He looked somewhat relieved. “There’s a cafeteria upstairs.”
Telzey smiled, nodded. “I’ll eat something and then I’ll be all right!” She stood up.
The attendant didn’t let her get away so easily. He accompanied her to the cafeteria, guiding her along by an elbow as if she were an infirm old lady. After he’d settled her at a table, he asked what she would like, and brought it to her. Then he sat down across from her.
“You do seem all right again!” he remarked at last. His anxious look wasn’t quite gone. “The reason this has sort of spooked me, miss,” he went on, “is something that happened about half a year ago.”
“Oh? What was that?” Telzey asked carefully, sipping at the foamy chocolate-colored drink he had got for her. She wasn’t at all hungry, but he obviously intended to hang around until she downed it.
There had been this other visitor, the attendant said, a well-dressed gentleman standing almost exactly where Telzey had been standing. The attendant happened to be glancing towards him when the gentleman suddenly began to stagger around, making moaning and screeching sounds, and dropped to the floor. “Only that time,” the attendant said, “he was dead before we got there. And, ugh, his face . . . well, excuse me! I don’t want to spoil your appetite. But it was a bad affair all around.”
Telzey kept her eyes on her drink. “Did they find out what was wrong with him?”
“Something to do with his heart, they told me.” The attendant looked at her doubtfully. “Well, I suppose it must have been his heart. It’s just that those are very peculiar creatures they keep in that hall. It can make you nervous working around them.”
“What kind of creatures are they?” Telzey asked.
He shook his head, said they didn’t have names. Federation expeditions brought them back from one place and another, and they were maintained here, each in its made-to-order environment, so the scientists from the university could study them. In his opinion, they were such unnatural beasts that the public should be barred from the hall; but he didn’t make the rules. Of course, there was actually no way they could hurt anybody from inside the habitat tanks, not through those force fields. But it had unnerved him today to see another visitor topple over before that one particular tank.
He returned to his duties finally, and Telzey pushed her empty glass aside and considered the situation.
By now, every detail of what happened there had returned to her memory. The green-jelly creature definitely did hurt people through the energy screens around its enclosure . . . if the people happened to be telepaths. In them it found mental channels through which it could send savage surges of psi force. So the unfortunate earlier visitor had been a psi, who responded as unsuspectingly as she did to the alien’s probing whisper, and then met quick death.
She’d fallen into the same trap, but escaped. In the first instant of stunned confusion, already losing consciousness, she’d had a picture of herself raising her arm to block the creature’s blow’s. She hadn’t done it, of course: the blows weren’t physical ones, and couldn’t be blocked in that manner. But in the same reflexive, immediate manner, she’d done something else, not even knowing what she did, but doing it simply because it was the only possible defensive move she could have made at that instant, and in that particular situation.
Now she knew what the move had been. Something that seemed as fragile as a soap bubble was stretched about her mind. But it wasn’t fragile. It was a curtain of psi energy she’d brought into instant existence to check the creature’s psi attack as her senses blacked out.
It was still there, unchanged, maintaining itself with no further effort on her part. She could tell that it would, in fact, take a deliberate effort to destructure it again—and she had no intention of doing that until she was a good, long distance away from the hostile mind in the habitat tank downstairs.
Although it needn’t be, Telzey thought, a particularly hostile creature. Perhaps it had simply acted as it would have done on its own world where other telepathic creatures might be a natural prey, to be tricked into revealing themselves as they came near, and then struck down.
In a public park, ten minutes later, she sat down in a quiet place where she could make an undisturbed investigation of her psi bubble and its properties. After an hour or so, she decided she had learned enough about it for the moment, and went back to the hall of the live habitat scenes. There was a different attendant on duty now, and half a dozen other people were peering in at the occupant of one of the other tanks.
Telzey settled down on a bench opposite the enclosure of the green-jelly alien. He lay unmoving on his rocks and gave no indication of being aware of her return. She opened a section of the bubble, and sent him a sharp “You, there!” thought. A definitely unfriendly thought.
At once, he slammed back at her with a violence which seemed to shake the hall all around her. But the bubble was closed again, and there were no other effects. The attendant and the people farther down the hall obviously hadn’t sensed anything. This was a matter strictly between psis.
Telzey let a minute or so pass before she gave the creature another prodding thought. This time, he was slower to react, and when he did, it was with rather less enthusiasm. He mightn’t have liked the experience of having his thrusts bounced back by the bubble.
He had killed a human psi and tried to kill her, but she felt no real animosity towards him. He was simply too-different for that. She could, however, develop a hate-thought if she worked at it, and she did. Then she opened the bubble and shot it at him.
The outworld thing shuddered. He struck back savagely and futilely. She lashed him with hate again, and he shuddered again.
Minutes later, he suddenly went squirming and flowing down the rocks and into the oily yellow liquid that washed around them. He was attempting panicky flight, and there was nowhere to go. Telzey stood up carefully and went over to the enclosure, where she could see him bunched up against the far side beneath the surface. He gave the impression of being very anxious to avoid further trouble with her. She opened the bubble wider than before, though still with some caution, picked out his telepathic channels and followed them into his mind. There was no resistance, but she flinched a little. The impression she had—translated very roughly into human terms—was of terrified, helpless sobbing. The creature was waiting to be killed.
She studied the strange mind a few minutes longer, then drew away from it, and left the habitat hall. It wouldn’t be necessary to do anything else about the green-jelly alien. He wasn’t very intelligent, but he had an excellent memory.
And never, never, never, would he attempt to attack one of the terrible human psis again.
Telzey had a curious feeling about the bubble. It was something with which she had seemed immediately more than half familiar. Letting it flick into being and out again soon was as automatic as opening and closing her eyes. And in tracing out the delicate manipulations by which its wispiest sections could be controlled and shifted, she had the impression of merely needing to refresh her memory about details already known . . . This, of course, was the way to go about that! That was how it worked . . .
There had been that other tantalizing feeling recently. Of being very close to an answer to her problems with the Psychology Service, but not quite able to see it. Perhaps the bubble had begun to form in response to her need for an answer and the awareness of it would have come to her gradually if the alien’s attack hadn’t brought it out to be put to instant emergency use. It was a fluid pattern, drawing the psi energy that sustained it from unknown sources, as if there were an invisible ocean of psi nearby to which she had put out a tap. She had heard of soft-bodied, vulnerable creatures which survived by fitting themselves into the discarded hard shells of other creatures and trudging about in them. The bubble was a little like that, though the other way around—something she had shaped to fit her; not a part of herself, but a marvelously delicate and adjustable apparatus which should have many uses beyond tu
rning into a solid suit of psi armor in emergencies.
At the moment, for example, it might be used to prepare a deceptive image of herself to offer to future Psychology Service investigators.
That took several days. Then, so far as Telzey could tell, any significant thinking she did about psionics, or the Psychology Service and its machines, would produce only the blurriest of faint traces under a telepathic probe. The same for her memories on the subject, back to the night when she’d been scared out of sleep by her first dream of the Psionic Cop. And the explanation was that the Cop had scared her so that she’d lost her interest in the practice of telepathy then and there.
Since their suggestion had been to do just that, they might buy it. On the other hand, if they took a really careful look into her mind, the thought-camouflage might not fool them long, or even for an instant. But they’d have to start searching around then to find out what really had been going on; and if they touched any part of the bubble block, she should know it. She had made other preparations for that.
In a rented deposit vault of the nondirect mailing system in Orado City there was a stack of addressed and arrival-dated microtapes, all with an identical content; and on Telzey’s wrist-talker were two new tiny control buttons keyed to the vault. Five minutes after she pressed down the first button, the tapes would be launched into the automatic mazes of the nondirect system, where nothing could intercept or identify them until they reached their individual destinations. She could stop the process by depressing the second button before the five minutes were up, but in no other manner. The tapes contained the thinking she’d done about the psionic machines. It might be only approximately correct, but it still was a kind of thinking the Psychology Service would not want to see broadcast at random to the news media of the Hub.
It wasn’t a wholly satisfactory solution for a number of reasons, including the one that she couldn’t know just what she might start by pushing the button. But it would have to do until she thought of something better. If there were indications of trouble, simply revealing that she could push it should make everybody quite careful for the moment. And after completing her preparations, she hadn’t actually been expecting trouble, at least not for some while. She was behaving in a very innocuous manner, mainly busy with her legitimate studies; and that checked with the picture presented by the thought-camouflage. She’d talked about telepathy only to Gilas and Gonwil, telling Gonwil just enough to make sure she wouldn’t mention the esoteric tapes Telzey occasionally immersed herself in to somebody else.
Now, of course, that might change to some extent. As Gilas had implied, they couldn’t risk holding back information from the detectives he was employing, because what they withheld might turn out to have been exactly the information the detectives had needed. If they were as discreet as Gilas thought, it probably wouldn’t matter much.
Telzey twisted her mouth doubtfully, staring at the thin, smoky lines of air traffic converging far ahead on Orado City . . .
Probably, it wouldn’t!
IV
Several hours after Telzey’s departure, Pehanron College’s buildings and grounds, spreading up the sun-soaked hills above the residential town of Beale, were still unusually quiet.
Almost half the student body was struggling with midsummer examinations, and a good proportion of those who had finished had obtained permission to get off to an early start for the holidays. The carports extending along the backs of the student courts showed a correspondingly large number of vacancies, though enough gleaming vehicles remained to have supplied the exhibits for the average aircar show, a fair percentage running up into the price ranges of small interstellar freighters. Pehanron sometimes was accused of opening its lists only to the sons and daughters of millionaires; and while this wasn’t strictly true, the college did scout assiduously for such of them as might be expected to maintain the pace of its rugged curriculum. Pehanron liked to consider itself a select hatchery from which sprang a continuous line of leaders in many fields of achievement, and as a matter of fact, it did turn out more than its share of imposing names.
There was no one in sight in Court Ninety-two when Senior Counselor Eulate turned into it, arriving from the direction of the managerial offices. Miss Eulate was a plump, brisk little woman whose normal expression when she felt unobserved was a vaguely worried frown. The frown was somewhat pronounced at the moment.
At the gate of the duplex bungalow marked 18-19, the counselor came to an abrupt stop. In the center of the short garden path, head and pointed wolf ears turned in her direction, lay a giant white dog of the type known as Askanam arena hounds—a breed regarded, so Miss Eulate had been told, as the ultimate in reckless canine ferocity and destructiveness when aroused.
The appearance of Chomir—a yellow-eyed, extravagantly muscled hundred-and-fifty-pounder—always brought this information only too vividly back to Miss Eulate’s mind. Not wishing to arouse the silently staring monster now, she continued to hesitate at the gate. Then, hearing the intermittent purr of a tapewriter from beyond the open door at the end of the path, she called out in a carefully moderate tone. “Gonwil?”
The tapewriter stopped. Gonwil’s voice replied, “Yes . . . is that you, Miss Eulate?”
“It is. Please keep an eye on Chomir while I come in.”
“Oh, for goodness sake!” Gonwil appeared laughing in the door. She was eighteen; a good-looking, limberbodied, sunny-tempered blonde. “Now you know Chomir won’t hurt you! He likes you!”
Miss Eulate’s reply was a skeptical silence. But she proceeded up the path now, giving the giant hound a wary four feet of clearance as she went by. To her relief, Chomir didn’t move until she was past; then he merely placed his massive head back on his forelegs and half closed his eyes. Airily ignoring Gonwil’s amused smile, Miss Eulate indicated the closed entrance door on the other side of the duplex as she came up. “Telzey isn’t still asleep?”
“No, she left early. Did you want to see her?”
Miss Eulate shook her head.
“This concerns you,” she said. “It would be better if we went inside.”
In Gonwil’s study, she brought a note pad and a small depth photo from her pocket. She held out the pad. “Do these names mean anything to you?”
Gonwil took the pad curiously. After a moment, she shook her head.
“No. Should they?”
Looking as stern as her chubby features permitted, Miss Eulate handed her the photo. “Then do you know these two people?”
Gonwil studied the two figures briefly, said, “To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never seen either of them, Miss Eulate. What is this about?”
“The Tayun consulate in Orado City had the picture transmitted to us a short while ago,” Miss Eulate said. “The two persons in it—giving the names I showed you—called the consulate earlier in the morning and inquired about you.”
“What did they want?”
“They said they had learned you were on Orado and would like to know where you could he found. They implied they were personal friends of yours from Tayun.” The girl shook her head. “They may be from Tayun, but we aren’t even casually acquainted. I . . .”
“The consulate,” Miss Eulate said grimly, “suspected as much! They secretly recorded the screen images of the callers, who were then requested to come to the consulate to be satisfactorily identified while your wishes in the matter were determined. The callers agreed but have failed to show up. The consulate feels this may indicate criminal intentions. I understand you have been placed on record there as being involved in a private war on Tayun, and . . .”
“Oh, no!” Gonwil wrinkled her nose in sudden dismay. “Not that nonsense again! Not just now!”
“Please don’t feel alarmed!” Miss Eulate told her, not without a trace of guilty relish. The counselor took a strong vicarious interest in the personal affairs of her young charges, and to find one of them touched by the dangerous glamour of a private war was undeniably exciting. “No
body can harm you here,” she went on. “Pehanron maintains a very dependable security system to safeguard its students.”
“I’m sure it does,” Gonwil said. “But frankly, Miss Eulate, I don’t need to be safeguarded and I’m not at all alarmed.”
“You aren’t?” Miss Eulate asked, surprised.
“No. Whatever reason these people had for pretending to be friends of mine . . . I can think of several perfectly harmless ones . . . they aren’t vendettists.”
“Vendettists?”
Gonwil smiled. “Commercial vendetta. An old custom on Tayun—a special kind of private war. A couple of generations ago it was considered good form to kill off your business competitors if you could. It isn’t being done so much any more, but the practice hasn’t entirely died out.”
Miss Eulate’s eyebrows rose. “But then . . .”
“Well, the point is,” Gonwil said, “that I’m not involved in any vendetta or private war! And I never have been, except in Cousin Malrue’s imagination.”
“I don’t understand,” the counselor said. “Cousin Malrue . . . you’re referring to Mrs. Parlin?”
“Yes. She isn’t exactly a cousin but she’s the closest relative I have. In fact, the only one. And I’m very fond of her. I practically grew up in the Parlin family . . . and, of course, they’ve more or less expected that Junior and I would eventually get married.”
Miss Eulate nodded. “Rodel Parlin the Twelfth. Yes, I know.” She had met the young man several times on his visits to the college to see Gonwil and gained an excellent impression of him. It looked like an eminently suitable match, one of which Pehanron would certainly have approved; but regrettably Gonwil had not returned Rodel Parlin the Twelfth’s very evident affection in kind.
“Now, Cousin Malrue,” Gonwil went on, “has always been afraid that one or the other of my father’s old business enemies on Tayun was going to try to have me killed before I came of age. My parents and my uncle—my father’s brother—founded Lodis Associates and made a pretty big splash in Tayun’s financial world right from the start. Malrue and her husband joined the concern before I was born, and then, when I was about a year and a half old, my parents and my uncle were killed in two separate accidents. Cousin Malrue was convinced it was vendetta action . . .”
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 135