They’d arrived. Now to catch their attention . . .
“Here!” she said sharply in the dog’s mind.
It meant: “Here I am! Look for me! Come to me!” No more than that. Chomir was keyed up enough without knowing why. Any actual suggestion that she was in trouble might throw him out of control.
She almost heard the deep, whining half-growl with which he responded. It should be enough. Chomir knew now she was somewhere nearby, and Rish and the others would see it immediately in the way he behaved. When the aircar reappeared, its search-beam should be swinging about, fingering the ground to locate her.
Telzey jumped down into a little gully, felt, with a shock of surprise, her knees go soft with fatigue as she landed, and clambered shakily out the other side. She took a few running steps forward, came to a sudden complete stop.
Robane! She felt him about, a thick, ugly excitement. It seemed the chance moment of contact for which she’d been waiting, his mind open, unguarded—
She looked carefully around. Something lay beside a cluster of bushes thirty feet ahead. It appeared to be a big pile of windblown dry leaves and grass, but its surface stirred with a curious softness in the breeze. Then a wisp of acrid animal odor touched Telzey’s nostrils and she felt the hot-ice surge of deep fright.
The spook lifted its head slowly out of its fluffed, mottled mane and looked at her. Then it moved from its crouched position . . . a soundless shift a good fifteen feet to the right, light as the tumbling of a big ball of moss. It rose on its hind legs, the long fur settling loosely about it like a cloak, and made a chuckling sound of pleasure.
The plain seemed to explode about Telzey.
The explosion was in her mind. Tensions held too long, too hard, lashed back through her in seething confusion at a moment when too much needed to be done at once. Her physical vision went black; Robane’s beast and the starlit slope vanished. She was sweeping through a topsy-turvy series of mental pictures and sensations. Rish’s face appeared, wide-eyed, distorted with alarm, the aircar skimming almost at ground level along the top of a grassy rise, a wood suddenly ahead. “Now!” Telzey thought. Shouts, and the car swerved up again. Then a brief, thudding, jarring sensation underfoot . . .
That was done.
She swung about to Robane’s waiting excitement, slipped through it into his mind. In an instant, her awareness poured through a net of subconscious psi channels that became half familiar as she touched them. Machine static clattered, too late to dislodge her. She was there. Robane, unsuspecting, looked out through his creature’s eyes at her shape on the plain, hands locked hard on the instruments through which he lived, experienced, murdered.
In minutes, Telzey thought, in minutes, if she was alive minutes from now, she would have this mind—unaware, unresistant, wide open to her—under control. But she wasn’t certain she could check the spook then through Robane. He had never attempted to hold it back moments away from its kill.
Vision cleared. She stood on the slope, tight tendrils of thought still linking her to every significant section of Robane’s mind. The spook stared, hook-beak lifted above its gaping mouth, showing the thick, twisting tongue inside. Still upright, it began to move, seemed to glide across the ground towards her. One of its forelimbs came through the thick cloak of fur, fourfingered paw raised, slashing retractile claws extended, reaching out almost playfully.
Telzey backed slowly off from the advancing goblin shape. For an instant, another picture slipped through her thoughts . . . a blur of motion. She gave it no attention. There was nothing she could do there now.
The goblin dropped lightly to a crouch. Telzey saw it begin its spring as she turned and ran.
She heard the gurgling chuckle a few feet behind her, but no other sound. She ran headlong up the slope with all the strength she had left. In another world, on another level of existence, she moved quickly through Robane’s mind, tracing out the control lines, gathering them in. But her thoughts were beginning to blur with fatigue. Bushy shrubbery dotted the slope ahead. She could see nothing else.
The spook passed her like something blown by the wind through the grass. It swung around before her, twenty feet ahead; and as she turned to the right, it was suddenly behind her again, coming up quickly, went by. Something nicked the back of her calf as it passed—a scratch, not much deeper than a dozen or so she’d picked up pushing through thorny growth tonight. But this hadn’t been a thorn. She turned left, and it followed, herding her; dodged right, and it was there, going past. Its touch seemed the lightest flick again, but an instant later there was a hot, wet line of pain down her arm. She felt panic gather in her throat as it came up behind her once more. She stopped, turning to face it.
It stopped in the same instant, fifteen feet away, rose slowly to its full height, dark eyes staring, hooked beak open as if in silent laughter. Telzey watched it, gasping for breath. Streaks of foggy darkness seemed to float between them. Robane felt far away, beginning to slip from her reach. If she took another step, she thought, she would stumble and fall; then the thing would be on her.
The spook’s head swung about. Its beak closed with a clack. The horn-ears went erect.
The white shape racing silently down the slope seemed unreal for a moment, something she imagined. She knew Chomir was approaching; she hadn’t realized he was so near. She couldn’t see the aircar’s lights in the starblaze above, but it might be there. If they had followed the dog after he plunged out of the car, if they hadn’t lost . . .
Chomir could circle Robane’s beast, threaten it, perhaps draw it away from her, keep it occupied for minutes. She drove a command at him—another, quickly and anxiously, because he hadn’t checked in the least; tried to slip into his mind and knew suddenly that Chomir, coming in silent fury, wasn’t going to be checked or slowed or controlled by anything she did. The goblin uttered a monstrous, squalling scream of astounded rage as the strange white animal closed the last twenty yards between them; then it leaped aside with its horrid ease. Sick with dismay, Telzey saw the great forelimb flash from the cloak, strike with spread talons. The thudding blow caught Chomir, spun him around, sent him rolling over the ground. The spook sprang again to come down on its reckless assailant. But the dog was on his feet and away.
It was Chomir’s first serious fight. But he came of generations of ancestors who had fought one another and other animals and armed men in the arenas of Askanam. Their battle cunning was stamped into his genes. He had made one mistake, a very nearly fatal one, in hurtling in at a dead run on an unknown opponent. Almost within seconds, it became apparent that he was making no further mistakes.
Telzey saw it through a shifting blur of exhaustion. As big a dog as Chomir was, the squalling goblin must weigh nearly five times as much, looked ten times larger with its fur-mane bristling about it. Its kind had been forest horrors to the early settlers. Its forelimbs were tipped with claws longer than her hands and the curved beak could shear through muscle and bone like a sword. Its uncanny speed . . .
Now somehow it seemed slow. As it sprang, slashing down, something white and low flowed around and about it with silent purpose. Telzey understood it then. The spook was a natural killer, developed by nature to deal efficiently with its prey. Chomir’s breed were killers developed by man to deal efficiently with other killers.
He seemed locked to the beast for an instant, high on its shoulder, and she saw the wide, dark stain on his flank where the spook’s talons had struck. He shook himself savagely. There was an ugly, snapping sound. The spook screeched like a huge bird. She saw the two animals locked together again, then the spook rolling over the ground, the white shape rolling with it, slipping away, slipping back. There was another screech. The spook rolled into a cluster of bushes. Chomir followed it in.
A white circle of light settled on the thrashing vegetation, shifted over to her. She looked up, saw Rish’s car gliding down through the air, heard voices calling her name—
She followed her contact-thoug
hts back to Robane’s mind, spread out through it, sensing at once the frantic grip of his hands on the instrument controls. For Robane, time was running out quickly. He had been trying to turn his beast away from the dog, force it to destroy the human being who could expose him. He had been unable to do it. He was in terrible fear. But he could accomplish no more through the spook. She felt his sudden decision to break mind-contact with the animal to avoid the one experience he had always shunned—going down with another mind into the shuddering agony of death.
His right hand released the control it was clutching, reached towards a switch.
“No,” Telzey said softly to the reaching hand.
It dropped to the instrument board. After a moment, it knotted, twisted about, began to lift again.
“No.”
Now it lay still. She considered. There was time enough.
Robane believed he would die with the spook if he couldn’t get away from it in time. She thought he might be right; she wouldn’t want to be in his mind when it happened, if it came to that.
There were things she needed to learn from Robane. The identity of the gang which had supplied him with human game was one; she wanted that very much. Then she should look at the telepathic level of his mind in detail, find out what was wrong in there, why he hadn’t been able to use it . . . some day, she might be able to do something with a half-psi like Gikkes. And the mind-machines—if Robane had been able to work with them, not really understanding what he did, she should be able to employ similar devices much more effectively. Yes, she had to carefully study his machines—
She released Robane’s hand. It leaped to the switch, pulled it back. He gave a great gasp of relief.
For a moment, Telzey was busy. A needle of psi energy flicked knowingly up and down channels, touching here, there, shriveling, cutting, blocking . . . Then it was done. Robane, half his mind gone in an instant, unaware of it, smiled blankly at the instrument panel in front of him. He’d live on here, dimmed and harmless, cared for by machines, unwitting custodian of other machines, of memories that had to be investigated, of a talent he’d never known he had.
“I’ll be back,” Telzey told the smiling, dull thing, and left it.
She found herself standing on the slope. It had taken only a moment, after all. Dunker and Valia were running towards her. Rish had just climbed out of the aircar settled forty feet away, its search-beam fixed on the thicket where the spook’s body jerked back and forth as Chomir, jaws locked on its crushed neck, shook the last vestiges of life from it with methodical fury.
TROUBLE TIDE
You can, by mutation and selective breeding, adapt Earth life-forms to another planet. But that doesn’t mean that the other planet life-forms are going to adapt to you!
I
When Danrich Parrol, general manager of the Giard Pharmaceutical Station on Nandy-Cline, stepped hurriedly out of an aircab before the executive offices, he found Dr. Nile Etland’s blazing blue Pan Elemental already parked on the landing strip next to the building entrance.
Parrol pushed through the door, asked the receptionist, “When did she get here, and where is she now?” The girl grinned, checked her watch. “She arrived four minutes ago and went straight into Mr. Weldrow’s office. They called in Freasie immediately. Welcome home, Mr. Parrol! We’ve had a dull time since you left—at least until this thing came up.”
Parrol smiled briefly, said, “Put any calls for me on Weldrow’s extension, will you?” and went down the hall. At the far end, he opened the door to an office. The three people standing in front of a wall map looked around at him. Ilium Weldrow, the assistant manager, appeared relieved to see him.
“Glad you’re here, Dan!” he said heartily. “It seems that . . .”
“Dan, it’s a mess!” Dr. Nile Etland interrupted. The head of Giard’s station laboratory appeared to have dressed hastily after Parrol called her at the spaceport hotel—she would have had to, to show up here within ten minutes. Her coppery hair was still piled high on her head; the intent face with its almost too perfectly chiseled features was innocent of make-up. She nodded at the heavily built woman beside Weldrow. “Apparently it isn’t an epidemic. Freasie says there’s been no trace of disease in the specimens and samples that came through the lab.”
“Naturally not!” the lab’s chief technician said sourly. “If the material hadn’t been absolutely healthy, it would have been returned with a warning to the ranches that supplied it.”
“Of course. And there’ve been no reports of sea beef carcasses seen floating around,” Nile Etland went on.
Parrol asked, “Exactly what does seem to have happened? The news report I picked up at the hotel just now didn’t tell much, but it didn’t sound like an epidemic. The man talked of ‘mysterious wholesale disappearances’ among the herds in this area. The way he put it almost implied that one or the other of the local ranchers is suspected of rustling stock.”
Nile turned to the wall map. “That’s darn improbable, Dan! Here, let me show you. The trouble started there . . . a hundred and fifty miles up the coast. Eight days ago. Throughout the week the ranches south of that point have been hit progressively.
“The worst of it is that the estimated losses are going up fast! It was five to ten per cent in the first herds affected. But the report this morning was that Lipyear’s Oceanic is missing almost sixty per cent of its stock.”
“Lipyear’s? Sixty per cent!” Parrol repeated incredulously. “The newscast said nothing of that.”
“I called the Southeastern Ranchers Association on my way here,” Nile told him. “That’s the figure Machon gave me. They haven’t put it out yet. It’s a big jump over yesterday’s estimate, and Machon seemed to be in a state of shock about it. There are plenty of wild rumors but no useful explanation of what’s happening.”
Parrol looked at Weldrow, asked, “What have you done so far, Weldrow?”
The assistant manager frowned. Nile Etland said impatiently, “Weldrow’s done exactly nothing!” She turned to the door, added, “Come on, Freasie! Let’s get things set up in the lab. Be back in ten minutes, Dan.”
Ilium Weldrow was a chubby, pink-faced man, Parrol’s senior by ten years, whose feelings were easily bruised. As an assistant manager on a world like Nandy-Cline he was pretty much of a dead loss; but a distant relative on Giard’s board of directors had made it impossible to ship him quietly back to the Federation’s megacities where he should have been more in his element.
He was disturbed now by Nile Etland’s comment, and Parrol spent a few minutes explaining that the coastal ranchers—particularly the ones under contract to Giard—depended on the company’s facilities and expensively trained trouble-shooters to help them out in emergencies . . . and that if anything serious should happen to the local sea beef herds, Giard would drop a fortune in the medicina’ extracts obtained by its laboratory from the glands of the specific strain of sea beef grown on Nandy-CIine and obtainable nowhere else.
Weldrow seemed to get the last point; his expression shifted from petulance to concern.
“But, Dan, this problem . . . whatever it turns out to be . . . appears to affect only this area of the eastern coast! What is to keep us from getting the required materials from sea beef ranches on the other side of the continent?”
“Mainly,” Parrol said, “the fact that those ranches are under contract to outfits like Agenes. Can you see Agenes loosening up on its contract rights to help out Giard?”
Again the point seemed to sink in. Even Weldrow couldn’t help being aware that Agenes Laboratories was Giard’s most prominent competitor and one with a reputation for complete ruthlessness.
“Well,” he said defensively, “I haven’t had an easy time of it during the two and a half months you and Dr. Etland were in the Hub, Dan! My duties at the station have absorbed me to the extent that I simply haven’t been able to give much attention to extraneous matters.”
Parrol told him not to worry about it. On the way o
ut, he instructed the receptionist, “If there are any calls for me during the next few hours, I’ll be either at the Southeastern Ranchers Association or in Dr. Etland’s car. That’s the new job she had shipped out from Orado with us. She’s had its call number registered here.”
A few minutes later, he was easing Nile Etland’s PanElemental off the landing terrace and into the air, fingering the controls gingerly and not without misgivings, while the doctor took care of her makeup.
“Don’t be timid with the thing,” she advised Parrol, squinting into her compact. “There’s nothing easier to handle, once you get the hang of it.”
He grunted. “I don’t want to cut in its spacedrive by mistake!”
“That’s impossible, dope . . . unless you’re in space. Put up the windscreen, will you? Fourth button, second row, left side. Agenes? Well, I don’t know. If those beef things were dying instead of disappearing, I’d be wondering about Agenes, too, of course.”
Parrol found the windscreen button and shoved at it. The air whistling about them was abruptly quiet. Somewhat reassured about the PanElemental’s tractability—nobody but Nile would sink two years’ salary into a quadruple-threat racing car—Parrol stepped up their speed and swung to the right, towards the sea. A string of buildings rushed briefly towards them and dropped below, and the sun-bright blue rim of Nandy-Cline’s world-spanning ocean came into view.
“Would there be chemical means of inducing a herd of sea beef to move out of a specific body of water?” Parrol asked.
“Naturally. But who’s going to give that kind of treatment to a body of water a hundred and fifty miles long and up to eighty miles wide? Besides, they haven’t all moved out.” She loosened her hair, fluffed, shook and stroked it into place. “Better try another theory, Danny,” she add.
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 159