"I don't have time for this," I said. I grabbed the throat of the Trebor closest to me. His neck instantly dissolved, and I held thin air. He wasn't there anymore. I looked down. The white floor was crawling up my legs. It swirled around me, and I felt myself sinking into it like into quicksand. I swore then patted my back pocket. My knife was still in it. I grabbed the handle, flipped the catch and sliced down. The entire room burst with a high-pitched keening that hurt my ears. The floor receded, and Trebor rose in front of me. He didn't look happy. I held the knife in front of me, unsure of what he was capable of doing. He lifted his arm, and the ground gave under me as if he'd pulled a rug. I fell on my back. I could see murder on his face.

  Finally, I thought, I'll be free. I closed my eyes and hoped for a quick death.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I WAITED.

  "Come on, come on," I muttered. "Get it over with."

  "What would you have me do, Jack Meter?"

  I opened my eyes. Trebor and I stood face-to-face, which further confused my already baffled mind. A moment ago I lay on my back, hoping for a quick death. Now, I was staring at the mouth on his chin. Either Trebor was floating in the air above me, or he'd tilted the entire room so I could stand on my feet again. With all this white around me, I couldn't distinguish the ceiling from the walls or the floor.

  "A minute ago," I said, "you were ready to cancel my ticket. What happened?"

  "We did not repair you so we could damage you, Jack Meter."

  "What a letdown. You guys don't even put up a good fight."

  Trebor smiled, silent, cross-eyed. The other Trebor approached him, and they melted together into a distorted human shape.

  I examined the result, certain my knife had done some damage. The blade had made contact; it had felt like I was slicing flesh. I searched around me. I couldn't see any tear, cut or hole; and there were no traces of my knife or of blood.

  Could it be that Trebor was telling the truth? They'd brought me to a world other than Earth?

  I shook my head to dislodge the idea.

  Even during my stay at the funny farm, I'd never had visions of pink elephants dancing on the ceiling. My delusions always stayed within the limits of my own personal horrors. In my dreams, I relived the explosion and felt Annie, over and over again, bleed away in my arms.

  During those periods of madness, it was as if one me watched the meltdown while the other stayed remote and impassive. But here, with Trebor and his body double, physics apparently didn't apply. I rejected the idea of an elaborate setup. I knew I'd made a few enemies in my job, but none had the kind of money to arrange special effects like these. Hell, I was dealing with someone who could melt into the floor and split himself into his own copy, upside-down face and all.

  I squinted, confused all over again at his appearance. Now he had a proper face, but his body was all mixed up like a Picasso. Just watching it made me dizzy; I staggered, but the air around me thickened and kept me upright.

  "This tendency of your race toward violence is fascinating," Trebor said, "albeit unproductive." His voice came out muffled, as if he spoke through water.

  I jumped at him — and bounced against an invisible barrier. I grinned, amused. "Can't be too careful with the mad PI, right, Trebor?"

  "A mere precaution until we arrive at an agreement."

  "Let me give you a news flash. You got the wrong guy. I can't help you."

  "You mean you won't."

  "Can't. Won't. What's the difference?" I walked away then turned to face him again. "In case it didn't occur to you, my experience with alien life forms is somewhat limited. And what do I know about Trans-whachamacallits?"

  "Transworld Portals."

  "Whatever. There are a few things I want to know, though, before you send me back. How'd you find out I was a PI? For that matter, how did you even know what a PI was?"

  While I paced up and down in front of him, Trebor fluctuated from one shape to the other. I thought maybe I could attach an electrical cord on him — he'd make a perfect lava lamp.

  "We had limited time," Trebor said. "Of course, we cannot know everything about your world. We concentrated on our need." He waved at his own body. "We thought it would make it easier for you if we adopted your form."

  "You need more practice."

  "Our inability to conserve a consistent shape is related to the problem that made us bring you here."

  "What the hell is a Transworld Portal, then? How can it be gone?"

  "We don't know how it was stolen," Trebor said. "Part of your task will be to discover how it was done so we can prevent such an occurrence in the future."

  I frowned at him. "When did it happen?"

  "I am not certain."

  "You don't know much, do you?"

  Trebor just stared, his lips pressed tightly together.

  "Why not use someone from your own world to get it back?"

  "We are prevented from leaving our world, lest we disintegrate," a voice behind me said.

  I whipped around. Another Trebor stood behind me.

  "Unfortunately, you lack the necessary framework to understand the scientific explanation," he said. "Imagine trying to explain to a Neanderthal how one of your computers works. Impossible."

  "Naturally," I said, my voice falsely casual. "But this dumb jerk is the one you come to when you want your property back."

  "The Portal is not our 'property.' It is a part of our totality. We are one and many, Jack Meter—oneness and plurality, sound and silence, emotions and logic, insubstantiality and mass."

  "You mean you haven't tried to confuse me on purpose?"

  Trebor gave me a half-smile and pointed to my body with his chin. "You are limited to operating in discrete space and time; it will allow you physical access to worlds we cannot reach. We will provide you with the proper equipment to help you track down the thief."

  "You don't even know where to look next."

  "We would not have called upon you otherwise."

  I sighed. My skin itched, a warning that either things weren't quite what they seemed or that the situation held danger. I'd learned to pay attention to my hunches in the past. Was Trebor holding out on me, or was he as naive as he sounded? Then again, would my instincts work with aliens?

  Regardless, I didn't have much to go on so far, and it didn't look like I would get much more until I gave them my decision. Despite the strange situation, I was intrigued. I never could resist a challenge, especially when I thought a prospective client was hiding something from me.

  I laughed, even though the situation wasn't all that funny. "If you think that making me healthy was payment enough for this stint, Trebor, you'd better come up with a better idea. And fast."

  "Then, you will help us?"

  "As I said, it depends."

  Trebor's face melted then slowly reshaped itself. "I will strike a bargain with you, Jack Meter. Upon return of our Portal, we will grant you what you desire most." He paused and moved closer, eyeball-to-eyeball. "If you still wish to end your life at that time, we will do so."

  I could hear my heart beating a rhythmic pattern on my eardrums.

  "And if that's not good enough?" I couldn't resist asking.

  Trebor's mouth molded itself into the semblance of a smirk. "If you refuse this offer, or if you fail to recover our lost Portal, we will return you to your world unharmed...in the condition you are now."

  I jerked forward, sudden, explosive fury threatening to break loose. Trebor stood his ground, but his body split and several of him faced me, in different stages of bodily disarray.

  I glared at the row of misshapen Trebors, and my anger deflated as quickly as it had risen. They all had the same gray-green eye color. And all those eyes held a mixture of confusion and hope.

  I looked around at the pitiful bunch of aliens. What the hell, I thought, there was nothing holding me to Earth. From the looks of it, if I didn't agree to help them I'd have to go back healthy and start the process of abusing my body all over again. Tracking down a thief who'd stolen an alien device wasn't like being with Annie, but at least I wouldn't be reminded of her every time I turned around.

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly then grunted in capitulation. "Trebor of Thrittene, you've got yourself a deal."

  Trebor reshaped himself into one. I was about to ask him for more details when screeches speared my gut and made my heart vibrate. The light around me changed. It took on a tinge of pink then blue. After a while, the walls settled on purple.

  "I take it your friends decided to join us," I said.

  Trebor bit his upper lip. "Now that you have agreed to assist us, they ask to attend the remainder of this discussion."

  I lifted an eyebrow and smirked. "I'd bet a case of my finest rotgut your friends thought I'd turn you down. Now that I said yes, they want to dump me and try to recover the Portal on their own."

  "How could you know that?"

  "It's always the same clowns using the same tactics." I turned to face the purple wall. "If you have business with me," I said to the new colors, "why don't you show yourselves. I'd like to get going."

  The wall swirled until a magenta figure shaped like a model Titian would have loved to paint formed in front of my eyes. Definitely female. She could've made me salivate, except there were so many holes in her she looked like she'd been blasted by a meteor shower.

  "I am Nasus," she said. "Trebor should have held his ground. You did not have much with which to bargain." Her voice was raspy and mellow, making me think of a dimly lit cafe and languid blues ballads.

  "By the looks of you, sweets, you can't afford to bargain, either." I stared her up and down. "I'd say you need me more than I need you."

  She snorted, a most indelicate sound for such a great-looking babe. Before she could open her mouth again, a blue creature came out of the floor. He didn't look much better than the others with his face under his left arm.

  "We can handle our problem ourselves, Trebor," the shape said. "This is a mistake."

  "By all means, go ahead," I said. "Although I should remind you that, after the repair trick you pulled, it's a miracle I even agreed to help you."

  Trebor lifted a hand and stilled the others. "Enough. We had already decided that enlisting Jack Meter's assistance was the only course of action possible. He has agreed to help. We must give him all the support we can."

  It turned out the two newcomers, Nasus and Leinad, were the ones who'd first noticed their world was losing "unity throughout its mass." They had built the stolen Portal, although I still wasn't clear on what, exactly, that was.

  "How long ago did you build this Portal?" I said.

  The room darkened to deep purple, and multiple faces molded themselves from the wall. "Five years ago, we experienced a storm, similar to one of your Earth's hurricanes," several Leinad faces chanted in chorus.

  "Outside of Us," the Nasus features intoned. The dozen echoes of her voice wrapped themselves around me like a cloudburst.

  "Sounds serious, but I don't get it," I said.

  "We should not have been conscious of.outside," Trebor said, his voice impatient.

  "You came to get me," I said. "That's more than just being aware of outside."

  "Before the storm," Trebor said, "we did not know of any other world but ours."

  "How many worlds are you aware of now?"

  Trebor's body moved in what I took for a shrug. "I suppose they are innumerable, but we could identify fewer than ten. They all function along space and time dimensions, although each world has a very different nature."

  "For a reason we are still attempting to understand," Leinad said, "the storm opened links from our world to several proximate worlds. Think of it as a wheel without its rim. Thrittene is the hub, and each world is at the end of a spoke, although each spoke may not have the same length."

  "You traveled to those worlds?"

  "No," Leinad said. "In attempting to do so, we discovered that we cannot leave our world. We have, however, established stable Portals that permit us to keep the links open and attempt communication. So far, we have not been successful in contacting any but your world."

  "You didn't contact me, pal, you kidnapped me."

  Leinad's color deepened.

  "Why would the stolen Portal cause your loss of cohesion?"

  "We are not certain," Trebor said. "Perhaps it destabilized our world, or perhaps the unbalance is caused by something else the thief did. All we know is that it is getting worse."

  "When did you first notice you were losing cohesion?"

  "Approximately two and a half years ago," Nasus said. "According to your measure of time, of course."

  "It took you that long to figure out your Portal was missing?"

  "The imbalance was subtle at first." Leinad said. "Then, the speed and severity of the disturbances increased. We investigated and found the Portal missing. We concluded that this theft caused the loss of cohesion. And it is worsening, Jack Meter. We can barely hold ourselves together."

  My skin itched again. My instincts told me that Trebor and Leinad were lying. Their story sounded too lame. I'd lived with a scientist for three years, and I knew how rigorous and thorough she was. Annie would never have neglected to check on something she'd built, especially for as long as two years.

  At this stage, however, I didn't care if the Thrittene told me the truth or not. I preferred to make up my own mind; and in the end, I always dug up the whole story, anyway.

  A chair molded itself behind my knees and forced me to

  sit.

  "Why would it take that long for the effects to become noticeable?"

  Leinad shook his head. "We do not know, but we have a theory."

  "Okay, let's hear it."

  "If the worlds are connected in some way to Thrittene then we may be a Whole. Let us follow the idea of the wheel, although it is not a perfect analogy. To break one link would be similar to using a wheel with a broken spoke. With time, uneven pressure on the hub weakens it."

  "At the same time, it affects the balance of the entire wheel," I said.

  "Exactly."

  "So, a broken link might strain the entire structure. The hub wouldn't necessarily break, but if other links broke the wheel would eventually collapse." I frowned. "If the thief stole another Portal, Thrittene might be in a lot of trouble."

  "Yes," Leinad said, his features somber. "By extension, so would the other links. Including Earth."

  The question is, I mused, why steal a Portal? What would a thief do with it? Until I found a reason for the theft, I didn't have a chance of finding the culprit.

  I lifted my head to the expectant faces of the Thrittene who stood in front of me. Their bodies undulated and changed, the room adopted the colors of the rainbow and I registered a medley of sounds that ran from soothing to discordant. I knew they wanted me to discuss what to do next, but it wasn't my style.

  Leinad interrupted my thoughts by placing his hand on my arm. A thin strip of his body wrapped around my wrist then moved up under my sleeve jacket.

  "Hey!" I jumped to my feet and tugged, but Leinad stuck to me for a few more seconds. When he withdrew, the strip remained. I pulled up my sleeve and tried to rip it off, but every time I thought I had a grip on it, it would become viscous and cold and slip through my fingers like water.

  "This telecarb will hold you within your space-time dimensions during your passage from one world to the other. It will allow you to find the thief and bring us back our Portal."

  "What's it made of?"

  "We are not certain how you will be affected by this type of travel, Jack Meter. The telecarb is set to bring you back to us should you lose yourself."

  I shrugged. "I'm not worried about it. I already know what that feels like. You haven't answered my question."

  Trebor colored slightly. "It has the same composition as this room."

  "You mean it's a piece of you? I thought you couldn't leave your world."

  "We cannot. The telecarb is only a minute part of our world, Jack Meter."

  I looked more closely at the telecarb and saw an infinite range of swirling colors.

  "How does it work?" I looked up to see all the aliens scowling. "I know, I know—I 'lack the necessary framework.' You said I could travel with it. I just want to know how I go from one place to the other."

  "You need simply desire it."

  "But if I don't know where I'm going, how can I wish to go there?"

  Trebor frowned then blushed, but stayed silent. He was flakier than even I could begin to understand, but this place sure wasn't Kansas and I didn't have any magic red shoes to click together.

  My eyes narrowed in suspicion. "You didn't just repair me, did you?"

  "The telecarb has its own form of intelligence," Leinad said. He had jutted out of the floor between Trebor and me. "It understands your thoughts and will take you where you wish to go."

  He lifted a hand, as if to stop me from thinking what I was already thinking.

  "Only along a forward, linear time thread, Jack Meter. You cannot go back in time. The telecarb is interactive and will respond to your conscious thoughts only. To permit this, we had to alter your neurological system." Leinad gave me a self-satisfied smile. "Fortunately, although we are losing cohesion, we have not lost coherence so we could still perform a logical connection of the diverse elements contained in your body and the telecarb."

  These aliens sure knew how to push my buttons. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath to control my outrage.

  "You had a lot of nerve tinkering with my body without asking my permission."

  Leinad frowned. "We had no choice, and we were already performing repairs. Besides," he added, "you said you did not want your body anymore."

  "You didn't know that at the time, now, did you?" I said, my teeth clenched. "I ought to punch your face inside out."

  "Enough." Trebor's voice boomed, and my muscles quivered. "This bickering is becoming tiresome."

  These guys would drive me to drink, I thought. But however much I wanted a shot right now, it was out of the question. I never drank on the job. I dropped my face into my hands and rubbed my eyes in the hope they would all be gone if I didn't look at them for a while.

 

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