Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by James H. Schmitz

  But again—what made Gikkes so nervous here? The unfamiliar environment, the frozen beauty of the starblaze overhanging the sloping plain like a tent of fire, might account for it. But it didn’t rule out a more specific source of disturbance.

  She could make sure, Telzey thought, by probing into Gikkes’ mind and finding out what was going on in there. Gikkes wouldn’t know it was happening. But it took many hours, as a rule, to develop adequate contact unless the other mind was also that of a functioning telepath. Gikkes was borderline—a telepath, but not functional, or only partly so—and if she began probing around in those complexities without the experience to tell her just how to go about it, she might wind up doing Gikkes some harm.

  She looked over at Gikkes. Gikkes met her eyes, said, “Shouldn’t you start worrying about that dog of Gonwil’s? He hasn’t been in sight for the past half-hour.”

  “Chomir’s all right,” Telzey said. “He’s still checking over the area.”

  Chomir was, in fact, only a few hundred yards away, moving along the Cil River up in the canyon. She’d been touching the big dog’s mind lightly from time to time during the evening to see what he was doing. Gikkes couldn’t know that, of course—nobody in this group suspected Telzey of psionic talents. But she had done a great deal of experimenting with Chomir, and nowadays she could, if she liked, almost see with his eyes, smell with his nose, and listen through his ears. At this instant, he was watching half a dozen animals large enough to have alarmed Gikkes acutely. Chomir’s interest in Melna Park’s wildlife didn’t go beyond casual curiosity. He was an Askanam hound, a breed developed to fight man or beast in pit and arena, too big and powerful to be apprehensive about other creatures and not inclined to chase strange animals about without purpose as a lesser dog might do.

  “Well,” Gikkes said, “if I were responsible for somebody else’s dog, if I’d brought him here, I’d be making sure he didn’t run off and get lost—”

  Telzey didn’t answer. It took no mind-reading to know that Gikkes was annoyed because Pollard had attached himself to Telzey’s fan club after supper and settled down beside her. Gikkes had invited Pollard to come along on the outing; he was president of various organizations and generally important at Pehanron College. Gikkes, the glamour girl, didn’t like it at all that he’d drifted over to Telzey’s group, and while Telzey had no designs on him, she couldn’t very well inform Gikkes of that without ruffling her further.

  “I,” Gikkes concluded, “would go look for him.”

  Pollard stood up. “It would be too bad if he strayed off, wouldn’t it?” he agreed. He gave Telzey a lazy smile. “Why don’t you and I look around a little together?”

  Well, that was not exactly what Gikkes had intended. Rish and Dunker didn’t think much of it either. They were already climbing to their feet, gazing sternly at Pollard.

  Telzey glanced at them, checked the watch Dunker had loaned her after she smashed the one in her wrist-talker on the fishing excursion.

  “Let’s wait another five minutes,” she suggested. “If he isn’t back by then, we can all start looking.”

  As they settled down again, she sent a come-here thought to Chomir. She didn’t yet know what steps she might have to take in the other matter, but she didn’t want to be distracted by problems with Gikkes and the boys.

  She felt Chomir’s response. He turned, got his bearings instantly with nose, ears, and—though he wasn’t aware of that—by the direct touch of their minds, went bounding down into the river and splashed noisily through the shallow water. He was taking what seemed to him a short cut to the camp. But that route would lead him high up the opposite bank of the twisting Cil, to the far side of the canyon.

  “Not that way, stupid!” Telzey thought, verbalizing it for emphasis. “Turn around—go back!”

  And then, as she felt the dog pause comprehendingly, a voice, edged with the shock of surprise—perhaps of fear—exclaimed in her mind, “Who are you? Who said that?”

  There had been a number of occasions since she became aware of her abilities when she’d picked up the thought-forms of another telepath. She hadn’t tried to develop such contacts, feeling in no hurry to strike up an acquaintanceship on the psionic level. That was part of a world with laws and conditions of its own which should be studied thoroughly if she was to avoid creating problems for herself and others, and at present she simply didn’t have the time for thorough study.

  Even with the tentative exploration she’d been doing, problems arose. One became aware of a situation of which others weren’t aware, and then it wasn’t always possible to ignore the situation, to act as if it didn’t exist. But depending on circumstances, it could be extremely difficult to do something effective about it, particularly when one didn’t care to announce publicly that one was a psi.

  The thing that appeared to have happened in Melna Park tonight had seemed likely to present just such problems. Then this voice spoke to her suddenly, coming out of the night, out of nowhere. Another telepath was in the area, to whom the encounter was as unexpected as it was to her. There was no immediate way of knowing whether that was going to help with the problem or complicate it further, but she had no inclination to reply at once. Whoever the stranger was, the fact that he—there had been a strong male tinge to the thoughts—was also a psi didn’t necessarily make him a brother. She knew he was human; alien minds had other flavors. His questions had come in the sharply defined forms of a verbalization; he might have been speaking aloud in addressing her. There was something else about them she hadn’t noticed in previous telepathic contacts—an odd, filtered quality as though his thoughts passed through a distorting medium before reaching her.

  She waited, wondering about it. While she wasn’t strongly drawn to this stranger, she felt no particular concern about him. He had picked up her own verbalized instructions to Chomir, had been startled by them, and, therefore, hadn’t been aware of anything she was thinking previously. She’d now tightened the veil of psi energy about her mind a little, enough to dampen out the drifting threads of subconscious thought by which an unguarded mind was most easily found and reached. Tightened further, as it could be in an instant, it had stopped genuine experts in mindprobing in their tracks. This psi was no expert; an expert wouldn’t have flung surprised questions at her. She didn’t verbalize her thinking as a rule, and wouldn’t do it now until she felt like it. And she wouldn’t reach out for him. She decided the situation was sufficiently in hand.

  The silence between them lengthened. He might be equally wary now, regretting his brief outburst.

  Telzey relaxed her screen, flicked out a search-thought to Chomir, felt him approaching the camp in his easy, loping run, closed the screen again. She waited a few seconds. There was no indication of interest from the other psi; apparently, even when he had his attention on her, he was able to sense only her verbalized thoughts. That simplified the matter.

  She lightened the. screen again. “Who are you?” she asked.

  The reply came instantly. “So I wasn’t dreaming! For a moment, I thought . . . Are there two of you?”

  “No. I was talking to my dog.” There was something odd about the quality of his thoughts. He might be using a shield or screen of some kind, not of the same type as hers but perhaps equally effective.

  “Your dog? I see. It’s been over a year,” the voice said, “since I’ve spoken to others like this.” It paused. “You’re a woman . . . young . . . a girl . . .”

  There was no reason to tell him she was fifteen. What Telzey wanted to know just now was whether he also had been aware of a disturbance in Melna Park. She asked, “Where are you?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “At my home. Twelve miles south of Cil Chasm across the plain, at the edge of the forest. The house is easy to see from the air.”

  He might be a park official. They’d noticed such a house on their way here this afternoon and speculated about who could be living there. Permission to make one’s residence in a Feder
ation Park was supposedly almost impossible to obtain.

  “Does that tell you anything?” the voice went on.

  “Yes,” Telzey said. “I’m in the park with some friends. I think I’ve seen your house.”

  “My name,” the bodiless voice told her, “is Robane. You’re being careful. I don’t blame you. There are certain risks connected with being a psi, as you seem to understand. If we were in a city, I’m not sure I would reveal myself. But out here . . . Somebody built a fire this evening where the Cil River leaves the Chasm. I’m a cripple and spend much of my time studying the park with scanners. Is that your fire?”

  Telzey hesitated a moment. “Yes.”

  “Your friends,” Robane’s voice went on, “they’re aware you and I . . . they know you’re a telepath?”

  “No.”

  “Would you be able to come to see me for a while without letting them know where you’re going?”

  “Why should I do that?” Telzey asked.

  “Can’t you imagine? I’d like to talk to a psi again.”

  “We are talking,” she said.

  Silence for a moment.

  “Let me tell you a little about myself,” Robane said then. “I’m approaching middle age—from your point I might even seem rather old. I live here alone except for a well-meaning but rather stupid housekeeper named Feddler. Peddler seems old from my point of view. Four years ago, I was employed in one of the Federation’s science departments. I am . . . was . . . considered to be among the best in my line of work. It wasn’t very dangerous work so long as certain precautions were observed. But one day a fool made a mistake. His mistake killed two of my colleagues. It didn’t quite kill me, but since that day I’ve been intimately associated with a machine which has the responsibility of keeping me alive from minute to minute. I’d die almost immediately if I were removed from it.

  “So my working days are over. And I no longer want to live in cities. There are too many foolish people there to remind me of the one particular fool I’d prefer to forget. Because of the position I’d held and the work I’d done, the Federation permitted me to make my home in Melna Park where I could be by myself . . .”

  The voice stopped abruptly but Telzey had the impression Robane was still talking, unaware that something had dimmed the thread of psi between them. His own screen perhaps? She waited, alert and quiet. It might be deliberate interference, the manifestation of another active psionic field in the area—a disturbing and malicious one.

  “. . . On the whole, I like it here.” Robane’s voice suddenly was back; and it was evident he didn’t realize there had been an interruption. “A psi need never be really bored, and I’ve installed instruments to offset the disadvantages of being a cripple. I watch the park through scanners and study the minds of animals . . . Do you like animal minds?”

  That. Telzey thought, hadn’t been at all a casual question. “Sometimes,” She told Robane carefully. “Some of them.”

  “Sometimes? Some of them? I wonder . . . Solitude on occasion appears to invite the uncanny. One may notice things that seem out of place, that are disquieting. This evening . . . during the past hour perhaps, have you . . . were there suggestions of activities . . .”

  He paused. “I find I don’t quite know how to say this.”

  “There was something,” she said. “For a moment, I wasn’t sure I wasn’t dreaming.”

  “You mean something ugly . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “Fear,” Robane’s voice said in her mind. “Fear, pain, death. Savage cruelty. So you caught it, too. Very strange! Perhaps an echo from the past touched our minds in that moment, from the time when creatures who hated man still haunted this country.

  “But—well, this is one of the rare occasions when I feel lonely here. And then to hear another psi, you see . . . Perhaps I’m even a little afraid to be alone in the night just now. I’d like to speak to you, but not in this way—not in any great detail. One can never be sure who else is listening . . . I think there are many things two psis might discuss to their advantage.”

  The voice ended on that. He’d expressed himself guardedly, and apparently he didn’t expect an immediate reply to his invitation. Telzey bit her lip. Chomir had come trotting up, had been welcomed by her and settled down. Gikkes was making cooing sounds and snapping her fingers at him. Chomir ignored the overtures. Ordinarily, Gikkes claimed to find him alarming; but here in Melna Park at night, the idea of having an oversized dog near her evidently had acquired a sudden appeal—

  So Robane, too, had received the impression of unusual and unpleasant events this evening . . . events he didn’t care to discuss openly. The indication that he felt frightened probably needn’t be taken too seriously. He was in his house, after all; and so isolated a house must have guard-screens. The house of a crippled, wealthy recluse, who was avoiding the ordinary run of humanity, would have very effective guard-screens. If something did try to get at Robane, he could put in a call to the nearest park station and have an armed ranger car hovering about his roof in a matter of minutes. That suggestion had been intended to arouse her sympathy for a shut-in fellow psi, help coax her over to the house.

  But he had noticed something. Something to judge from his cautious description, quite similar to what she had felt. Telzey looked at Chomir, stretched out on the sandy ground between her and the fire, at the big, wolfish head, the wedge of powerful jaws. Chomir was not exactly an intellectual giant but he had the excellent sensory equipment and alertness of a breed of fighting animals. If there had been a disturbance of that nature in the immediate vicinity, he would have known about it, and she would have known about it through him.

  The disturbance, however, might very well have occurred somewhere along the twelve-mile stretch between the point where Cil Chasm split the mountains and Robane’s house across the plain. Her impression had been that it was uncomfortably close to her. Robane appeared to have sensed it as uncomfortably close to him. He had showed no inclination to do anything about it, and there was, as a matter of fact, no easy way to handle the matter. Robane clearly was no more anxious than she was to reveal himself as a psi; and, in any case, the park authorities would be understandably reluctant to launch a search for a vicious but not otherwise identified man-hunting beast on no better evidence than reported telepathic impressions—at least, until somebody was reported missing.

  It didn’t seem a good idea to wait for that. For one thing, Telzey thought, the killer might show up at their fire before morning . . .

  She grimaced uneasily, sent a troubled glance around the group. She hadn’t been willing to admit it but she’d really known for minutes now that she was going to have to go look for the creature. In an aircar, she thought, even an aircar throttled down to thirty miles an hour and a contour altitude of a hundred and fifty feet, she would be in no danger from an animal on the ground if she didn’t take very stupid chances. The flavor of psi about the event she didn’t like. That was still unexplained. But she was a psi herself, and she would be careful.

  She ran over the possibilities in her mind. The best approach should be to start out towards Robane’s house and scout the surrounding wildlands mentally along that route. If she picked up traces of the killer-thing, she could pinpoint its position, call the park rangers from the car and give them a story that would get them there in a hurry. They could do the rest. If she found nothing, she could consult with Robane about the next moves to make. Even if he didn’t want to take a direct part in the search, he might be willing to give her some help with it.

  Chomir would remain here as sentinel. She’d plant a trace of uneasiness in his mind, just enough to make sure he remained extremely vigilant while she was gone. At the first hint from him that anything dangerous was approaching the area, she’d use the car’s communicator to have everybody pile into the other two aircars and get off the ground. Gikkes was putting them in the right frame of mind to respond very promptly if they were given a real alarm.

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p; Telzey hesitated a moment longer but there seemed to be nothing wrong with the plan. She told herself she’d better start at once. If she waited, the situation, whatever it was, conceivably could take an immediately dangerous turn. Besides, the longer she debated about it, the more unpleasant the prospect was going to look.

  She glanced down at Dunker’s watch on her wrist.

  “Robane?” she asked in her mind.

  The response came quickly.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll start over to your house now,” Telzey said. “Would you watch for my car? If there is something around that doesn’t like people, I’d sooner not be standing outside your door.”

  “The door will be open the instant you come down,” Robane’s voice assured her. “Until then, I’m keeping it locked. I’ve turned on the scanners and will be waiting . . .” A moment’s pause. “Do you have additional reason to believe—”

  “Not so far,” Telzey said. But there are some things I’d like to talk about—after I get there . . .” She didn’t really intend to go walking into Robane’s house until she had more information about him. There were too many uncertainties floating around in the night to be making social calls. But he’d be alert now, waiting for her to arrive, and might notice things she didn’t.

  The aircar was her own, a fast little Cloudsplitter. No one objected when she announced she was setting off for an hour’s roam in the starblaze by herself. The fan club looked wistful but was well trained, and Pollard had allowed himself to be reclaimed by Gikkes. Gikkes clearly regarded Telzey’s solo excursion as a fine idea . . .

  She lifted the Cloudsplitter out of the mouth of Cil Chasm. At a hundred and fifty feet, as the sealed engine lock clicked in, the little car automatically stopped its ascent. Telzey turned to the right, along the forested walls of the mountain, then swung out across the plain.