Free The Galaxy Builder by Keith Laumer Page A

M-51!"
     
                As O'Leary was about to voice his impatience
with the renewed spate of nonsense he had once again received in response to
his request for a simple explanation, he felt the stone tip and shake beneath
him. A block of rough-cut masonry fell from the ceiling, just missing his left
foot. Allegorus seized his arm, tugging him upward.
     
                "Into the lab, man!" he cried, as more
stone fragments rained down and the stair bucked under him like a flatbed at
speed on a gravel road.
     
    -
     
                Frumpkin's frantic face seemed to be swimming,
disembodied, in gelatinous mist.
     
                "Stop now!" he yelled. "This will
avail you nothing, O'Leary! And if you expect to see Daphne again—" His
voice ceased in mid-word and Lafayette caught a fleeting glimpse of Daphne's
face, her hair in disorder, her eyes wide with fear. He reached for her, but
there was only mist and dust and a deep rumbling underfoot. The powerful grip
on his arm urged him upward.
     
                "This is no time for wool-gathering,
Lafayette!" Allegorus' resonant voice shouted as from a distance. With an
effort, O'Leary focused his vision on the breaking stair-slab underfoot, and
managed to leap over it before it fell. Allegorus steadied him on his feet.
     
                "It happened again!" O'Leary shouted
over the rumble of falling stone. Allegorus hurried him on.
     
                They paused on the landing to catch their
breath, fending off a rain of gravel.
     
                "I thought you said the tower didn't really
collapse!" Lafayette remonstrated.
     
                "Oh, it collapsed, Lafayette, it collapsed
indeed—in a wide belt of loci into which we have no business straying just now.
I fear we've not yet felt all the repercussions of your folly."
     
                "My folly, nothing!" Lafayette yelled.
"Let's get out of here!"
     
                "The abnormal density gradient in Boötes
was first noted some decades ago," Allegorus said a bit breathlessly as
Lafayette urged him up the disintegrating stair. "A clear case of a
collapsed Schrodinger function on a vast scale, but as it was extragalactic in
origin, nothing was done. Then, mere hours ago—but you know all about
that."
     
                "All about what!" O'Leary
yelled.
     
                ."Consider for a moment, lad," Allegorus
urged quietly, thrusting Lafayette toward the plank door to the lab.
"Refresh your memory on the basics of quantum mechanics."
     
                "I never got around to the higher
physics," Lafayette protested. "I was too hung up with Getting
Into Radio Now, and How to Speak Spanish Without Actually Trying , and Auto Repair Made Easy, and continental-style techniques of fencing, and
my synthetic rubber experiments, and making sardine sandwiches."
     
                "A full schedule, without doubt,"
Allegorus commiserated.
     
                "If you knew how bad I hated those sardine
sandwiches!" Lafayette said bitterly. "I liked taffy OK, up until I
got myself stranded in the desert with nothing else to eat."
     
                "Yours has been an adventurous
existence," Allegorus agreed. "But just now we'd best take steps to
ensure the present Adventure is not permitted to deteriorate into a Terrible
Experience." Then they were through the door and in the comparative calm
of the old laboratory, though the floor still vibrated underfoot. The walls,
Lafayette noted, were now decorated with zebra-hide shields, voodoo masks,
stone-tipped spears, a moth-eaten lion's head, and gaudy posters advertising a
weekend tour to tropical Antarctica. He pointed out the changed decor to
Allegorus, who waved it away. "A shift in locus of a few parameters can
often produce extensive superficial modification. Not to fear, my boy. Our link
to Central remains