said it again: “Indeed.” And then: “It is nearly time for my dinner, Gerald. I will come to your hotel, if I may.”
“City Two Rooms and Services,” I said, not bothering about the fairly obvious deduction that I was in a hotel. “We’ll find a restaurant.”
“Room Service will be sufficient for an old and helpless man,” he said. “If you are serious about your story, Gerald, we shall want no distractions.”
An old and helpless man. Oh, God. But though being around the Master meant you had to put up with a lot—you also had to put up with being called Gerald, for instance—it was worth it; he was, after all, the Master.
“I’ll look for you,” I said.
“Do that. Look for a blind and lamed old man, Gerald.”
“Lamed?”
“It is unimportant,” he said. “A small accident, and I am assured temporary. Finished.”
Click. The Master wasted no phone time whatever.
He has been blind for thirty years and more, but I had never seen him with a cane before. He didn’t lean on it unduly and he didn’t flourish it; he used it, with as little waste motion as possible. He stalked into the hotel lobby, a big barrel-shaped man with a large, Roman head and a crown of fine white hair, moving a little slowly but not with a noticeable limp—and when he got to the middle of it he stopped and cocked his big head. The place was full of bustle and movement, for City Two— which, while a full city, is not as crowded as City One, where the bureaucracy lives—but when I said: “Over here,” he heard me without effort. He stalked toward me. People in his path got out of his path.
I think the Master has memorized the entire ground plan of any place on Ravenal he’s at all likely to be; he’s never used a cane for location that I know of. He came within two inches or so of a pillar, on the way to me, but no closer. When he got to me, he said: “I thought you might come down to meet me, Gerald.”
“Of course I would,” I said. “And not because you have difficulties—”
“Blind,” he said. “Not because I am blind. Periphrasis does not become you, Gerald.”
“At any rate,” I said uncomfortably, “simple politeness. What happened to your leg?”
“The room,” he said. “I dislike to chat in large open spaces.”
“Sorry,” I said, and headed for the elevators. He followed me without trouble. A couple of large men walking across the lobby and arguing with each other nearly bumped into him, but they did see him at the last second, and turned aside just enough. A little more than just enough. He affected not to notice, and let them live.
In the room, we got settled into chairs, and he said: “If I remember this establishment, the steak au poivre is edible. We will accept their usual accompaniments. That, and any decent red wine.”
I seconded the motion, called for Room Service, added coffee 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
