sleep was our only escape from hunger. And the endless waiting. I walked down the path a bit and looked out over the ocean. The waves surged turgidly against the cliffs; nothing else moved. Depression struggled onto the back of depression. I sighed mightily and went back to the clearing.
When Angelina did wake up we talked a bit. I was thirsty but she wasn’t, so I walked down to the beach to drink. There was nothing that we could carry water in. Therefore we took turns drinking so that someone would always be in the clearing. Waiting.
The walk was tiring—but it had to be done. I drank my fill, then a little more. Filling the stomach helped for awhile with the hunger. The walk back, uphill part of the way, was particularly exhausting. And I had to walk slowly or I would have an oxygen jag.
“Home is the drinker, home from the sea!” I called out. A feeble attempt at humor. “Hello!”
Maybe she was asleep again. I shut up but walked faster. Stopped. Frozen. The cleared area was empty. “Angelina!”
This was the blackest of blackest moments that I had ever experienced. If Coypu had his machine working—he could have saved her. That had to be it. Coypu had done this, not Slakey. Could that be it? But Coypu was an unknown. If the marines had grabbed a machine, and if it were intact, and if Coypu had built a machine An awful lot of ifs. But Slakey had plenty of machines and knew that we were here. He could have returned and seized Angelina and left me here to starve quietly. Was it Slakey who got here first and grabbed her off this world?
“Who did this? Where are you?”
I shouted aloud, brimming over with frustration and anger. And fear. It must be Coypu. It had to be him.
I hoped. But if it had been him why had he taken just Angelina and left me here? There should have been a message, at least a message. I frantically kicked about among the broken crystal. No note, no traces of anything.
For a very, very long time nothing happened. I was giggling with fear. Too much oxygen. Slow down, Jim, take it easy. I sat in the cleared area where we slept and breathed more slowly. With one last snicker the laughter died. Depression took over.
The days on Glass were short—but this was the longest one I had ever lived through. It was growing dark and I must have nodded off with my head slumped on my chest. Fear, worry, hunger, everything. Too much, far more than too much.
“Dad—over here!” Bolivar said. I blinked my eyelids, still half asleep, dreaming.
“Are you all right? We have to move fast.”
No dream! I set a new record for the broken glass sprint. Slammed into him and almost knocked him from his feet. We were falling—backward into a brightly lit hotel room, onto a soft, carpeted floor. I just lay there, looking up at Professor Coypu seated before a great mass of bread boarded electronics.
And Angelina smiling down on me.
“I hope they gave you something nice to eat,” I said, inanely, still not believing that it was all over and she was all right. She knelt and took my hands in hers.
“Sorry it took so long. The professor says that he has trouble aligning the machine.”
“Calibration errors, cumulative, entropy slippage,” Coypu said. “Gets better each time though.”
“Something to eat, Dad,” Bolivar said, helping me to my feet and handing me a giant roast meat sandwich. Saliva sported as I growled and tore off an immense bite, chewed, paradisical. I took the proffered beer bottle by the neck and drank and drank until the back of my nose hurt from the cold.
“Here, sit at the table,” Angelina said, pulling out a chair. “And don’t eat so fast or you’ll make yourself sick—”
“Warfle?” I said.
“—and don’t talk with your mouth full. Eat slowly, that’s better, while I tell you what happened. It was Bolivar who came for me. No time to wait, he said. The alignment was difficultjust seconds. I held back but he grabbed me and that was that. It took so long to get through to you again, I knew what you were feeling. But it is all all right now. We are all together this time. The end of worrying.”
“The begi
“All right for you people to relax and cheer each other up with stories of your strange adventures. You forget that the rest of us are weighed down with responsibilities. Since this whole mess began we have been behind the eight ball, stuck in the mud, up the creek paddleless and getting nowhere as fast as a turgid turtle.”
Instead of pointing out the tangled syntax of his mixed metaphor I reached for another sandwich. Priorities exist. He chuntered on.
“We have been tottering from calamity to calamity, our hand forced at every turn. Not one of the Slakeys has been apprehended. As soon as we close in on one of them another pops up and whips him away. All of our efforts so far have been spent in getting you out of trouble, diGriz. And the costs keep growing. I imagine it was your smart idea to rent this entire hotel, the Vaska Hulja Holiday Heaven, as center of this operation. Do you know how many millions of credits it has cost so far?”
“More than the gross a
He turned bright red and bulged his eyes, opened his mouth. But Angelina spoke first.
“You are both right and wrong, Jim. It looks like Slakey has been put Out of business. The search is still on, but it has been a long time since the detectors found any trace of him—on any civilized planet that we have contacted. The search is now spreading to every recorded world, as our great leader, H. P. Inskipp, has kindly pointed out.”
She smiled but Inskipp was immune to the kind word and the gentle touch. “I’m going to pull the plug and cut our losses,” he said. I was suddenly very angry.
“No you are not, you monetarial moron! All of the civilized planets pay large sums to keep the Special Corps in businessand they never ask you for any kind of accounting. We are now faced with one of the biggest threats that mankind has ever faced—and you want to cut and run.”
“What threat? What can one man do that can threaten a thousand worlds?”
“Think!” I said, grabbing up another beer to hold down the sandwiches. “Professor Justin Slakey may have started out as a top scientist and a genius. But this popping back and forth between universes has not only addled his mutual brains but in some way has multiplied his numbers. Do you want these madmen to go on multiplying and causing more and more trouble? We know he has sent people to Hell to provide lunch for his insane personification there. At the very least Slakey is a mass murderer. Who will go on committing murder and who knows what other forms of insane evil until he is stopped. And more than that…”
I really had their attention now. All eyes were on me. All mouths mute as I raised the bottle and drank in dramatic silence. Then raised a hortatory finger.