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“I held a gun to the back of his head with my finger trembling on the trigger,” Angeina said, smiling sweetly. “I was going after you and intended to bring you back—with a better machine than the duff one he had supplied you with.”
“It was an early model,” Coypu muttered defensively. “I improved the design greatly then constructed three devices of varying degrees of undetectability.”
“I carried the first hidden in the lining of my purse,” Angelina said. “The second was under the skin on my arm, here.” She rubbed at the long white scar, easily visible under the dusty smears, and scowled. “I will have to get this unsightly thing removed.”
“That is not the only thing that is going to be removed,” I grated through tight—clamped teeth. “I’m going to kill that particular Slakey for that botched bit of surgery.”
“Not if I get there first, darling. He of course very quickly found the one in my purse, and then he detected this one, with great difficulty I must say. He was so pleased with himself that he never considered that there might be a third.”
“Where is it?” I asked.
“Where Slakey obviously could not find it,” Coypu said, happily rattling his fingers on his foreteeth. “I knew that there was no way to detect the pseudo—electrons, so it must have been the pseudo—electron paths in the solid state circuitry that he found. So I impressed my neural network on Angelina’s neural network where it would be concealed by her neural activity.”
“You mean that you built your machine right into her nervous system?” “Exactly so. Since my pseudo electrons move at pseudo speed, there would be no interference with the electrical function of her synapses. The circuitry ended directly in her brain.”
“So when I thought go, we all went,” she said, throwing her empty glass towards the robar, which plucked it out of the air with a flip of a tentacle. “Now lam going to wash off this mud and stench and I suggest, Jim diGriz, that you do the same.”
“I will after I ask you a single question..
“It can wait.” Then she was gone. I whistled up another drink.
“Tell me all that happened,” Coypu said.
“You let her go after Slakey alone!” I accused. “With all the massed strength of the Corps to hand.”
“And a gun to my head. Do you think that there was any way to stop her?”
“No—but you could at least have tried.”
“I did. What happened?”
I slumped in a chair, sipped my drink, and told him the entire repulsive story. My descent into Purgatory from Heaven and the women at the sorting tables there. Then being tossed through Slakey’s machine to the living hell of the mining world. He popped his eyes a bit when I told him about our escape in the rebar cages. Narrowed his eyes into pensive slits when he heard about the laboratory and the mysterious circular tu
“And that was that. My dearest Angelina was there and whisked us back here and you know the rest.”
“Well, well, well!” Coypu said when I had finished, jumping to his feet with excitement and pacing back and forth.
“Now we know what he is doing and how he is doing itwe just don’t know what he is doing it for.”
“Perhaps you know, Professor, but some of us are still in the dark.” “It’s all so obvious.” He stopped pacing and raised a didactic finger. “Heaven is the seat of all of his activities, we can be sure of that now. It matters not in the slightest where the mineral is mined. Because it was brought to Heaven after you and the male slaves extracted it from the ground. Dropped through an interuniversal field to end up in Heaven where it is ground finely and bombarded in a cyclotron—” “A what?”
“A cyclotron, that is the machine that you saw in the tu
“Why?”
“My good friend, how did you manage to obtain an education without studying basic science in school? Any first—year student would remember the simple fact that if you bombard platinum with neon ions you obtain element a hundred and four, called u
“A transuranic element. In the Stone Age of physics there were believed to be only ninety—eight elements, the heaviest of which was uranium. As new ones were discovered they were named, we think, after household gods. Curium after the god of medicine who cures disease, that sort of thing. Anyway, after the discovery of mendelevium, nobelium—and such, the elements were numbered in an ancient and lost language. One hundred and four is u
“About what?” she asked. Making a glorious entrance in a green space juniper that went beautifully with her now red—gold hair.
“What were you and the other women looking for in the grit?” I asked. “I have no idea.”
“But exactly what were you doing?”
“An interesting phenomenon. All the bits of sand and gravel looked exactly alike. But some of the grains, when you touched them they felt—slow? No, that’s not right, perhaps the other grains felt faster. It’s almost impossible to describe. But once felt never forgotten.”
“Entropy,” Coypu said firmly. “That’s Slakey’s special field of research. I am certain now that he is producing particles with different entropy”
“Why?”
“That is what we will have to find out.”
“How?” I asked. Puzzled, bothered and bewildered.
“You will find a way, you always do,” Angelina said, patting me on the arm.. Her smile turned to a frown when she looked at her filthy fingertips. “Go burn those clothes,” she ordered. “Then wash until your skin glows, then wash some more.”
I went willingly, well aware now of the stench, itch and scratch of my battered body. In the guest suite a burst of flame in the bathroom burner incinerated my clothing. I punched for antiseptics as well as soap in the bath, sank with a sigh under the warm water with a weary whew..
Woke up drowning as my nose slipped beneath the surface. Hawked and spat out water; I must have fallen asleep. My body was giving me a message that I was happy to receive. Dried and dusted I went on all fours into the bedroom, crawled dizzily into bed and knew nothing more.
Angelina and I were having a relaxed drink before di
“Any particular way you would like me to kill Slakey in Heaven?” I asked. “Messy and painful. Though he wasn’t really that awful to me. But he was an irritating, fat old git. Cackling with joy when the surgicalbot cut out the implant. Painless really, just messy. He couldn’t have cared less after that. I was just another woman for his slave labor at the tables. That terrible one—eyed robot grabbed me—now that is one piece of rusty iron I intend to dispatch personally—and took me off to the sorting place. One of the other women let me touch a grain she had found and that was that. Unlike those other poor creatures I knew that I could leave at any time, so it wasn’t too awful. I also knew that you would be making a breakout from somewhere somehow as soon as you could, so I didn’t mind waiting. I worked along with the others until I saw you and your friend ru