But watching the hall darken again as the technician turned away from the console and began to talk into a communicator, Telzey acknowledged to herself that she felt a shade less certain now of the purpose for which the Psychology Service was quietly distributing its psionic machines about the Hub. Gilas was in the observation cubicle next to hers, with two of Rienne’s attorneys; while Gonwil waited with Dasinger and a few Kyth men in some other section of the great Transcluster finance complex for a summons from the adjudicators to take Chomir to the contact chamber. The hearing had been under way for a little over an hour.
That was the puzzling point. She had come in nervously ready for an indication that the Verifier and the human minds behind it knew what she had been up to before the hearing even began. Her own thoughts were camouflaged; but Gonwil, Gilas and Dasinger were unconsciously broadcasting the information that she was a psi who had manipulated the memories of a hearing witness in a manner calculated to trick the verification machine into making a false report.
While it was the only way left to get at Malrue, the Psychology Service certainly must consider it as flagrant a violation of their rules against the independent use of psionics as could be imagined. But, so far as Telzey could tell, nothing happened then . . . nothing, at any rate, that didn’t conform in every detail to what was generally assumed to happen at an ethics hearing. The hearing got off to an unhurried and rather dull start. One of Rienne’s attorneys formally presented the general charge against the Parlins—they had planned and attempted to carry out the murder of Gonwil Lodis for financial gain. He brought out background data on Lodis Associates to show the motive, displayed the device used to throw Chomir into a killing rage, explained the purpose for which similar instruments were employed on Askanam. A description of the occurrence in the Kyth Agency’s hideout followed, including Gonwil’s preceding conversation with Junior by the personalized communicator he had sent her, though naturally excluding Telzey’s role in checking the dog’s attack until a guard had been able to stun him.
Then the specific charge was made. The Parlins had caused the demonstrated device to be used on the dog at a moment when they could assume it would result in Gonwil Lodis’ death, leaving no indication that her death had been planned.
From what Telzey had heard, it was the standard sort of introduction. An ethics hearing developed like a game of skill, unfolding from formalized beginnings, and it wasn’t until after a few moves and countermoves had been made that significant revelations could be expected. On this occasion, however, the Parlins’ attorneys evidently felt they could afford to skip such cautious preliminaries. It was clear now that Vingarran had been captured before he could leave Orado and had talked; but while he presumably would appear as a witness, nothing he knew could endanger the Parlins’ position. The attorneys announced that their three principals denied the charges and wished to testify to their innocence under verification if the commercial mind blocks they employed would permit this.
Having demonstrated then that the mind blocks, as a matter of fact, did not permit it, the Parlins had retired to wait out the rest of the hearing unchallenged.
Which meant that the next witness up should be Chomir.
The use of an animal as a verification witness had been cleared in advance with the adjudicators. It was not without precedent; Chomir would be admitted even if, for some reason, the opposing attorneys objected, and objections weren’t expected. The Verifier would be instructed only to establish whether anything could be found in the dog’s memory to show the Parlin family had been directly responsible for the murder device planted in his brain.
It was what she had planned. But she had expected to have some intimation by now of what the Verifier’s reaction to their doctored witness would be. And there’d been nothing . . .
Telzey leaned forward suddenly and switched off the central screen and voice transmitters. It might still be several minutes before Chomir was taken to the contact chamber. They’d been told he would be doped first to keep him quiet while the machine carried out its work.
She shifted in the chair, laid her hands, palms down, on the armrests, and closed her eyes. The psi bubble about her mind opened. Her awareness expanded out cautiously into the Transcluster complex.
It wasn’t quiet there. Psi whispered, murmured, muttered, in an incessant meaningless trickling from the swarms of humanity which crowded the vast Central. But that seemed to be all. The unaware insect buzz of thousands of minds faded, swelled, faded monotonously; and nothing else happened. She could detect no slightest hint of an active telepath, mechanical or human, nearby.
She didn’t know what it meant. She opened her eyes again, nerves on edge; and as the psi whisperings receded from her awareness, the side screen showed her Chomir already standing in the contact chamber, looking sleepy and bored. She reached out quickly, switched the center screen back on.
Pitch-blackness appeared before her, gleaming with a suggestion of black glass. After a puzzled instant, Telzey realized she must be looking at the projection field within which the Verifier sometimes produced impressions connected with the search it was conducting. The field hadn’t come into action when the Parlins were in the chamber; there had been nothing to show. Its appearance in the screen now indicated the machine had begun its work on the dog.
Too late to stop it; she could give Gilas no plausible reason for interrupting the hearing at this point. She watched the screen, waiting, her hands gripping the chair.
There was a sudden strong impression of somebody looking at her. Automatically, Telzey glanced around at the blank wall of the cubicle. No one was there, but the feeling persisted.
Then she knew Transcluster’s Verifier had found her.
Her left hand made a panicky flick to her wrist-talker, jabbed down a tiny button. Why had she imagined it would be similar to a human mind, the mind of any living being? This was like being stared at by the sea. And like a vast, cold sea wave it was coming towards her. The bubble snapped tight.
Ordinarily, it might give only a splinter of its attention to the ethics hearings for which it was supposedly here, and to the relatively unimportant people involved in them; so perhaps it wasn’t until this moment that it had become aware some telepathic meddler had been at work on the animal mind it was to investigate . . . and that the meddler was present at the hearing. In any event, it was after the meddler now.
The cold psi wave reached the bubble, rolled over it, receded, came again. An unprotected mind must have been flooded in an instant. As it was, Telzey stayed untouched. It closed over the bubble again, and now it remained.
It might have lasted only for seconds. There was a sense of weight building up, of slow, monstrous pressures, shifting, purposefully applied. Then the pressures relaxed and withdrew.
The machine mind was still there, watching. She had the feeling that others watched through it.
She brought out the thought record she had prepared for them, and flicked the bubble shielding away from it. And if that let them see she had never been so scared in her life, the thought record still spoke for itself.
“Take a good look!” she invited.
Almost instantly, she was alone.
Her eyes fastened, somewhat blurrily, on the projection field in the screen. Colors were boiling up in it. Then there was a jarring sensation of opening alien eyes and looking out from them.
How it was done Telzey couldn’t imagine. But she, and presumably everyone else watching the verification field at that moment, was suddenly aware of being inside Chomir’s head. There came a reddish flash, then a wave of rage building up swiftly to blazing fury. The fury receded again.
A picture came into being, in glimpsed fragments and scraps of almost nightmarish vividness, of the white-walled room in which Chomir had found himself when he awoke with the microscopic Askanam device freshly inserted in his brain. As he had done then, he was pacing swiftly and irritably about the room, the walls and a semitransparent energy barrier at one e
nd flowing past him in the projection field.
Again came the red flash, followed by the surge of rage. The dog stopped in mid-stride, head swinging towards the barrier. A figure moved vaguely behind the barrier. He hurled himself at it.
The barrier flung him back, once, twice. As he came smashing up against it for the third time, the scene suddenly froze.
At this distance, only inches away, the energy field was completely transparent. Three people stood in the section of the room beyond, Rodel Parlin the Twelfth a few feet ahead of his parents, right hand holding an instrument, a small but readily recognizable one. His thumb was on a plunger of the instrument, pressing it down. All three stared at the dog.
The projection field went blank.
For a second, Telzey had the feeling of somebody’s screams echoing through her thoughts. It was gone immediately, so she couldn’t be sure. But precisely how Malrue Parlin was reading to what she had just seen in the Verifier’s projection field was obviously of no particular importance now.
Telzey put the tip of her left forefinger on the second of the two little buttons she’d had installed recently in her wrist-talker, and pushed it gently down.
A ComWeb chimed persistently. Half awake, Telzey frowned. She had been dreaming, and there seemed to have been something important about the dream because she was trying to hang on to it. But it faded from her awareness like a puff of thin smoke, and she couldn’t recall what it had been. She woke up all the way just as the ComWeb went silent.
And where was she? Couch in the semidark of a big, comfortable room, rustic type, with the smell of pine trees . . . The far wall was a single window and it was night outside. Moving pinpoints of light and a steadier radiance glittered through a pale, ghostly swirling . . .
Tor Heights . . .
Of course! Tor Heights, the mountain sports resort . . . in starshine with a snowstorm moving past. With the hearing over, Gilas had suggested she go ahead with Chomir and rent a cabin here, so she and Gonwil could relax from recent stresses for a few days before returning to Pehanron College. He and Gonwil would stay on until the posthearing arrangements with the Transcluster adjudicators and the Parlins’ attorneys had been concluded, and then follow. After she’d secured the cabin and fed Chomir, she found herself getting sleepy and curled up for a nap.
That might have been a couple of hours ago.
As she climbed off the couch, the ComWeb began chiming again in the adjoining room. This time the summons was accompanied by Chomir’s attention-requesting rumble. Glancing at her watch, Telzey ran to take the call. She switched on the instrument, and Gonwil’s face appeared in the screen, eyes big and sober.
“Hi!” she said. “Your father and I are leaving Draise in about twenty minutes, Telzey. Thought I’d let you know.”
“Everything over?” Telzey asked.
“Not quite. They still have a lot of details to settle, but they don’t need us around for that. What made it all very simple was that Malrue and Rodel Senior signed up for voluntary rehabilitation, rather than take Transcluster’s penalties.” She hesitated. “I almost feel sorry for them now.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Telzey said thoughtfully. “They’ve had it coming for years.”
“I know. But still . . . well, I couldn’t have done it! Not to keep from losing the money.”
Telzey admitted she couldn’t have done it either. “What about Junior?”
Gonwil smiled briefly. “He wasn’t having any! He told the adjudicators losing his Lodis holdings still would leave him enough to be a playboy the rest of his life, and he couldn’t care less about getting placed on Transcluster’s black list. The adjudicators said he was practically frothing! Apparently, they were all in a severe state of shock when the hearing ended.”
“Glad to hear it,” Telzey said. She didn’t find herself feeling in the least sorry for the Parlins. “How will you like having Malrue back in Lodis Associates after they let her out of Rehabilitation?”
“I don’t know just how I would feel about it,” Gonwil said, “but I won’t be there when she comes back. That ruling’s been canceled, and I’m selling to the Bank of Rienne. I decided I’m not really cut out to he a Tayun financier. Besides, I’ve . . . oh, started to develop other interests.”
“Like in the Federation Navy?” Telzey asked.
Gonwil colored slightly. “Perhaps.”
After she had switched off, Telzey found and pushed the button which started the big fireplace in the main room going, then another button which let the sound of the soft, roaring rush of the storm pass through the cabin. She got a glass of milk and sat down reflectively with it before the fire.
Of course, the Parlins had realized they’d lost the hearing as soon as they saw themselves in the projection field. They must have nearly gone out of their minds for a while. But they couldn’t prove they’d never been in such a room with Chomir, and to dispute a Verifier’s report was useless. What had happened seemed impossible! But they were trapped, and they knew it.
Nevertheless, Telzey thought, it was very unlikely the senior Parlins would have preferred rehabilitation to losing their Lodis stock—if it had been left up to them. That was what had jolted Gonwil: she knew such a decision didn’t really go with the kind of people they were. But it couldn’t be explained to her, or to anybody else, that the decision hadn’t been their own.
Telzey sipped meditatively at her milk. Clear and obvious in the thought record she’d displayed to the Verifier, and to whatever Psychology Service agents were studying her through their machine, was the information that unless a certain thing was done and certain other things were not done, vast numbers of copies of a report she’d deposited in an nondirect mailing vault would be dumped into the nondirect system within minutes, tagged with randomly selected delivery dates extending up to fifteen years in the future.
On any day, during that fifteen-year period, there might show up at some of the Hub’s more prominent news services a concise statement, with data appended, of every significant fact she had deducted or suspected concerning psis and psionics in the Hub, and particularly of the role the Psychology Service and its psionic machines appeared to be playing. The first such missive to reach its destination should make quite a splash throughout the Hub.
So she’d blackmailed a department of the Overgovernment, and while they mightn’t relish it much, frankly, it felt good. Among the things they weren’t to do was to try to take control of her, mentally or physically. And the thing to be done, of course, was to see to it that the Parlins were found guilty at the ethics hearing of the crime they’d planned, even though the method of convicting them might be open to question.
Considering the Verifier’s ability to scan minds at large, they must have been aware by then that the Parlins were guilty, though they wouldn’t have lifted a finger to help out Gonwil if they hadn’t been forced to it. Being forced to it, they turned in a fast, artistic job, using Telzey’s fabrication but adding a number of lifelike touches she couldn’t have provided, and presenting it in a convincing dramatic manner.
Then they’d had to take immediate additional action to keep the stunned Parlins from wailing loudly enough to raise doubts about the infallibility of the ethics hearing procedures. As she knew from experience, the psionic machies were very good at installing on-the-spot compulsions.
So Malrue and her husband had applied for rehabilitation. The machines in the rehabilitation center would take it from there. The Psychology Service might have exempted Junior as being too much of a lightweight to worry about, but they certainly had seen to it that he wouldn’t do any talking.
So far, so good, Telzey thought. She put down the glass of milk and slipped off her shoes. Chomir had strolled in from the next room and settled himself in front of her, and she placed her feet on his back now, kneading the thick, hard slabs of muscle with toes and heels. He grunted comfortably.
Gonwil’s difficulties were over. And now where did she stand with the Psychology S
ervice?
She considered it a while. Essentially, they seemed to be practical people, so they shouldn’t be inclined to hold grudges. But she would look like a problem to them.
She’d reduced the problem as much as possible. Letting somebody look into sections of your mind was a good deal more satisfactory than making promises when you were out to create an atmosphere of confidence. If they could see what you really intended, they didn’t worry about cheating.
The Psychology Service knew now she wouldn’t give away any of their secrets unless they forced her to it—which again was a practical decision on her part. She couldn’t talk about them to Gonwil or her parents or Dasinger because their minds would be an open book any time they came near a psionic machine, and if she had told them too much, they might be in trouble then.
And in her own interest, she had no intention of telling people in general what she knew about psis—not, at least, until she understood a great deal more of what she’d be talking about.
Again, so far, so good.
Then there was the matter of having threatened to use the nondirect mailing system to expose them. She hadn’t let them see whether she intended to give up that arrangement or not. As a matter of fact, the package of prepared reports had been destroyed shortly before she set off for Tor Heights, because of the risk of something going wrong accidentally and, not inconceivably, changing the course of Federation history as a result. They probably had expected her to do it, but they couldn’t be sure. And even if they were, they didn’t know what else she might have cooked up.
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 141