Read Online The Galaxy Builder by Keith Laumer - Free Book Online Page B

approached, O'Leary stepped close to Mike.
     
                "You may have an iron head," he said,
"but I'll bet you've got a glass gut." He feinted a jab to the
midriff; the big fellow staggered back, hands extended, fingers spread as if to
fend off an advancing juggernaut.
     
                "Have a heart, pal," he groaned.
"I ain't in my best form right now, OK? So maybe I'll give ya a break this
time, see? I'll just play like I din't hear him."
     
                As Lafayette eased around the giant and
continued quickly across the broken flagstones to the no-longer-collapsed
doorway, Marv caught his arm. He turned to shake him loose, and from behind him
an iron clamp closed on his shoulder, yanked him inside, and dropped him. The
door slammed and he was in darkness.
     
                The darkness lightened and he caught a glimpse
of the wide, featureless gray room. Daphne stood a few feet away, dressed in a
gown of pale yellow Lafayette had never before seen. He croaked her name. She
turned, seemed to look through him, and walked away to be lost in dimness.
Frumpkin hurried up. "This won't do, you know, my boy," he said in
mild reprimand. "We must come to terms."
     
                O'Leary knocked the Man in Black aside and
hurried after Daphne, but there was only darkness around him now.
     
                "Come back here, you vandal!"
Frumpkin's frantic voice shouted after him. "You'll ruin everything!"
     
                "It occurred to me, my boy," the
resonant voice of Allegorus said from the gloom, "that you'd be in need of
a trifle of assistance about now." There was a scratching sound, and light
flared. The tall figure of the mysterious Primary agent loomed over O'Leary,
holding a candlestick in one hand. With the other, still as hard as an iron
clamp, he hauled Lafayette to his feet.
     
                "Come along, lad," he ordered curtly.
"We have work to do—and not much time to do it in."
     
     

Chapter Five
     
                "I was sure you'd have second thoughts, my
boy," Allegorus went on expansively, "when you realized what you'd
blundered into out there."
     
                "I thought the tower was collapsing,"
Lafayette said. "In fact, I know it was collapsing. How'd it get
put back together so quick?"
     
                "A mere temporal faultline,
Lafayette," Allegorus replied soothingly. "For a moment there, in
transit to Aphasia II, you were occupying a locus in which the tower happened
to be falling as a result of all the probability stresses set up by current
events centering on the lab."
     
                "What about the lab?" Lafayette
demanded, feeling a sudden stab of panic. "Is it still intact?"
     
                "No fear, lad. As I told you earlier, the
volume of space-time occupied by the installation has been thoroughly
stabilized; in some loci, where the tower itself has fallen, it appears to
float unsupported in thin air, a circumstance which is helpful both in
rendering it inaccessible to curious locals and engendering the aura of
supernatural dread which you've encountered here in embryonic form."
     
                "I just came back to get a few things
straight," Lafayette demurred, but he followed his rescuer up the
rubble-littered stairway. "By the way, what did I blunder into? It
seems there's been a change of administration out there in the last few
minutes."
     
                "That, my dear boy, is the least of the
changes which have occurred," Allegorus replied patronizingly.
     
                "Let's hold it right here," Lafayette
said, and halted. "Until we clear up a few things. And I'm definitely not
your dear boy. Anytime someone starts calling me 'dear boy', I know I'm being
set up for something. Why not come right out and tell me what it is? I might
even volunteer. And what do you know about a big gray room where