Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by James H. Schmitz

  A minute later, she turned the little car out into the traffic lane. She had barely been able to shove the luggage compartment’s door shut on her two passengers; but they were safely out of sight. The two guards stared thoughtfully after the car as it went gliding down the lane. They could hear the music of a newsviewer program within the duplex. It might be a good half-hour before they got the first proddings of suspicion about Telzey and her aircar.

  Coming up to the force-screen exit she’d used in the morning, Telzey snapped the Star Honor-Student pass back on her hat. The guards we’re screening incoming visitors with unusual care today, but students going out were a different matter. They glanced at the pass, at her, waved her through.

  As she lifted the car over the crest of the wooded hills north of the college area, a big green airvan veered out of the direction in which it was headed and turned north ahead of her, picking up speed. Fifteen miles on and a few minutes later, Telzey followed the van down to the side of an isolated farm building. En route, there had been a few cautiously questioning knocks from the inside of the luggage compartment, but Telzey ignored them and Gonwil, puzzled, no doubt, about the delay in being let out but trustful as ever, had subsided again.

  In the shadow of the farm building, Telzey set the Cloudsplitter down behind the van. Gilas Amberdon clambered out of the front section of the big vehicle and met her beyond hearing range of the luggage compartment.

  “Any problems?”

  “Not so far,” Telzey said. “They’re both inside. Has the Kyth Agency found out where the Parlins are?”

  “No,” Gilas said. “The calls they’ve made were routed through Orado City but apparently didn’t originate there. The chances are they aren’t hiding deliberately and will disclose their whereabouts as soon as they hear Gonwil had disappeared from the college.”

  He studied her a moment. “I realize we’re working you a little hard, Telzey. If you take six hours off and catch up on some sleep after we get to the Kyth hideout, it shouldn’t make any difference.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t feel particularly tired. And I want to finish up with Chomir. I’ve got a hunch what he knows will be really important when we get it figured out.”

  Gilas considered. “All right. Dasinger would like to have that. We’ll be there shortly. You’ll get separate quarters as you specified—close enough to Gonwil and Chomir to let you work your mental witchcraft on them. And you’ll be completely undisturbed.”

  “That will be fine,” Telzey said.

  Her father smiled. “Then let’s go!”

  He started towards the front of the van. Telzey walked back to the Cloudsplitter and slipped into her seat. Half a minute later, the end of the van opened out. She slid the car up and inside and shut off its engines. Benches lined this section of the vehicle. Aside from that, it was empty.

  The loading door slammed shut again and the section lights came on overhead. Telzey waited until she felt the van lift creakily into the air. Then she opened the luggage compartment and let her rumpled passengers emerge.

  “What in the world,” Gonwil inquired bewilderedly, straightening up and staring around as Chomir eased himself muttering out of the Cloudsplitter behind her, “are we doing in this thing?”

  “Being scooted off to a safe hiding place,” Telzey said. “That was all arranged for in advance.”

  “Arranged for . . . safe . . .” Gonwil’s voice was strained. “Telzey! Whose idea was this?”

  “The Bank of Rienne’s.”

  The room they’d put her in here, Gonwil acknowledged, was, though not very large, comfortable and attractively furnished. If, nevertheless, it gave her a somewhat oppressive feeling of being imprisoned, that could be attributed to the fact that it was windowless and lacked means of outside communication.

  The only way to leave would be to go through a short corridor and open a door at the far end, which let into an office where a number of people were working. So she couldn’t have slipped away unnoticed, but there was no reason to think the people in the office would try to detain her if she did decide to leave. She’d simply been asked to stay here long enough to let the Bank of Rienne determine whether there could be any sinister significance to the appearance of the inquisitive strangers at the Tayun Consulate that morning.

  During the brief ride in the airvan, Telzey had explained that the bank felt its investigation would be greatly simplified if it could be carried out in complete secrecy. Pehanron College did not seem a safe place to leave Gonwil if somebody did intend to harm her: and to avoid revealing that it was taking a hand in the matter, the bank had called on Telzey through her father to spirit Gonwil quietly away from the campus.

  Allowing for the fact that at the moment everybody appeared obsessed by the notion that Tayun vendettists were after her, it wasn’t an unreasonable explanation. The Bank of Rienne did have some grounds to consider itself responsible for her here. “But why,” Gonwil had asked, “didn’t you tell me all this before we left?”

  “Would you have come along if I had?” Telzey said.

  Gonwil reflected and admitted that she probably wouldn’t have come along. She didn’t want to appear ungrateful; and she had now begun to feel the first touches of apprehension. When so many people, including Telzey’s eminently practical father, were indicating concern for her safety, the possibility couldn’t be denied that there was more to the old vendettist stories than she’d been willing to believe. Cousin Malrue, after all, was no fool; perhaps she had done Malrue an inexcusable injustice in belittling her warnings! Gonwil had only a vague idea of the methods a capable murderer might use to reach his victim; but it was generally accepted that he had a frightening array of weapons to choose from, and that every precaution must be taken in such situations.

  At any rate, she was perfectly safe here. The door to the room was locked; she had one key to it, Gilas Amberdon another. She was to let no one but Telzey in, and to make sure that no one else attempted to enter, Chomir was on guard in the corridor outside. It was comfortable to remember now that if Chomir was no shining light when it came to the standard doggy tricks, the protection of a human being was as solidly stamped into his nature as the gory skills of the arena. While he could move, only Gonwil or Telzey would open that door until one of them convinced him he could stop being a watchdog again.

  And now she was alone, Gonwil thought, there was something she should take care of promptly.

  Opening the overnight bag she had taken from the college, she arranged her study materials on a desk shelf, then brought out the miniature camouflaged communicator which had come with the mail in the morning. She had dropped Junior’s unwanted token of affection in with the tapewriter and other items, intending to show it to Telzey later on.

  She studied the tiny instrument a moment, pensively biting her lip. There had been no opportunity to tell Telzey about it, so no one here knew she had the thing. The lack of communicators among the room furnishings might mean that they’d rather she didn’t send messages outside. But they hadn’t said so.

  And it seemed only fair to send Malrue a reassuring word through Junior now. There would be no need to mention the Bank of Rienne’s investigation. She could tell Junior a very harmless story, one designed only to keep his mother from becoming completely distraught when she heard from Pehanron College that Gonwil had chosen to disappear.

  Gonwil glanced back a moment at the door. Then she placed the communicator in the palm of her left hand, and shifted the emerald arrowhead in its cover design a quarter turn to the right. That, according to the instructions which had come with it, made it ready for use. She placed it on the desk shelf, and pressed down with a fingertip on the golden pinhead stud in the center of the cover.

  A slender fan of golden light sprang up and out from around the rim of the communicator, trembled, widened, and held steady. It was perhaps three feet across, not much over two high, slightly concave. This was the vision screen.

  Now, if she turned the
little arrowhead to the third notch, and Junior’s communicator was set to receive, he should hear her signal.

  She turned it over carefully.

  Some ten or twelve seconds passed. Then Rodel Parlin the Twelfth’s handsome, narrow face was suddenly there in the fan-shaped golden light screen before her.

  “Well, at last!” he exclaimed. “I’ve been trying to call you but . . .”

  “I didn’t switch it on until just now,” Gonwil admitted. “Busy as all that with your tests?” Junior’s gaze shifted past her, went around the room. “What’s this?” he inquired. “Did Pehanron actually change your quarters because of the vendettist scare?”

  So the Parlins hadn’t been told she was gone. Gonwil smiled.

  “Pehanron didn’t!” she said. “I did. The fuss was getting too much for my nerves, so I sneaked out!”

  For a moment, Junior looked startled. “You’ve left the college?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, I . . . where are you now?”

  “I’m not telling anybody,” she said. “I’ve gone underground, so to speak, and I intend to stay out of sight until the thing blows over.”

  “Well, uh, Malrue . . .”

  “I know. That’s why I called the first chance I had. I don’t want Malrue to worry unnecessarily, so you tell her I’m in a perfectly safe place. Nobody here knows me, so nobody—including vendettists—can find out where I’ve gone. Tell Malrue I’m being very careful, and whenever you all decide there’s no more danger, I’ll come out again.”

  Junior studied her, frowning doubtfully.

  “Malrue,” he observed, “isn’t going to like that very much!”

  “Yes, I . . . just a moment!” Gonwil turned towards the door. Sounds of scratching came from it, then a deep whine. “That’s Chomir! He heard us talking, and I’d better let him in before he arouses the neighborhood. It’s difficult enough to be inconspicuous with him around!”

  “I can imagine.”

  Gonwil unlocked the door and opened it partly, glancing up the hall as Chomir slid through into the room, ears pricked. The door at the far end of the corridor was closed; he hadn’t been heard in the office. She locked the door quietly again. Chomir stared for an instant at the image in the viewfield, took a sniff at the air to confirm that while he’d heard Junior’s voice, Junior was not physically present. Chomir was familiar with the phenomenon of communicator screens and the ghosts that periodically appeared in them. Satisfied, he sat down beside the door.

  “I was wondering whether you’d left him behind,” Junior remarked as Gonwil came back.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t do that to Chomir! About Malrue—”

  He grinned. “I know! She does carry on rather badly at times like this! I’ll be tactful in what I tell her.”

  “Thanks,” Gonwil said gratefully. “I wouldn’t want her to feel that Pm avoiding her in particular. But would you please not tell her about sending me a personal communicator? Say I was just using a regular ComWeb in making this call. Otherwise, she’d want to argue me out of this, and I’d hate to have to refuse her.”

  “You can depend on me. When will you call again?”

  “Sometime early tomorrow?”

  “I’ll be waiting.” He turned his head to the left, appeared to listen. Then he looked back at her.

  “I believe I hear Malrue coming,” he said quietly. “Good-by, Gonwil!”

  “ ’By, Junior!”

  His face vanished. Still smiling, Gonwil bent over the communicator, searching for the pinhead stud. Junior had been on his best behavior this time; she was very glad she’d decided to make the call.

  She pushed down the stud, and the light screen disappeared.

  From the far end of the corridor outside came the sound of a violently slammed door.

  Startled, Gonwil swung about. Footsteps were pounding up the short corridor now, but she wasn’t aware of them. She stood dead-still, staring.

  The white shape crouched across the room, ears back and down, huge teeth bared, could hardly be recognized as Chomir. He might have been listening to the approaching steps. But then the snarling head moved. The eyes found Gonwil, and instantly he was coming towards her in a flat, long spring, jaws wide.

  As she watched Chomir move off beside Gonwil through the entrance tunnel to the Kyth hideout where the airvan had stopped, Telzey put out a tentative probe towards him.

  This time, she was inside the dog’s mind at once and so definitely that she could sense him striding along and the touch of the hard flooring beneath his pads. Satisfied, she withdrew. The contacts established during the night’s work hadn’t faded; she could resume her investigation immediately.

  Left alone in the room reserved for her, less than fifty feet from the one to which they had conducted Gonwil, Telzey settled into an armchair and closed her eyes. Chomir still seemed to be moving about, but that made no difference. At this stage, she could work below his awareness without disturbing him or interfering with his activities.

  She picked up the familiar memory chains within seconds, and then hesitated. Something had changed here. There was a sense of being drawn quietly, but positively, away from the memories towards another area of mind.

  She didn’t know what it meant. But since psi seemed sometimes to work independently on problems in which one was involved, this might turn out to be a short cut to the information for which she had been digging throughout the night. Telzey let herself shift in the indicated direction. There was a momentary odd feeling of sinking, then of having made a transition, of being somewhere else.

  And it had been a short cut. This was an aspect of mind she hadn’t explored before, but it wasn’t difficult to understand. A computer’s processes might have presented a somewhat similar pattern: impersonal, unaware, enormously detailed and busy. Its universe was the living animal body that generated it, and its function was essentially to see to it that its universe remained physically in good operating condition. As Telzey grasped that, her attention shifted once more—now to a disturbance point in the Chomir universe. Something was wrong there. The body-mind knew it was wrong but was unable to do anything about it.

  Telzey studied the disturbance point absorbedly. Suddenly its meaning became clear; and then she knew this was the information she had come to find. And it was very ugly and disturbing information.

  She opened her eyes. Her thoughts seemed sluggish, and for some seconds the room looked hazy and blurred about her. Then, as the body-mind patterns faded from her awareness, she discovered she was back in the ordinary sort of contact with Chomir—very clear, strong contact. She had a feeling of catching Gonwil’s voice impressions through him.

  The voice impressions ended. There was a moment’s pause. A sharp surge of uneasiness passed through Chomir.

  What did that . . .

  Telzey felt the blood drain from her face as she scrambled abruptly out of the chair, reaching for the room communicator. Then her breath caught. She stopped in mid-motion, stood swaying. Electric shivers were racing over her skin. The air seemed to tingle. Psi energy was building up swiftly, oppressively; and she was its focal point.

  Fury swept towards her, mindless, elemental, like a roaring wind. She seemed to move, and the room flicked out of existence. Something raged, and about her spun a disk of noise, of shock-distorted faces, of monstrously straining muscles. She moved again, and everything was still and clear.

  She was looking into another room, a day-bright room where a man in a yellow suit stood beside a window, studying the small device he held in one hand. Beyond the window, sunlit parkland stretched away in long, rising slopes; and in the far distance, high on the slopes, was the glassy glitter of a familiar cluster of buildings.

  Something appeared to startle the man. His face turned quickly towards her; and as she registered the details of the sharp features and wispy blond mustache, his eyes became round, white-rimmed holes of intense fright.

  The room vanished. Then there was one more sens
ation, remarkably like being slammed several times on top of the head by a giant fist; and a wave of blackness rolled over Telzey and swept her down.

  VI

  “Oh, he’s admitted it, all right!” Dasinger said, frowning at the solidopic of the man with the thin blond mustache. “In fact, as soon as he was told why he’d been picked up, he became anxious to spill everything he knew.

  But his confession isn’t going to be of much use against the Parlins.”

  “Why not?” Telzey asked.

  “Because one thing he didn’t know was who his employers were.” The detectives nodded at the tapeviewer he’d put on the table before her. “You can get the details from the report faster than I could give them to you. I have some questions myself, by the way.”

  “What about, Mr. Dasinger?”

  “It seems,” Dasinger said, “that when you sensed the dog was turning on Miss Lodis, you did three things almost simultaneously. You pinned the animal down in some manner . . .”

  Telzey nodded. “I kept locking his muscles on him. That’s what it felt like.”

  “That’s what it looked like,” Dasinger agreed. “When we got into the room, he was twisting around on the floor and seemed unable to close his jaws. Even so, he gave us one of the most startling demonstrations of animal athletics I’ve seen. It was a good half minute before somebody could line up on him long enough to feed him a stunner! Besides keeping Miss Lodis from getting killed in there, you’ve probably also saved the lives of three or four of my men . . . a detail which the Kyth Agency will remember. Now, as you clamped down on the dog, you also blasted a telepathic warning to your father to let us know Miss Lodis needed immediate help.”

  “Uh-huh. I didn’t realize till afterwards I’d done it.”

  “Meanwhile again,” Dasinger said, indicating the solidopic, “you were putting in a personal appearance in the city of Beale, a good thousand miles away, in the room where this gentleman was operating the instrument which was supposed to be accomplishing the murder of Miss Lodis.”