Arrow or not, though, that sort of a mouth up and spoke like the old Roman godlet Aius Locutius: one number after another, until there were ten. Celia Chang and I both wrote them down as Eligor gave them to us. By the time we'd recorded the last one, the lines on both plaques had stopped glowing.
"Let's compare them," the wizard said. I handed her the scrap of parchment on which I'd taken down the numbers.
She held out the one on which she'd written them. We'd both heard the phone number the same way. She asked, "Is this number familiar to you?"
"No." I shook my head. "It's not Judy's; it's not any phone number I've seen before."
"I expected as much, but you never know," she said.
"We'll have to go to the telephone consortium, then, and learn to whom the number belongs - if anyone, of course. It might be a public phone."
"I hadn't thought of that," I said in a hollow voice. Hard for me to imagine kidnappers having a victim make a call from a pay phone in the middle of the morning, but it was possible, especially if they knew of one that couldn't be easily seen from the street.
Mistress Chang said, "We'll be in touch with you as soon as we learn anything, Mr. Fisher." She packed up her sorcerous impedimenta, nodded to me - still businesslike, but with, I thought, some sympathy, too - and strode out of the office.
My stomach growled, fortunately a couple of seconds after that. What with all the coffee I'd poured down there, it had been growling on and off for a while now, but this was a different note. It wanted food. No matter what your mind tries to do to you, your body has a way of reminding you of life's basics. I went over to the cafeteria and bought myself a vulcanized hamburger - as a matter of fact, it was cooked so hard that Vulcan, had he been of a mind to, could have carved the battle reliefs that he'd put onto the shields of Achilles and Aeneas right onto the surface of the meat. I ate it anyhow; at the moment, I didn't much care what I fed my fire, as long as it filled me up. And I washed it down with more coffee.
The stuff was starring to lose its power to conjure up my demons. I found myself yawning over the last of my fries.
But no rest for the weary; I plodded back to the office to see what I could accomplish.
In short, the answer was not much. Part of the reason was that I jumped halfway to the ceiling every time the phone yarped, hoping it would be Judy again. It never was. None of the calls I got was of any consequence whatsoever. Every one of them, though, broke my concentration. In aggregate, they left me a nervous wreck.
Along with hoping one of the calls would be from Judy, I also kept hoping one wouldn't be from Bea. I just didn't have it in me to play staff meeting games right then, and I wasn't real thrilled about having to bear up under sympathy, either.
Atlas carried the whole world, but right now I had all the weight on me I could take.
But Bea, to my relief, didn't call. Except for relief, I didn't think anything of it at the time. Looking back, though, I think she didn't call precisely because she knew I couldn't deal with it. Bea is a pretty fair boss. I may have mentioned that once or twice.
The phone squawked yet again. When I answered it, Celia Chang was on the other end. "Mr. Fisher? We have located that telephone whose number I traced a little while ago. It is, unfortunately, a public phone up on the comer of Soto's and Plummer in St. Ferdinand's Valley."
"Oh," I said unhappily.
"I am sorry, Mr. Fisher," she said, "but I did think you would want to know."
"Yes, thank you," I said, and hung up. I never have figured out why you thank someone who's given you bad news - maybe to deny to the Powers that it's really hurt you, no matter how obvious that is.
After Celia Chang's call, the phone stopped making noise for a while. I tried to buckle down and get some work done, but I still couldn't make my mind focus on the parchments in front of me. I'd write something, realize it was either colossally stupid or just pointless, scratch it out, by again, and discover I hadn't done any better the next time. All I could think about was Judy - Judy and sleep. In spite of all that coffee, I was yawning.
About half past three, someone tapped on my door. Several people had been in already; news of what had happened was getting around with its usual speed in offices. I knew they meant well, and it made them feel better, but it just kept reminding me of what Judy had gone through and might be going through now. Still, once more couldn't make me feel much worse than I did already. "Come in," I said resignedly.
It was somebody I worked with, but somebody who already knew what was going on. "Hello, David," Michael Manstein said. "I trust I am not intruding?"
"No, no," I said - someone else would have been, but not Michael. "Here, sit down, tell me what that thing - that Nothing - I mean - in the Devonshire dump is."
He folded his angular frame into a chair, steepled his long pale fingers. "First tell me if you have any word of your fiancee," he said. So I had to go through that again after all. He listened attentively - Michael is always attentive - then said, "I am sorry you were out of the office when Judith called. I wish I could have been here when the CBI wizard traced the call, as well. I have had occasion to attempt that twice, but succeeded in only one instance. An opportunity to improve my technique would have been welcome."
I had the feeling he was more interested in the magic for its own sake than the reason it had been used, but I couldn't get angry about that - it was Michael through and through. I tried again to make the carpet fly my way: "So what was that Nothing? Did you analyze it?"
"I did," he answered. "As best I could determine, it is - Nothing."
"What's that supposed to mean?" I know I sounded peevish - nerves, exhaustion, coffee again.
Michael didn't notice. What he'd found intrigued him too much for him to pay attention to details like bad manners.
He said, "It is, in my experience, unique: an area from which all the magic has been removed, not externally, as would be normal, but internally. Whatever Powers are involved are still contained within the barrier established around them, but have in effect created that barrier to shield them from the surrounding world - or vice versa. I have no idea how to penetrate the barrier from This Side."
"Could whatevers in there burst out from the Other Side?" I asked.
"It is conceivable," Michael said. "Since I am of necessity ignorant of what lies inside the barrier - think of it as an opaque soap bubble, if you like, although it is almost infinitely stronger - I cannot evaluate the probability of that possibility."
I worked that through till I thought I understood it. Then I said, "Why does the, the Nothing make everything behind it look so far away?"
"Again, I cannot give a precise answer," Michael said, "I believe I do grasp the basic cause of the phenomenon, however: the barrier is in effect an area where the Other Side has been removed from contact with This Side. The eye naturally attempts to pursue it in its withdrawal, thus leading to the impression of indefinitely great distance behind it."
"Okay," I said. That made some sense - certainly more than anything I'd thought of (which, given my current state, wasn't saying much). But it raised as many questions as it answered, the most important of which was, how do you go about separating This Side and the Other? They've been inextricably joined at least since people and Powers became aware of each other, and possibly since the beginning of time.
Michael said, "If your next question is going to be whether I have a theoretical model to explain how this phenomenon came to be, the answer, I regret, is no."
"I regret it, too, but that's not what I was going to ask you," I said. Michael raised a pale eyebrow; to him, finding a theoretical model ranked right up there with breathing. My mind was on simpler things: "I was going to ask if you'd come with me to inspect Chocolate Weasel tomorrow morning." I explained how more and more of the evidence was pointing toward an Aztedan connection.