Alienist. Laurence M. Janifer
and a warmer to the menu—well, it would do for a midnight supper, for me, and the coffee would be welcome (though much earlier I’d been filling up on it), after the last few hours of Customs.
I put down the phone, and the Master said: “Tell me.”
“The leg first,” I said. “What happened?”
He shrugged, just a little. “I was examining some files, at the request of a friend,” he said. “Instances of minor theft in specialty shops—unusual lingerie.”
I nodded, trying not to look surprised; God knows what he can notice. “Unusual lingerie?”
“What seem to be called Playtime Wispies,” he said flatly. “I had not myself previously encountered the objects. The records of theft were among several boxes of reader spools.”
I was trying hard not to picture the Master encountering a delicate handful of Playtime Wispies. Some of them are edible. Some play music. Some are rigged to vanish into thin air after set periods of wear—say two hours. Some—well, there are a lot of variations. “And the boxes of spools—”
“Just so,” he said. “A particularly heavy box fell on my foot. There is injured musculature, a small broken bone, a swollen ankle. All, I am assured, quite temporary.”
“Good,” I said. “And the thefts—”
“A very minor matter,” he said. “But my friend was curious as to patterns in the timing as well as in the objects stolen. A private matter, not for police inquiry. It will be settled easily enough, there is no real complexity involved.”
“Well,” I said, “I hope the foot’s better soon.”
“Indeed,” he said, and then: “Tell me.”
So I did. In careful detail, and word for word, second for second. It wasn’t at all the sort of thing I had trouble remembering. He asked no questions until the end, which was pleasing; it meant I was doing a thorough job of reporting events.
When I had brought him to the point at which I was orbiting Ravenal, I stopped. He said nothing at all for over a full minute—which was not usual.
Then he said: “You have left nothing out, and have added nothing?”
“Of course not.”
“Then we have an extraordinary situation,” he said. “You were quite right, Gerald: this is a story I have not heard before, and one for which I do not have any immediately final answers. There are, of course, a number of suggestive points.”
I said: “I’ve seen a few of them. But I’d like to hear your—” and there was a polite little rap at my door.
Room Service, of course. I got up and let the Totum in, told it where to set up the table and arrange the plates and food and so on, and punched my accept code into its shield. It buzzed faintly, said: “Ank you, Sir, and a pleas evening.”
Well, that it talked at all was evidence of the high ranking of my hotel; expecting perfection, in a machine that saw the kind of heavy use a hotel Totum had to see, would have been silly. “Thank you,” I said, and it went away, and I shut and locked the door and we got down to eating.
“Suggestive points,” I said after a while.
“Let us assume that what you experienced was objectively real,” he said. “In that case—though I hesitate greatly over the conclusion, and of course this Folla may have been lying, or mistaken, or mad—you were hearing the voice—produced I do not know how—of someone who was not, so to speak, from this universe.”
“Not from this galaxy, you mean,” I said. “A total stranger. I did get that. A very strange stranger, too.”
“Not from this universe,” the Master said flatly. “So he claims. Not from this—little sheaf of spaces. Three dimensions of space, and one of time—as Folla said. With visitations, of course, to a fourth dimension of space—which would describe, loosely to be sure, our travels in or through or with space-four.”
I nodded—very tentatively. “He described—space-time— as if it were something special. Odd. Not the kind of thing he’s used to.”
“God alone knows what he might be used to,” the Master said. He cut the last bit of steak au poivre and began to chew. “‘Sensory equipment limited’,” he said. “I wonder what unlimited sensory data would be.”
“Maybe his is limited too,” I said. I chased some peas around my plate, caught them and ate a forkful. “But in different ways.”
“Anything is possible,” the Master said. “He said ‘these spaces’ are his ship—that is, these spaces are where he now resides, and through which, or by which, he now travels. These three—or four—spatial dimensions.”
“As opposed to what?”
“Other dimensions?” he said. “I say that very hesitantly, Gerald—and, indeed, without any clear idea of what such a phrase might in fact mean to us.” He shook his head. “I sound as if I were talking about a very bad piece of science-fiction. A dimension is a heuristic convenience; it is not, if we except the ones we normally live in, an object, a thing one can point to and so define.”
“Space-four can’t be pointed to,” I said.
“And space-four is a dimension by definition only,” he said at once. “We cannot in fact point to time, Gerald. We can define, practically, so to speak, three dimensions of space, and those only.” He drank off some wine. “What do we mean by ‘dimension’—and what can it possibly mean to say that this creature, this voice, this Folla lives in some other one or ones?”
I poured out the last of the wine for him, and emptied my own glass. “Damned if I know,” I said.
There was quite a lot to be dug out of the comparatively few words I’d had with Folla, whoever or whatever he was. (He, she or it, I suppose—but “it” doesn’t seem to cover the case, somehow, and since Folla is not really a nice sort of being, I’d rather include him in my own gender than insult my companions of another g.) It was somewhere after midnight by City Two clocks, and positively into early morning by mine, when the Master sighed: “This shall have to be continued. I must leave.”
I agreed that it was getting late. He got up, grabbed his cane from beside his chair—he’d had it leaning against the portable table—and headed for the door. He wastes very little time on polite goodbyes.
But at the door—I trailed him by a few feet, politely—he turned. “Gerald,” he said, “I would like you to talk to a psychiatrist. An expert in Psychological Statics.”
I took a second to digest that. “Well,” I said, not wanting to burst out with objections, of which I had several hundred on immediate call, “why would you want me to do that? If we’re to accept the experience as objectively real—”
“That is why,” he said. “Euglane has an interest in such matters. He may prove quite valuable, if we are to inquire into what has happened at all. We could of course simply drop the whole matter.”
“And spend the rest of my life wondering what the Hell had happened,” I said. “Thanks. But why a psychiatrist? I may have a few bats in my personal belfry, but—”
“Your bats are your affair,” the Master said, “as mine are my affair; that is what it means to be human, and adult. But I believe you will find his insights helpful, as regards this particular problem.”
I was doubtful—but he was, after all, the Master. “If you say so,” I told him.
“I do,” he said. “I will call him in the morning, and he will then call you. By the way, Gerald—he’s a Giell.”
I blinked. “A what?”
He gave me his chuckle—a dry sound, part muted trumpet and part creak. “Not a gel,” he aid. “A Giell. You may not