Michael told me what your trouble was. I'll pray for you."

Rose is one of the good people. If God was in a mood to listen to anybody. He'd listen to her. "I did have to do this," I said. "It's the stuff before that I shouldn't have done."

She waved that aside and started to say something more, but I was already on the way back to my office. No matter how much of a big, hairy thing I'd been, I found she'd faithfully taken my messages while I was out. One was from Henry Legion. I'd have to call him back, I thought Then I looked at the next one. It was from Judy.

IX

I don't know how long I stood there staring at the little piece of parchment in my hand. Every feeling you can imagine ran through my mind - joy that Judy was alive, fear that she was in their clutches, hope, worry, rage, all of them jumbled together at once in a way that would have made me dizzy even if I hadn't been running on no sleep and too much coffee.

Eventually I started thinking as well as feeling. The message, not surprisingly, left no return number. I ran back j down the hall (I almost ran into Phyllis Kaminsky, too) to | Rose, threw it on her desk. "I meant to tell you about this, David," she said, "but what with the flowers and all, it went right out of my mind. I'm sorry."

So even Rose could make mistakes. I hadn't been sure it was possible. But it didn't matter, not right then. "Never mind," I said. "How did she sound? What did she say?"

"She just asked for you and hung up when I told her you were out of the office," Rose said. "I didn't know anything was wrong then." She gave me a reproachful look; if I'd told her earlier, she might have been able to do more.

"You have to remember, I've only spoken with her the couple of times she's come up here and occasionally taken messages for you - and no one ever sounds like herself on the phone."

Miserable phone imps - But no sooner had that thought crossed my mind than I ran up the hall (and almost ran down Phyllis again; she let out an indignant squawk) back to my office.

I wished Michael were still here instead of up at the Devonshire dump. I'd read that a good wizard could sometimes trace a phone call even after the etheric connection between the imps at the opposite ends was broken.

Phone imps are nearly identical, one to another - that's what ectoplasmic cloning is all about. Nearly, but not quite.

As Bacon's Troscintto puts it. There's a divinity that shapes our ends. Rough-hew them how we will." Tiny imperfections get into the cloning process - macro identical, but micro different That's why the phone switching system works so well: because the imps are so like one another and spring from the same source, the laws of similarity and contagion make establishing contact between any two of them easy. And because they aren't quite identical, each can be assigned its own place in the telephone web.

"God, I'm an idiot!" I exclaimed a moment later. God, I presume, already knew this. Michael Manstein was a good wizard, sure, but he wasn't the only good wizard involved in this case - the CBI had plenty of skilled mages, just two floors up. I called Saul Klein, told him what had happened.

"I'll send someone right to you," he said as soon as I was through. Henry Legion might have got down to my office faster than the wizard did, but I don't think any mere mortal could have. She was a Hanese woman who came up just past my elbow, but she seemed smart and businesslike as all getout. She introduced herself as Celia Chang.

"What time would this telephone call have been placed?" she asked.

I looked down at the parchment. Rose, bless her efficient soul, had made a note of it. Ten twenty-seven," I answered.

"And it's now"-she paused to ask her watch-"five minutes past twelve. A little more than an hour and a half. The etheric trail should not be impossibly cold. Let me see what I can do, Mr. Fisher."

From the efficient way she went about things, I gathered this wasn't the first time she'd traced phone calls - probably not the fifty - first either. If anybody had to use that particular thaumaturgy a lot, it would be the CBI. I felt easier, I'd been wishing she were Michael, but now I decided I didn't need to worry about it She opened her little black bag, took out what looked like a telephone handset but wasn't (I'd never seen a blue porcelain phone, anyhow), and set it on the desk next to my phone. "Does the telephone consortium know you have gear like that?" I asked.

"Officially, no," she said. Her smile made her look much younger and prettier than she had without it. "Unofficially - ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies." Like anybody else with an ounce of concern for the world to come, she was hesitant about being forsworn.

"Never mind," I told her.

She took a copper cable from one pocket other lab robe, used it to connect her blue box to the real telephone. As she did so, she made a face. "Properly, this should be silver," she said. "It's a better conductor of sorcerous influences than copper - but it's also more expensive, and so it's not in our thaumaturgical budget. If I were in private practice-" She shook her head. "If I were in private practice, I'd be less useful. I'm sure you have to manage on fewer resources than you find ideal, too."

"How right you are," I said.

She was making small talk while she could, just to put me at my ease. When the need for serious conjuration came, she started ignoring me. That was all right; I hadn't expect anything different. Wizards dealing with the Other Side don't need their elbows joggled, even metaphorically.

Mistress Chang might have been Hanese by blood, but she used standard Western sorcerous techniques, ones that date back to the Species of Origen and some of them even farther. No reason she shouldn't have; for all I knew, her ancestors might have come to the Confederation a couple of generations before mine. After censing the copper cable (and stinking up my office), she took two metal plaques, each inscribed with a demon's seal, and affixed them to the cable.

"I don't need a full manifestation from either Eligor or Botis," she explained, "but I do require the application of some of their attributes: Eligor discovers hidden things, while Botis discerns past, present, and future. Now if you will excuse me-"

The first gesture of her elegantly manicured hand was a wave to get me to move back a couple of steps. The next was a pass that accompanied her conjuration. Calling up demonic attributes without getting raw demon, so to speak, is a tricky business; I watched quietly and respectfully while she did what she had to do.

It was more like coaxing than commanding: no impressive circles or pentagrams, no manifest thyself or eternal torment shall overwhelm thee. At the climax of the incantation, she just said, "Help me, please, you two great Powers." I tell you, modem sorcery lacks the drama it had in the good old days.

But we can do things now that our ancestors never dreamt of trying. When Celia Chang pointed to the plaques on the cable, the seals that bound Eligor and Botis, which had been black squiggles on silver metal, began to glow with a light that outshone the St Elmo's fire on the ceiling.

The light started to fade, then grew again. They're searching through time for the etheric connection," Celia Chang said. Just then, Botis' seal blazed for a moment; I had to blink and turn my head aside. The CBI wizard softly clapped her hands together. "We have the fix in time. Now to see whether Eligofs allegory algorithm can uncover the missing phone number."

I didn't know what we were waiting for - probably for Eligofs seal to flare up the way Botis' had. That didn't happen; its squiggles continued to shine as they had before. I don't know if you're familiar with Eligor's seal: it looks rather like an open mouth with a rubber arrow threaded through its upper lip.