by Andre Norton
“An awkward situation, sir,” Iliff sympathized, “demanding a great deal of tact. But then you have that!”
“I’ve got it,” agreed the Co-ordinator, “but I’d prefer not to have to use it so much. So if you can find some way of handling that little affair on Gull discreetly—Incidentally, since you’ll be just a short run then from Lycanno, there’s an undesirable political trend reported building up there! They’ve dropped from D to H-Class politics inside of a decade. You’ll find the local Agent’s notes on the matter waiting for you on Gull. Perhaps you might as well skip over and fix it.”
“All right,” said Iliff coldly. “I won’t be needed back in my own Zone for another hundred hours. Not urgently.”
“Lab’s got a new mind-lock for you to test,” the Co-ordinator went on briskly. “You’ll find that on Gull, too.”
There was a slight pause.
“You remember, don’t you,” the Agent inquired gently then, as if speaking to an erring child, “what happened the last time I gave one of those gadgets a field test on a high-powered brain?”
“Yes, of course! But if this one works,” the Co-ordinator pointed out, almost wistfully, “we’ve got something we really do need. And until I know it does work, under ultimate stresses, I can’t give it general distribution. I’ve picked a hundred of you to try it out.” He sighed. “Theoretically, it will hold a mind of any conceivable potential within that mind’s own shields, under any conceivable stress, and still permit almost normal investigation. It’s been checked to the limit,” he concluded encouragingly, “under lab conditions—”
“They all were,” Iliff recollected, without noticeable enthusiasm. “Well, I’ll see what turns up.”
“That’s fine!” The Co-ordinator brightened visibly. He added, “we wouldn’t, of course, want you to take any unnecessary risks—” For perhaps half a minute after the visualization tank of his telepath transmitter had faded back to its normal translucent and faintly luminous green, Iliff continued to stare into it.
Back on Jeltad, the capital planet of the Confederacy, fourteen thousand light-years away, the Co-ordinator’s attention was turning to some other infinitesimal-seeming but significant crisis in the Department’s monstrous periphery. The chances were he would not think of Iliff again, or of Zone Seventeen Eighty-two, until Iliff’s final mission report came in—or failed to come in within the period already allotted it by the Department’s automatic monitors.
In either event, the brain screened by the Co-ordinator’s conversational inanities would revert once more to that specific problem then, for as many unhurried seconds, minutes or, it might be, hours as it required. It was one of the three or four human brains in the galaxy for which Zone Agent Iliff had ever felt anything remotely approaching genuine respect.
“How far are we from Gull now?” he said without turning his head.
A voice seemed to form itself in the air a trifle above and behind him.
“A little over eight hours, cruising speed—”
“As soon as I get the reports off that pigeon from Jeltad, step it up so we get there in four,” Iliff said. “I think I’ll be ready about that time.”
“The pigeon just arrived,” the voice replied. It was not loud, but it was a curiously big voice with something of the overtones of an enormous bronze gong in it. It was also oddly like a cavernous amplification of Iliff’s own type of speech.
The Agent turned to a screen on his left, in which a torpedolike twenty-foot tube of metal had appeared, seemingly suspended in space and spinning slowly about its axis. Actually, it was some five miles from the ship—which was as close as it was healthy to get to a homing pigeon at the end of its voyage—and following it at the ship’s exact rate of speed, though it was driven by nothing except an irresistible urge to get to its “roost,” the pattern of which had been stamped in its molecules. The roost was on Iliff’s ship, but the pigeon would never get there. No one knew just what sort of subdimensions it flashed through on its way to its objective or what changes were wrought on it before it reappeared, but early experiments with the gadget had involved some highly destructive explosions at its first contact with any solid matter in normal space.
So now it was held by barrier at a safe distance while its contents were duplicated within the ship. Then something lethal flickered from the ship to the pigeon and touched it; and it vanished with no outward indication of violence.
For a time, Iliff became immersed in the dossiers provided both by Interstellar and his own department. The ship approached and presently drove through the boundaries of Zone Seventeen Eighty-two, and the big voice murmured: “Three hours to Gull.”
“All right,” Iliff said, still absently. “Let’s eat.”
Nearly another hour passed before he spoke again. “Send her this. Narrow-beam telepath—Gull itself should be close enough, I think. If you can get it through—”
He stood up, yawned, stretched and bent, and straightened again.
“You know,” he remarked suddenly, “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the old girl wasn’t so wacky, after all. What I mean is,” he explained, “she really might need a Zone Agent!”
“Is it going to be another unpredictable mission?” the voice inquired.
“Aren’t they always—when the man picks them for us? What was that?”
There was a moment’s silence. Then the voice told him, “She’s got your message. She’ll be expecting you.”
“Fast!” Iliff said approvingly. “Now listen. On Gull, we shall be old Trader Casselmath with his stock of exotic and expensive perfumes. So get yourself messed up for the part—but don’t spill any of the stuff, this time!”
The suspect’s name was Deel. For the past ten years he had been a respected—and respectable—citizen and merchant of the monoplanet System of Gull. He was supposed to have come there from his birthplace, Number Four of the neighboring System of Lycanno.
But the microstructural plates the operative made of him proved he was the pirate Tahmey who, very probably, had once been a middling big shot among the ill-famed Ghant Spacers. The Bureau of Interstellar Crime had him on record; and it was a dogma of criminology that microstructural identification was final and absolute—that the telltale patterns could not be duplicated, concealed, or altered to any major degree without killing the organism.
The operative’s people, however, were telepaths, and she was an adept, trained in the widest and most intensive use of the faculty. For a Lannai it was natural to check skeptically, in her own manner, the mechanical devices of another race.
If she had not been an expert she would have been caught then, on her first approach. The mind she attempted to tap was guarded.
By whom or what was a question she did not attempt to answer immediately. There were several of these watchdogs, of varying degrees of ability. Her thought faded away from the edge of their watchfulness before their attention was drawn to it. It slid past them and insinuated itself deftly through the crude electronic thought-shields used by Tahmey. Such shields were a popular commercial article, designed to protect men with only an average degree of mental training against the ordinary telepathic prowler and entirely effective for that purpose. Against her manner of intrusion they were of no use at all.
But it was a shock to discover then that she was in no way within the mind of Tahmey! This was, in literal fact, the mind of the man named Deel—for the past ten years a citizen of Gull, before that of the neighboring System of Lycanno.
The fact was, to her at least, quite as indisputable as the micro-structural evidence that contradicted it. This was not some clumsily linked mass of artificial memory tracts and habit traces, but a living, matured mental personality. It showed few signs of even as much psychosurgery as would be normal in a man of Deel’s age and circumstances.
But if it was Deel, why should anyone keep a prosperous, reasonably honest and totally insignificant planeteer under telepathic surveillance? She considered investigating the unk
nown watchers, but the aura of cold, implacable alertness she had sensed in her accidental near-contact with them warned her not to force her luck too far.
“After all,” she explained apologetically, “I had no way of estimating their potential.”
“No,” Iliff agreed, “you hadn’t. But I don’t think that was what stopped you.”
The Lannai operative looked at him steadily for a moment. Her name was Pagadan and, though no more human than a jellyfish, she was to human eyes an exquisitely designed creature. It was rather startling to realize that her Interstellar dossier described her as a combat-type mind—which implied a certain ruthlessness, at the very least—and also that she had been sent to Gull to act, among other things, as an executioner.
“Now what did you mean by that?” she inquired, on a note of friendly wonder.
“I meant,” Iliff said carefully, “that I’d now like to hear all the little details you didn’t choose to tell Interstellar. Let’s start with your trip to Lycanno!”
“Oh, I see!” Pagadan said. “Yes, I went to Lycanno, of course—” She smiled suddenly and became with that, he thought, extraordinarily beautiful, though the huge silvery eyes with their squared black irises, which widened or narrowed flickeringly with every change of mood or shift of light, did not conform exactly to any standard human ideal. No more did her hair, a silver-shimmering fluffy crest of something like feathers—but the general effect, Iliff decided, remained somehow that of a remarkably attractive human woman in permanent fancy dress.
“You’re a clever little man, Zone Agent,” she said thoughtfully. “I believe I might as well be frank with you. If I’d reported everything I know about this case—though for reasons I shall tell you I really found out very little—the Bureau would almost certainly have recalled me. They show a maddening determination to see that I shall come to no harm while working for them.” She looked at him doubtfully. “You understand that, simply because I’m a Lannai, I’m an object of political importance just now?”
Iliff nodded.
“Very well. I discovered in Lycanno that the case was a little more than I could handle alone!” She shivered slightly, the black irises flaring wide with what was probably reminiscent fright.
“But I did not want to be recalled. My people,” she said a little coldly, “will accept the proposed alliance only if they are to share in your enterprises and responsibilities. They do not wish to be shielded or protected, and it would have a poor effect on them if they learned that we, their first representatives among you, had been relieved of our duties whenever they threatened to involve us in personal danger!”
“I see,” Iliff said seriously, remembering that she was royalty of a sort, or the Lannai equivalent of it. He shook his head. “The Bureau,” he said, “must have quite a time with you!”
Pagadan stared and laughed. “No doubt they find me a little difficult at times. Still, I do know how to take orders! But in this case it seemed more important to make sure I was not going to be protected again than to appear reasonable and co-operative. So I made use, for the first time, of my special status in the Bureau and insisted that a Zone Agent be sent here. However, I can assure you that the case has developed into an undertaking that actually will require a Zone Agent’s peculiar abilities and equipment!”
“Well,” Iliff shrugged, “it worked and here I am, abilities, equipment and all. What was it you found on Lycanno?”
There was considerable evidence to show that, during the years Tahmey was on record as having been about his criminal activities in space, the man named Deel was living quietly on the fourth planet of the Lycanno System, rarely even venturing beyond its atmospheric limits because of a pronounced and distressing liability to the psychosis of space-fear.
Pagadan gathered this evidence partly from official records, partly and in much greater detail from the unconscious memories of some two hundred people who had been more or less intimately connected with Deel. The investigation appeared to establish his previous existence in Lycanno beyond all reasonable doubt. It did nothing to explain why it should have become merged fantastically with the physical appearance of the pirate Tahmey.
This Deel was remembered as a big, blond, healthy man, good-natured and shrewd, the various details of his features and personality blurred or exaggerated by the untrained perceptions of those who remembered him. The description, particularly after this lapse of time, could have fitted Tahmey just as well—or just as loosely.
It was as far as she could go along that line. Officialdom was lax in Lycanno, and the precise identification of individual citizens by microstructural images or the like was not practiced. Deel had been born there, matured there, become reasonably successful. Then his business was destroyed by an offended competitor, and it was indicated to him that he would not be permitted to re-establish himself in the System.
He had business connections on Gull; and after undergoing a lengthy and expensive conditioning period against the effects of space-fear, he ventured to make the short trip, and was presently working himself back to a position comfortably near the top on Gull.
That was all. Except that—somewhere along the line—his overall physical resemblance to Tahmey had shifted into absolute physical identity . . .
“I realize, of course, that the duplication of a living personality in another body is considered almost as impossible as the existence of a microstructural double. But it does seem that Tahmey-Deel has to be one or the other!”
“Or,” Iliff grunted, “something we haven’t thought of yet. This is beginning to look more and more like one of those cases I’d like to forget. Well, what did you do?”
“If there was a biopsychologist in the Lycanno System who had secretly developed a method of personality transfer in some form or other, he was very probably a man of considerable eminence in that line of work. I began to screen the minds of persons likely to know of such a man.”
“Did you find him?”
She shook her head and grimaced uncomfortably. “He found me—at least, I think we can assume it was he! I assembled some promising leads, a half dozen names in all, and then—I find this difficult to describe—from one moment to another I knew I was being . . . sought . . . by another mind. By a mind of quite extraordinary power, which seemed fully aware of my purpose, of the means I was employing—in fact, of everything except my exact whereabouts at the moment. It was intended to shock me into revealing that—simply by showing me, with that jolting abruptness, how very close I stood to being caught!”
“And you didn’t reveal yourself?”
“No,” she laughed nervously. “But I went ‘akaba’ instead! I was under it for three days and well on my way back to Gull when I came out of it—as a passenger on a commercial ship! Apparently, I had abandoned my own ship on Lycanno and conducted my escape faultlessly and without hesitation. Successfully, at any rate—But I remember nothing, of course!”
“That was a quite a Brain chasing you then!” Iliff nodded slowly. The akaba condition was a disconcerting defensive trick which had been played on him on occasion by members of other telepathic races. The faculty was common to most of them; completely involuntary, and affected the pursuer more or less as if he had been closing in on a glow of mental light and suddenly saw that light vanish without a trace.
The Departmental Lab’s theory was that under the stress of a psychic attack which was about to overwhelm the individual telepath, a kind of racial Overmind took over automatically and conducted its member-mind’s escape from the emergency, if that was at all possible, with complete mechanical efficiency before restoring it to awareness of itself. It was only a theory since the Overmind, if it existed, left no slightest traces of its work—except the brief void of one of the very few forms of complete and irreparable amnesia known. For some reason, as mysterious as the rest of it, the Overmind never intervened if the threatened telepath had been physically located by the pursuer.
They stared at each other thoughtfully for
a moment, then smiled at the same instant.
“Do you believe now,” Pagadan challenged, “that this task is worthy of the efforts of a Vegan Zone Agent and his shipload of specialists?”
“I’ve been afraid of that right along,” Iliff said without enthusiasm. “But look, you seem to know a lot more about Galactic Zones than you’re really supposed to. Like that business about our shipload of specialists—that kind of information is to be distributed only ‘at or above Zone Agent levels.’ Where did you pick it up?”
“On Jeltad—above Zone Agent levels,” Pagadan replied undisturbed. “Quite a bit above, as a matter of fact! The occasion was social. And now that I’ve put you in your place when do you intend to investigate Deel? I’ve become casually acquainted with him and could arrange a meeting at almost any time.”
Iliff rubbed his chin. “Well, as to that,” he said, “Trader Casselmath dropped in to see a few of Deel’s business associates immediately after landing today. They were quite fascinated by the samples of perfume he offered them—he does carry an excellent line of the stuff, you know, though rather high-priced. So Deel turned up too, finally. You’ll be interested to hear he’s using a new kind of mind-shield now.”
She was not surprised. “They were warned, naturally, from Lycanno. The mentality there knew I had been investigating Deel.”
“Well, it shows the Brain wasn’t able to identify you too closely, because they’re waiting for you to pick up your research at this end again! The shield was hair-triggered to give off some kind of alarm. Old Casselmath couldn’t be expected to recognize that, of course! He took a poke at it, innocently enough—just trying to find out how far Deel and company could be swindled.”