The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

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.