61

In a world not yet undone by artificial intelligence, in Room 414, Jeffy Coltrane stood in a state of terror. Every second of horrified expectation worried an hour off his life.

When the hotelman and Amity manifested in a rush of displaced air, Jeffy went to his knees, as if someone had made a martial arts move on him again, though this time it was relief and gratitude, not pain and the compression of a nerve nexus, that dropped him.

Amity flew into his arms, and he held her tight. They didn't need to say anything, for they'd said it all before, more than once. Anyway, what they felt for each other was beyond the power of words to describe.

Into their emotion-racked silence, the hotelman felt compelled to speak. "Who are you? What are you? What happened to me? Where was that fucked-up place? Who the hell are you people?"

Jeffy didn't want to say that he and Amity were fugitives from deep-state agents. This was a security guy whose sympathies might lie with the authorities, any authorities, even the corrupt and murderous kind. However, he couldn't brazen through the moment by pretending ignorance—What fucked-up place are you talking about, sir?—because the hotelman was huge enough to coldcock a horse, still held Jeffy's pistol, just had the bejesus scared out of him perhaps for the first time in his life, and suddenly seemed, in retrospect, to have the air of a former cop who could detect a lie faster than a polygraph. Although Jeffy was not as quick to trust people as he had once been, in fact as he had been just two days ago on the gloriously normal eleventh of April, he had no choice but to have some faith in the fairness of this behemoth.

"I'm Jeffy. Jeffrey Coltrane. This is my daughter, Amity. And this"—he took Harkenbach's quantum voodoo from his daughter's hand—"is the key to everything, a beam-me-up-Scotty teleporting gismo that can shoot you across the multiverse to parallel worlds. I curse the scientist who invented it, the day he gave it to me, and Albert Einstein, who started the whole mess with his theories. So tell me—who're you?"

The hotelman peered down at him in silence. Processing. Finally he said, "What was that damn hideous thing?"

"What damn hideous thing?"

"That six-legged saucer-eyed door-busting thing."

Jeffy looked at Amity, who said, "It was a humongous bug-form robot, one of an army controlled by the totally insane AI that went to war against the human race and probably killed everybody on that world, a lot of the time by gassing them in the streets, like I saw them trying to do back there on one point seventy-seven."

Jeffy shuddered and, with a quiver in his voice, said to the big man, "Did you hear that?"

"I heard it clear enough. Can't say it made a lot of sense."

"You still haven't told me who you are?" Jeffy said.

"Charlie Pellafino. People call me Duke."

Jeffy got to his feet, holding Amity close. "What now?"

Pellafino considered for a moment. "I imagine some people are looking for that doohickey of yours."

"You imagine right."

"And they're not sweethearts."

"They're vicious scum."

Amity said, "They leave a mess when they search a place."

Pellafino nodded. He chewed on his lower lip for a while. Then he said, "Let's go down to my office. We gotta talk."