XXIII
I TAKE CARE not to remember the next several hours in detail.
At noon we were in my study. Our local chief had seen almost at once that the matter was beyond him and urged us to call in the FBI. Their technicians were still busy checking the house and grounds, inch by inch. Our best service was to stay out of their way. I sat on the day bed, Ginny on the edge of my swivel chair. From time to time one of us jumped up, paced around, made an inane remark, and slumped back down. The air was fogged with smoke from ashtray, overflowing cigarets. My skull felt scooped out. Her eyes had retreated far back into her head. Sunlight, grass, trees were unreal in the windows.
“You really ought to eat,” I said for the ?‑th time. “Keep your strength.”
“Same to you,” she answered, not looking at me or at anything I could tell.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Nor I.”
We returned to the horror.
The extension phone yanked us erect. “A call from Dr. Ashman,” it said. “Do you wish to answer?”
“For God’s sake yell” ripped from me. “Visual.” Momentarily, crazily, I couldn’t concentrate on our first message from the man who brought Valerie into the world. My mind spun off into the principles of telephony. Sympathetic vibrations, when sender and receiver are spelled to the same number; a scrying unit for video when desired; a partial animation to operate the assembly?Ginny’s hand seized mine. Its cold shocked me into sanity.
Ashman’s face looked well‑nigh as exhausted as hers. “Virginia,” he said. “Steve. We have the report.”
I tried to respond and couldn’t.
“You were right,” he went on. “It’s a homunculus.”
“What took you so long?” Ginny asked. Her voice wasn’t husky any more, just hoarse and harsh.
“Unprecedented case,” Ashman said. “Fairy changelings have always been considered a legend. Nothing in our data suggests any motive for nonhuman intelligences to steal a child . . . nor any method by which they could if they wanted to, assuming the parents take normal care . . . and certainly no reason for such hypothetical kidnappers to leave a sort of golem in its place. ” He sighed. “Apparently we know less than we believe.”
“What are your findings?” The restored determination in Ginny’s words brought my gaze to her.
“The police chirurgeon, the crime lab staff, and later a pathologist from the University hospital worked with me,” Ashman told us. “Or I with them. I was merely the family doctor. We lost hours on the assumption Valerie was bewitched. The simulacrum is excellent, understand. It’s mindless?the EEG is practically flat?but it resembles your daughter down fingerprints. Not till she … it … had failed to respond to every therapeutic spell we commanded between us, did we think the body might be an imitation. You told us so at the outset, Steve, but we discounted that as hysteria. I’m sorry. Proof required a whole battery of tests. For instance, the saline content and PBI suggest the makers of the homunculus had no access to oceans. We clinched the matter when we injected some radioactivated holy water; that metabolism is not remotely human.”
His dry tone was valuable. The horror began to have some shadowy outline; my brain creaked into motion, searching for ways to grapple it. “What’ll they do with the changeling?” I asked.
“I suppose the authorities will keep it in the hope of‑of learning something, doing something through it,” Ashman said. “In the end, if nothing else happens, it’ll doubtless be institutionalized. Don’t hate the poor thing. That’s all it is, a poor thing, manufacturer some evil reason but not to blame.”
“Not to waste time on, you mean,” Ginny rasped. “Doctor, have you any ideas about rescuing Val?”
“No. It hurts me.” He looked it. “I’m only a medicine man, though. What further can I do? Tell me and I’ll come flying.”
“You can start right away,” Ginny said. “You’ve heard, haven’t you, my familiar was critically wounded defending, her? He’s at the vet’s, but I want you to take over. ‘
Ashman was startled. “What? Really?Look, I can’t save an animal’s life when a specialist isn’t able.”