At least, she thought, loping worriedly down one of the corridors towards the main halls of the Institute from which she had come, she wasn’t the only one who had got a surprise out of the affair! She would have time to think about that later. The immediate problem was how to get out of this mess, and it would be stupid to assume that she had succeeded in that.
There were plenty of other people in those buildings ahead, and she had no way at all of knowing what their attitude would be.
* * *
She came with swift caution out of the corridor, into a long, sunbright and apparently deserted hall.
The opposite wall was formed of vertical blue slabs of some marble-like mineral with wide window embrasures between. The tops of feathery trees and the upper parts of buildings, a good distance off, were visible beyond the windows. Several hundred feet away in either direction a high doorway led out of the hall.
Both exits were blocked just now by a wedged, immobile mass of little-people. Robes of all colors—citizens of all types and classes, hastily assembled to stop her again. Even at this distance their faces sickened her. Apparently they had been directed simply to prevent her from leaving this hall, until—
It clamped down then about her skull—and tightened!
Mental attack!
Jasse’s hands leaped to her temples in a convulsive, involuntary motion, though she knew there was nothing tangible there to seize. It was inside her, an enormous massing of tiny, hard pressures which were not quite pain, driving upon an equal number of critical linkages within her brain. In her first flash of panicky reaction, it seemed the burst of an overwhelming, irresistible force. A moment later, she realized it was quite bearable.
She should have known, of course with her mind-shield activated as it was, it would take some while before that sort of thing could have much effect. The only immediately dangerous part of it was that it cut down the time she could afford to spend on conducting her escape.
She glanced again at the nearer of the two doorways, and knew instantly she wasn’t even going to consider fighting her way through another mindless welter of grappling human bodies like that! The nearest window was a dozen steps away.
A full hundred yards beneath her, the building’s walls dropped sheer into a big, blue-paved courtyard, with a high-walled park on the opposite side and open to the left on a city street, a block or more away. The street carried a multicolored, murmuring stream of traffic, too far off to make any immediate difference. A few brightly dressed people were walking across the courtyard below—they made no difference either. The important thing was the row of flow-cars parked against the wall down there, hardly eighty feet to her right.
Her hand dropped to her belt and adjusted the gravmoc unit. She felt almost weightless as she swung over the sill and pushed away from the building; but she touched the pavement in something less than eighteen seconds, rolled over twice and came up running.
There was scattered shouting then. Two young women, about to step out of one of the cars, stared in open-mouthed surprise as she came towards them. But neither they nor anyone else made any attempt to check her departure.
She had one of the vehicles airborne, and headed in the general direction of the lake-front section which was being used as a spaceport by the one Vegan destroyer stationed on Ulphi, before she was reminded suddenly that Central City had police ships for emergency use, which could fly rings around any flow-car—and that long, silvery, dirigible-like shapes seemed to be riding on guard directly over the area to which she wanted to go!
A few minutes later, she realized the ship might also be several miles to either side of the spaceport. At this distance and altitude she couldn’t tell, and the flow-car refused to be urged any higher.
She had kept the clumsy conveyance on its course, because she hadn’t really much choice of direction. There was no way of contacting or locating any of the other Vegan officials currently operating on Ulphi except through the destroyer itself or through the communicators in her own study; and her mobile-unit was also in the spaceport area. There were enough similar cars moving about by themselves to keep her from being conspicuous, though traffic, on the whole, was moderate over the city and most of it was confined to fairly definite streams between the more important points.
A second police ship became briefly visible far to her right, gliding close to the building tops and showing hardly more than its silhouette through a light haze which veiled that sector. If they knew where she was, either of the two could intercept her within minutes.
Very probably though, Jasse reassured herself, nobody did know just where she was. The mental force still assailing her shield was non-directional in any spatial sense; and her departure from the Historical Institute must have been much more sudden and swift than had been anticipated by her concealed attackers. In spite of her size, strangers were quite likely to underestimate her because of her slender build and rather childlike features, and on occasions like this that could be very useful. But—
Jasse bit her lip gently, conscious of a small flurry of panic bubbling up inside her and subsiding again, temporarily.
Because they needed only to ring off the spaceport, far enough away from the destroyer to avoid arousing its interest, and then wait for her arrival. She would have to come to them then—and soon! Her shield was still absorbing the punishment it was getting, but secondary effects of that unrelenting pressure had begun to show up. The barest touch of a dozen different, slowly spreading sensations within her brain—burning, tingling, constricting, dully throbbing sensations. Within the last few minutes, the first flickering traces of visual and auditory disturbances had appeared. Effects like that could build up for an indeterminate time without doing any real damage. But in the end they would merge suddenly into an advanced stage of blurred confusion—technically, her shield might still maintain its function; but she would no longer know or be able to control what she did.
A curiously detached feeling overcame Jasse then as the flow-car carried her steadily forward into whatever lay ahead. What she had to do was clear enough: go on until she was discovered and then ground the flow-car and try her luck on foot. But meanwhile, who or what had stirred up this mess about her? What were they after?
She sat quietly behind the flow-car’s simple controls, leaning forward a trifle to conceal herself, while her mind ran over the implications of the odd little speech she had made in the park before Moyuscane’s tomb. Those hadn’t been her thoughts; if they had been, she wouldn’t have uttered them voluntarily—so, shielded or not, somebody must have been tampering with her mind before this! Were there opposing groups of mental adepts on Ulphi, and was one of them trying to use her, and Vega, against the other in some struggle for control of this planetary civilization?
Once more then, System Chief Jasse surprised herself completely—this time by a flash of furious exasperation with the lofty D.C. policies which had put her in a spot like this unarmed. To trust in the innate rightness of A-Class humanity was all very well. But, mysterious superior mentalities or not, a good, ordinary, old-fashioned blaster in her hand would have been so satisfactory just now!
“Oh, Suns and Planets!” Jasse muttered aloud, shocked into a half-forgotten Traditionalist invocation acquired during her childhood. “They’ve got me fighting mad!”
And at that moment, a clean-edged shadow, which was not the shadow of any cloud, came sliding soundlessly over the flow-car and stayed there.
Jasse, heart pounding wildly, was still trying to twist around far enough to look up without pitching herself out of the car or releasing its controls when a voice, some twenty feet above her, remarked conversationally:
“Say—I thought it was you!”
* * *
She stared up speechlessly.
The words had been Vegan—and nothing like that dull-green, seamless, thirty-foot sliver of space-alloy floating overhead had ever been dreamed up on Ulphi! While the pert, huge-eyed face that peered down at her out of
the craft’s open lock—she remembered suddenly the last time she’d met that member of a nonhuman race in a G.Z. space-duty uniform and the polite effort she’d made to mask the antipathy and suspicions which were bound to arise in a Traditionalist when confronted by any such half-and-half creature.
But—safe!
A shaking began in her knees. She sat down quietly.
And Zone Agent Pagadan, for whom any kind of thought-shield on which she really directed her attention became as sheerest summer gossamer—unless, of course, it was backed by a mind that approximated her own degree of nerve-energy control—smiled amiably and chalked one up to her flair for dramatic timing.
“Remember me, eh?” she nodded. “Pelial, of Galactic Zones, at your service! I was scoping the area from ten miles above and spotted you drifting along by yourself. What occurs, my tall colleague? Are you just going sightseeing in that piece of primitive craftsmanship, or did your pilot fall out?”
“Ulp—!” began Jasse, nodding and shaking her head at the same time. Pagadan’s contemplative eyes became a little bigger.
“Skip it!” she said apprehensively. “From close up, you look both chewed on and distraught, my girl! What happ— Hey, hang on a moment and I’ll slide in close and take you aboard. Maybe you ought to be home in bed, or something.”
The head withdrew; and Jasse took a deep, sighing breath, raked a snarled strand of black hair out of her forehead and dabbed tentatively at a deep scratch on the back of her hand.
She did look a mess, now that she noticed it—the Greens were badly ripped and streaked with the blue chalk of the pavement over which she had rolled; and her jeweled cap was gone. A moment passed before she realized suddenly that the clinging constrictions of the mental attack were gone, too!
She was still wondering about that as she swung over into the space-skiff, steadied by Pagadan’s gloved hand.
Then, as the skiff’s lock slammed shut behind her, she made another discovery:
Her shield-bracelet hung free, attached to her wrist now only by its safety chain. The shield switch flickered, warningly red, on “Open”—
“Your mind-shield?” The Lannai Agent, measuring a rose-colored liquid carefully from a fat little jug into a cup, absently repeated Jasse’s stunned exclamation. “Probably snagged the bracelet while you were climbing in from the car. It happens.” She glanced around and her eyes caught the light with a wicked crystalline glitter. “Why? Could it matter? Was someone pressuring you?”
“They were before,” Jasse whispered; and suddenly there wasn’t any question about her being frightened! Panic hammered into her brain and stayed; a dizzy shimmering grew before her eyes. Mixed with that came a queer, growing feeling as if something were surging and pulsing within her skull—a wildly expectant feeling of something about to happen.
She realized the Lannai was holding the filled cup to her lips.
“Drink that!” the cool voice ordered. “Whatever you’ve got it’s good for. Then just settle back, relax, and let’s hear what you know!”
* * *
The liquid she had gulped, Jasse noticed, wasn’t really rose-colored as she had thought, but a deep, dim, ruby red, almost black—an enormously quiet color—and with a highly curious slowing-down effect on things, too! For instance, you might realize perfectly well that somewhere, out around the edges of you, you were still horribly upset, with fear-thoughts racing about everywhere at a dizzy speed. Every so often, one of them would turn inwards and come shooting right at you, flashing like a freezing arrow into the deep-red dusk where you were. But just as you started to shrink away from it, you noticed it was getting slower and slower, the farther it came; until finally it just stayed where it was, and then gradually melted away.
They never could get through to reach you. It was rather comical!
It appeared she had asked some question about it, because the big-eyed little humanoid was saying:
“You like the effect, eh? That’s just antishock, little chum! Thought you knew the stuff . . . don’t they teach you anything at Cultures?”
That was funny, too! Cultures, of course, taught you everything there was to know! But wait—hadn’t there been . . . what had there been that she—? Jasse decided to examine that point about Cultures very carefully, some other time.
By and large there seemed to be a good deal of quiet conversation going on around her. Perhaps she was doing some of it, but it was hard to tell; since, frankly, she wasn’t much interested in those outside events any more. And then, for a while, the two tall shapes, the man and the woman, came up again to the barrier in her past and tried to talk to her, as they always did when she was feeling anxious and alone. A little puzzled, because she didn’t feel that way now, Jasse watched them from her side of the barrier, which was where the explosions and shrieking lights were, that had brought terror and hurt and the sudden forgetting which none of Culture’s therapists had been able to lift. Dimly, she could sense the world behind them, to which they wanted her to go—the star-glittering cold and the great silent flows of snow, and the peace and enchantment that were there. But she could make no real effort to reach it now, and in the end the tall shapes seemed to realize that and went away.
Or else, they merely faded out of her sight as the color about her deepened ever more from ruby redness into the ultimate, velvety, all-quieting, all-slowing-down black—
“Wonderful—” Jasse murmured contentedly, asleep.
* * *
“Hallerock?”
“Linked in, Pag! I’m back on the Observation Ship again. Go ahead.”
“Just keep this thought-line down tight! Everything’s working like a charm, so far. I tripped the D.C.‘s shield open when I took her aboard, and our good friend Moyuscane came right in, all set to take control and find out whether we actually knew something about him and his setup here or not. Then he discovered I was around, and he’s been lying quiet and just listening through her ever since.”
“What makes him shy of you?” Hallerock inquired.
“He tried a long-range probe at my shields a couple of weeks ago. I slapped him on the beak—some perfectly natural startled-reaction stuff by another telepath, you understand. But he certainly didn’t like it! He went out fast, that time—”
“I don’t blame him,” Hallerock said thoughtfully. “Sometimes you don’t realize your own strength. Does the D.C. really have anything on him?”
“No. It’s about as we suspected. She made some sort of innocent remark—I couldn’t take the chance of digging around in her mind long enough to find out just what—and Moyuscane jumped to the wrong conclusions.”
“I was wondering, you know,” Hallerock admitted, “whether you mightn’t have done some work on the Cultures girl in advance—something that would get her to drop a few bricks at some appropriate occasion.”
“Well, you’re just naturally a suspicious little squirt!” Pagadan replied amiably. “To use Confederacy personnel against their will and knowledge for any such skulduggery is strictly counter-regulation. I advise you to make a note of the fact! However, it was the luckiest sort of coincidence. It should save us a week or two of waiting, especially since you have the hospital ship and staff all prepared. Moyuscane’s got himself a listening-post right in our ranks now, and that’s all he needs to stay reasonably safe—he thinks!”
Hallerock appeared to be digesting this information for a moment. Then his thought came again:
“Where are you at present?”
“Down at the Central City spaceport, still in the Viper’s skiff. The D.C.‘s under antishock and asleep on the bunk here.”
“Oh,” said Hallerock, “you’re all ready to start the drive then?”
“Wake up, little brother!” Pagadan advised him. “It started ten minutes ago! The last thing I told the girl before she went down deep was that a Vegan Fleet Hospital Ship was approaching Ulphi with a brand-new, top-secret drug against space-fear, called Kynoleen—a free gift from the Confederacy to t
he afflicted population of this planet.”
“Well . . . I suppose I’d better set the H-Ship down at the spaceport about an hour from now, then?”
“One hour would be about right. Moyuscane must be in a considerable stew at the prospect of having the Kynoleen disclose the fact that most of the local population is suffering from an artificially imposed space-fear psychosis, but it won’t take him long to see to it that the drug won’t actually be used around here for quite some time. When that’s settled, we’ll let him breathe easier for about three hours. Then I’ll wake up the D.C., make sure he’s listening through her and feed him the big jolt. So see I get that message we’ve prepared half an hour beforehand—three hours and thirty minutes from now! And send it as a straight coded communication, to make it look authentic.”
“All right,” Hallerock said doubtfully. “But wouldn’t it be better to check over the entire schedule once more—just to be sure nothing can go wrong?”
“There’s no need for that!” the Lannai said, surprised. “We’ve got Moyuscane analyzed down to the length of his immortal whiskers, and we’ve worked out the circumstances required to produce the exact effects we want. It’s just a matter of timing it now. You’re not letting yourself get rattled by a Telepath of the Second Order, are you? If he didn’t happen to have the planet under control, this wouldn’t be a job for Galactic Zones at all.”
“Possibly not,” said Hallerock reasonably, “but then he does have it under control. Enough to hash it up from one pole to the other if he panics. That’s what keeps putting this dew on my brow.”
“Agent-Trainee Hallerock,” Pagadan replied impatiently, “I love you like a son or something, but at times you talk like a dope. Even a Telep-Two doesn’t panic, unless you let him get the idea he’s cornered. All we’ve got to do is keep Moyuscane’s nose pointed towards the one way out and give him time enough to use it when we switch on the pressure—but not quite time enough to change his mind again. If it makes you feel any better, you could put trackers on any unprotected Vegans for the next eight hours.”
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 76