Universe Twister - Keith Laumer [183]
"No! Wait! You have to get the information into the right hands before it's too late! Hello! Hello? Central?"
Lafayette struggled up from the dream, his shouts echoing in his ears. "Must have dozed off," he mumbled, looking around the hut. Lom was nowhere to be seen. Outside, the light seemed to have taken on a different quality: a late-afternoon quality.
"How long did I sleep?" O'Leary mumbled. He struggled up; he was light-headed, but his legs supported his weight.
"Lom! Where are you—" he called. There was no answer. He stepped outside. The hut—a flimsy shack of sticks and leaves, he saw—was surrounded by a flat clearing no more than a dozen yards in diameter, ringed in by high bushes, beyond which distant peaks rose high into the dusk-tinged sky.
"Ye gods—it's almost dark. I must have slept for hours." Lafayette thrust through the encircling shrubbery—and stopped short. At his feet, a vertical cliff dropped away into dizzying depths. He backed off, checked at another point. In five minutes he knew the worst:
"Marooned," he groaned. "Stuck on top of a mesa. I should have known better than to trust anyone who lives in a grass hut and subsists on Bavarian ham."
Far below, the valley spread, green and orderly, a pattern of tilled fields and winding roads. In the distance, the towers of the palace sparkled, ruddy in the late sun. The nearest of the peaks looming beyond the airy gulf surrounding his eyrie were at least five miles away, he estimated.
"I fell here, eh? From where? And how did that frail little old man carry my one-hundred and seventy-five pounds into his hut unassisted? I must have been crazy not to have smelled treachery." At a sudden thought, Lafayette clutched at his coat.
The Mark III was gone.
4
"Beautifully handled, O'Leary," he congratulated himself half an hour later, after a fruitless search of the half-acre mesa. "You really came on like a champ every inch of the way. From the minute you got that idiotic note, you've been shrewdness personified. You couldn't have worked yourself into a tighter pocket if it had been planned that way . . ."
He paused to listen to the echo of his own words.
"Planned that way? Of course it was planned that way—but not by you, you dumbbell! The Red Bull must have been in on it; probably someone paid him to con me, and then . . ." his train of thought faltered. "And then—what? Why hijack me, give me somebody else's face, and strand me on a mountaintop?"
"I don't know," he answered. "But let's skip that for now. The important thing is to get off this peak. Lom managed it. I ought to be able to do the same."
"Maybe he used ropes."
"And maybe I'm a kangaroo!"
"Possibly. Have you looked lately?"
Lafayette examined his hands, felt of his features.
"I'm still Zorro," he concluded. "Worse luck."
"And down there, someone is still on the loose with enough Probability gear to shift Artesia into the next continuum. And what are you going to do about it?"
As if in answer to his question, the sky seemed to flicker—like a bad splice in a movie film—and darken; not gradually, but with an abrupt transition from gathering twilight to deep dusk. Some small, fluffy-pink clouds that had been cruising near the adjacent peak were gone, whisked out of sight like dust under a rug. And that wasn't all, O'Leary realized in that same dizzying instant: the peak itself was gone—as were the neighboring peaks. He saw that much before the last of the light drained away, leaving him in total darkness. He took a step back, felt the ground softening under his feet. He was sinking down—dropping faster—then falling through black emptiness.
Chapter Four
1
The wind shrieked past Lafayette's face, buffeted his body. Instinctively, he spread his arms as if to slow his headlong fall. The streaming air tugged tentatively, then with a powerful surge that made the bones creak in his shoulders. In automatic response, he stroked, angling his hands to cup the air. He felt the tug of gravity,