Free The Galaxy Builder by Keith Laumer

Frumpkin's
keeping Daphne?"
     
                Allegorus, three steps above, turned to face
him. "Lafayette," he said almost kindly, "I have no wish to
delude or confuse you, but the situation in which we find ourselves is one of
the most extreme gravity, aggravated, I regret to say, by your own hasty
actions since you arrived here."
     
                "Sure, you mentioned the entropic
disjunction. Now tell me what it means," Lafayette demanded grumpily.
"Maybe we'd better hurry on up and just make sure the lab is still
there," he suggested, edging past Allegorus. Especially the phone, he
was assuring himself urgently. The phone is still working.
     
                "You're well aware, Lafayette, of
the manifold nature of what we choose to call 'reality', Allegorus
pontificated. "What is not so generally realized is that the laminar
paratemporal structure is more fragile than is at first evident. You found you
were able, of course, quite voluntarily to shift your personal ego-focus from
one plane to an adjacent one by a mere effort of will, which quite clearly is
only a slight extension of the inherent faculty of all matter to coexist on
multiple levels, shifting freely from one to another under pressure of
circumstance. But it is just there, at the question of circumstantial
pressures, that the crux of our problem lies. You see," Allegorus
continued less glibly, seating himself on the step and warming to his subject,
"when circumstantial forces are modified on a sufficiently wide scale, it
is not the individual who slips across the interplanar gap, but the locus
itself, this being the principle of the Focal Referent, a device with which you
are familiar. Vast events on a cosmic scale can equally exert such pressures.
And when such an event is triggered out-of-matrix by a freak occurrence, whole
categories of foci can suffer dissubstantiation, while in accordance with
Newton's well-known law, commensurate changes of equal and opposite scope bring
unrealized foci into substantive status. It appears, Lafayette, that is what
has happened. The ramifications are too complex to consider in any detail. The
least of such repercussions is the realization of this bundle of defective foci
known locally as Aphasia, replacing in the grand scheme the legitimate Artesian
bundle, and relegating the latter to the void of that which might have been."
     
                O'Leary jumped up. "You can't pin that one
on me," he yelled. "I told you, I was just sitting on a bench with
... uh ..." Lafayette paused, frowning. "Anyway, all of a sudden it
was raining, and from then on everything went to pot. I didn't do
anything!"
     
                "You see, already those identities which
have been relegated to nothingness fade from your memory," Allegorus
pointed out. " 'Daphne' was the name which escaped you just now, by the
way. Now, I want you to think carefully, Lafayette. Precisely what did you say
and do—and even think—as you sat on the bench? Try. This may be of monumental
importance."
     
                "Nothing," Lafayette said defensively.
"We were just admiring the stars—"
     
                "Any specific star?" Allegorus cut in
quickly.
     
                "No! I mean, well, maybe. It was in Boötes,
near the Great Bear, Ursa Major. I was just thinking bears don't have tails,
and that it looked more like a duck—or it would if it had another star for the
beak."
     
                "Lafayette," Allegorus said in a
stricken tone, "you didn't do—actually do anything? I mean to say,
it was no more than an idle thought, eh?"
     
                "I just played around with the idea of
moving a nearby star over to make the beak, as I said."
     
                Allegorus leaped up and slapped his forehead
with a crack like a pistol shot. "That's it! The Great Unicorn! Greenwich
was right! The E.D. does emanate from the vicinity of