She opened her eyes abruptly and the Cop was gone. But she might as well give up the idea of a nap just now.
The compulsion against using telepathy somebody had thoughtfully stuck her with was weakening progressively, hut the long session with Chomir could have stirred it up enough to produce another series of nightmares in which the Psionic Cop chased her around to place her under arrest. Half an hour of nightmares wouldn’t leave her refreshed for the meeting with Gilas’ detectives.
Telzey straightened up, sat frowning at the horizon. There had been no way of foreseeing complications like the Psionic Cop when the telepathic natives of Jontarou nudged her dormant talent into action, a little over eight weeks ago. The prospects of life as a psi had looked rather intriguing. But hardly had she stepped out of the ship at Orado City when her problems began.
First, there’d been the touch of something very much like a strong other-mind impulse in the Customs Hall. Some seconds after it faded, Telzey realized it hadn’t been structured enough to he some other telepath’s purposeful thought. But she’d had no immediate suspicions. The Customs people used a psionically powered inspection machine, and she was within its field at the moment. Undoubtedly, she’d picked up a brief burst of meaningless psionic noise coming from the machine.
She forgot about that incident then, because her mother met her at the spaceport. Federation Councilwoman Jessamine Amberdon had been informed of the events on Jontarou, and appeared somewhat agitated about them. Telzey found herself whisked off promptly to be put through a series of psychological tests, to make sure she had come to no harm. Only when the tests indicated no alarming changes in her mental condition, in fact no detectable changes at all, did Jessamine seem reassured.
“Your father took immediate steps to have your part in the Jontarou matter hushed up,” she informed Telzey. “And . . . well, xenotelepathy hardly seems very important! You’re not too likely to run into telepathic aliens again.” She smiled. “I admit I’ve been worried, but it seems no harm has been done. We can just forget the whole business now.”
Telzey wasn’t too surprised. Jessamine was a sweet and understanding woman, but she had the streak of conservatism which tended to characterize junior members of the Grand Council of the Federation. And discreet opinion-sampling on shipboard already had told Telzey that conservative levels of Hub society regarded skills like telepathy as being in questionable taste, if, indeed, they were not simply a popular fiction. Jessamine must feel it could do nothing to further the brilliant career she foresaw for her daughter if it was rumored that Telzey had become a freak.
It clearly was not the right time to admit that additional talents of the kind had begun to burgeon in her on the trip home. Jessamine was due to depart from Orado with the Federation’s austere Hace Committee within a few days, and might be absent for several months. It wouldn’t do to get her upset all over again.
With Telzey’s father, it was a different matter. Gilas Amberdon, executive officer of Orado City’s Bank of Rienne, could, when he chose, adopt a manner conservative enough to make the entire Hace Committee look frivolous. But this had never fooled his daughter much, and Gilas didn’t disappoint her.
“You appear,” he observed in the course of their first private talk after her return, “to have grasped the principle that it rarely pays to give the impression of being too unusual.”
“It looks that way,” Telzey admitted.
“And of course,” Gilas continued, “if one does happen to he quite unusual, there might eventually be positive advantages to having played the thing down.”
“Yes,” Telzey agreed. “I’ve thought of that.”
Gilas tilted his chair back and laced his fingers behind his neck. It was his customary lecture position, though there appeared to be no lecture impending at the moment.
“What are your plans?” he asked.
“I want to finish law school first,” Telzey said. “I think I can be out of Pehanron in about two years—but not if I get too involved in something else.”
He nodded. “Then?”
“Then I might study telepathy and psionics generally. It looks as if it could be very interesting.”
“Not a bad program,” Gilas observed absently. He brought his chair back down to the floor, reached for a cigarette and lit it, eyes reflective.
“Psionics,” he stated, “is a subject of which I know almost nothing. In that I’m not unique. Whatever research worthy of the name is being done on it has been going on behind locked doors for some time. Significant data are not released.”
Telzey frowned slightly. “How do you know?”
“As soon as I learned of your curious adventures on Jontarou, I began a private investigation. A fact-finding agency is at present assembling all available information on psionics, sorting and classifying it. Because of the general aroma of secrecy in that area, they haven’t been told for whom they’re working. The results they obtain are forwarded to me through the nondirect mailing system.”
Oh, very good! He couldn’t have arranged things better if she’d told him just what she wanted.
“How useful the material we get in that manner will be remains to be seen,” Gilas concluded. “But we have two years to consider what other approaches are indicated.”
Telzey took a selection of the tapes already forwarded to the bank by the fact-finding agency back to college with her. It had begun to he apparent on the return trip from Jontarou, when she was checking through the space liner’s library, that there was something distinctly enigmatic about the subject of psis in the Hub. It expressed itself in the lack of information. She discovered a good deal on the government-controlled psionic machines, but what it all added up to was that they were billion-credit gadgets with mystery-shrouded circuits, which no private organization appeared able to build as yet, though a variety of them had been in public service for years.
About human psis, there was nothing worth the trouble of digging it out.
In her rooms at Pehanron that evening, she went over the fact-finding agency’s tapes. Again there was nothing really new. The reflection that all this could hardly be accidental crossed her mind a number of times.
Later in the night, Telzey had her first dream of the Psionic Cop. He came tramping after her, booming something about having received complaints about her; and for some reason it scared her silly. She woke up with her heart pounding wildly and found herself demonstrating other symptoms of anxiety. After getting a glass of water, she lay down again to think about it.
It had been a rather ridiculous dream, but she still felt shaky. She almost never had nightmares. But in Psych Two she’d learned that a dream, in particular a nightmare, always symbolized something of significance to the dreamer, and there had been instructions in various self-help methods which could be used in tracking a disturbing dream down to its source.
It took around an hour to uncover the source which had produced the dream-symbol of the Psionic Cop.
There was no real question about its nature. She’d been given a set of suggestions, cunningly interwoven with various aspects of her mental life, and anchored to emotional disturbance points. When she acted against the suggestions, the disturbances were aroused. The result had been a menacing dream.
She dug at the planted thoughts for a while, then decided to leave them alone. If the Psych texts were right, nothing in her mind that she had taken a really thorough look at was going to bother her too much again.
The question was who had been interested in giving her such instructions. Who didn’t want her to experiment with psionics on her own or get too curious about it?
From there on, the details began to fall into place . . .
The odd burst of psionic noise as she came through the Customs hall at the space terminal in Orado City—Telzey considered it, edgy with a sense of apprehensive discovery.
The Customs machine certainly wasn’t supposed to be able to affect human minds. But it belonged to the same family as the p
sionic devices of the rehabilitation centers and mental therapy institutions, which did read, manipulate, and reshape human minds. The difference, supposedly, was simply that the Customs machine was designed to do other kinds of work.
But the authority which designed, constructed and maintained all psionic machines, the Federation’s Psychology Service, was at present keeping the details of design and construction a carefully guarded secret. The reason given for this was that experimentation with the machines must be carried further before such details could be offered safely to the public. Which meant that whatever the Psychology Service happened to want built into any of its machines could be built into it. And that might include something which transmitted to the mind of psis an order to either enter the Psychology Service or stop putting their special abilities to use.
That was roughly what the suggestions they’d put into her mind amounted to.
But what was the purpose?
She couldn’t know immediately—and, probably, she was not supposed to be wondering. The dream had led her to discover their trick, and that had brought her to the edge of something they wouldn’t want known.
It wasn’t a comfortable reflection. Telzey had listened to enough political shop talk among her mother’s colleagues to know that the Federation could act in very decisive, ruthless ways in a matter of sufficient importance. And here was something, some plan or policy in connection with psis and psionics, apparently important enough to remain unknown even to junior members of the Federation’s Grand Council! Jessamine would have expressed a very different kind of concern if she’d had any inkling that a branch of Federation government was interested in her daughter’s experience with xenotelepathy.
Telzey rubbed her neck pensively. She could keep such thoughts to herself, but she couldn’t very well help having them. And if the Psychology Service looked into her mind again, they might not like at all what she’d been thinking.
So what should she do?
The whole thing was connected, of course, with their top-secret psionic machines. There was one of those—a supposedly very advanced type of mind reader, as a matter of fact—about which she could get detailed firsthand information without going farther than the Bank of Rienne. And she might learn something from that which would fill in the picture for her.
The machine was used by Transcluster Finance, the giant central bank which regulated the activities of major financial houses on more than half the Federation’s worlds, and wielded more actual power than any dozen planetary governments. In the field of financial ethics, Transcluster made and enforced its own laws. Huge sums of money were frequently at stake in disputes among its associates, and machines of presumably more than human incorruptibility and accuracy were therefore employed to help settle conflicting charges and claims.
Two members of the Bank of Rienne’s legal staff who specialized in ethics hearings were pleased to learn of Telzey’s scholarly interest in their subject. They explained the proceedings in which the psionic Verifier was involved at considerable length. In operation, the giant telepath could draw any information pertinent to a hearing from a human mind within minutes. A participant who wished to submit his statements to verification was left alone in a heavily shielded chamber. He sensed nothing, hut his mind became for a time a part of the machine’s circuits. He was then released from the chamber, and the Verifier reported what it had found to the adjudicators of the hearing. The report was accepted as absolute evidence; it could not be questioned.
Rienne’s attorneys felt that the introduction of psionic verification had in fact brought about a noticeable improvement in ethical standards throughout Transcluster’s vast finance web. Of course it was possible to circumvent the machines. No one was obliged to make use of them; and in most cases, they were instructed to investigate only specific details of thought and memory indicated to them to confirm a particular claim. This sometimes resulted in a hearing decision going to the side which most skillfully presented the evidence in its favor for verification, rather than to the one which happened to be in the right. A Verifier was, after all, a machine and ignored whatever was not covered by its instructions, even when the mind it was scanning contained additional information with a direct and obvious bearing on the case. This had been so invariably demonstrated in practice that no reasonable person could retain the slightest qualms on the point. To further reassure those who might otherwise hesitate to permit a mindreading machine to come into contact with them, all records of a hearing were erased from the Verifier’s memory as soon as the case was closed.
And that, Telzey thought, did in a way fill in the picture. There was no evidence that Transcluster’s Verifiers operated in the way they were assumed to be operating—except that for fifteen years, through innumerable hearings, they had consistently presented the appearance of being able to operate in no other manner. But the descriptions she’d been given indicated they were vaster and presumably far more complex instruments than the Customs machine at the Orado City space terminal; and from that machine—supposedly no telepath at all—an imperceptible psionic finger had flicked out as she passed to plant a knot of compulsive suggestions in her mind.
So what were the Verifiers doing?
One of them was set up, not at all far away, in the Transcluster Finance Central in Draise. The Central was the heart of Hub finance, a key point of the Federation. Every moment of the day, enormously important information was coming in to it from a thousand worlds—flowing through the vicinity of the Psychology Service’s mind-reading device.
Could it really be restricted to scanning specific minute sections of the minds brought into contact with it in the ethics hearings?
Telzey wondered what the two amiable attorney’s would say if she told them what she thought about that.
But, of course, she didn’t.
It was like having wandered off-stage, accidentally and without realizing it, and suddenly finding oneself looking at something that went on behind the scenery.
Whatever the purpose of the something was, chance observers weren’t likely to be welcome.
She could tiptoe away, but so long as the Psychology Service was theoretically capable of looking inside her head at any moment to see what she had been up to, that didn’t change anything. Sooner or later they’d take that look. And then they’d interfere with her again, probably in a more serious manner.
So far, there seemed to be no way of getting around the advantage they had in being able to probe minds. Of course, there were such things as mind blocks. But even if she’d known how to go about finding somebody who would be willing to equip her with one, mind blocks were supposed to become dangerous to one’s mental health when they were retained indefinitely. And if she had one, she would have to retain it indefinitely. Mind blocks weren’t the answer she wanted.
On occasion, in the days following her conversation with the ethics hearing specialists, Telzey had a very odd feeling that the answer she wanted wasn’t far away. But nothing else would happen; and the feeling faded quickly. The Psionic Cop popped up in her dreams now and then, each time with less effect than before; or, more rarely, he’d come briefly into her awareness after she’d been concentrated on study for a few hours. On the whole, the Cop was a minor nuisance. It looked as if the underlying compulsion had been badly shaken up by the digging around she’d done when she discovered it, and was gradually coming apart.
But that again might simply prompt the Psychology Service to take much more effective measures the next time.
That was how matters stood around the beginning of the third week after Telzey’s return from Jontarou. Then, one afternoon, she met an alien who was native to a nonoxygen world human listed by a cosmographic code symbol, and who possessed a we’ll-developed psionic talent of his own.
She had spent several hours that day in one of Orado City’s major universities to gather data for a new study assignment and, on her way out, came through a hall containing a dozen or so live habitat scenes fro
m wildly contrasting worlds. The alien was in one of the enclosures, which was about a thousand cubic yards in size and showed an encrusted jumble of rocks lifting about the surface of an oily yellow liquid. The creature was sprawled across the rocks like a great irregular mass of translucent green jelly, with a number of variously-shaped, slowly moving crimson blotches scattered through its interior.
Strange as it appeared, she was in a hurry and wouldn’t have done more than glance at it through the sealing energy field which formed the transparent front wall if she hadn’t caught a momentary telepathic impulse from within the enclosure as she passed. This wasn’t so unusual in itself; there was, when one gave close attention to it, frequently a diffused psionic murmuring of human or animal origin or both around, but as a rule it was as unaware and vague as the sound somebody might make in breathing.
The pulse that came from the alien thing seemed quite different. It could have been almost a softly whispered question, the meaningful probe of an intelligent telepath.
Telzey checked, electrified, to peer in at it. It lay motionless, and the impulse wasn’t repeated. She might have been mistaken.
She shaped a thought herself, a light, unalarming “Hello, who are you?” sort of thought, and directed it gently at the green-jelly mass on the rocks.
A slow shudder ran over the thing; and then suddenly something smashed through her with numbing force. She felt herself stagger backwards, had an instant’s impression of another blow coming, and of raising her arm to ward it off. Then she was somehow seated on a bench at the far end of the hall, and a uniformed attendant was asking her concernedly how she felt. It appeared she had fainted for the first time in her life. He’d picked her up off the floor and carried her to the bench.
Telzey still felt dazed, but not nearly dazed enough to tell him the truth. At the moment, she wasn’t sure just what had happened back there, but it definitely was something to keep to herself. She told him the first thing to come to her mind, which was that she had skipped lunch and suddenly began to feel dizzy. That was all she remembered.
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 134