Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by James H. Schmitz

  Then Telzey turned up the room’s lights, switched on music and lay listening to it, while her heartbeat slowed and steadied. Her psi shield had gone tight again in reaction to the nightmare; and now she left it that way. The music should relax her, she thought.

  It didn’t. An hour later, she was still wide awake. Exasperated with herself—she almost never had problems of that sort—she got dressed and went down to the hotel terrace where late diners still sat, watching a scattering of couples dance languidly under the starblaze. Telzey sat down at a table and ordered a glass of hot milk. She’d heard hot milk was a good remedy for insomnia. She sipped it slowly, looking around at the groups of park tourists, aware that whatever tensions were in her seemed to be letting up here. By the time she finished the milk, she was getting drowsy, and returned to her room.

  But it remained an uncomfortable night. Telzey napped fitfully, woke up again. Something in her simply didn’t want to relax; and as soon as she began to fall asleep and the energy bubble enclosing her mind loosened normally, the something protested and brought her awake. It was puzzling and disturbing, and in some way it still seemed associated with Robane and with her purpose here. It would be a good thing to get her business with him over and finished as quickly as she could.

  By daybreak, she was up, feeling fatigued and irritated. But a cold shower opened her eyes; and after she’d had breakfast, she seemed reasonably fresh. Ten minutes later, she was on her way to Robane’s house.

  It was a warm, breezy prewinter day. Telzey’s aircar moved along at the thirty miles an hour to which it was limited by the sealed engine attachment installed when she’d brought it in through a park entry in the evening. Melna Park was famous for the resplendent color changes of the vegetation in its plains and forests as winter approached; the tourist traffic was consequently much heavier today than it had been a month ago. Aircars floated almost everywhere she looked, following the rolling contours of the ground, as her own Cloudsplitter was doing. She had slid the canopy down to let in the sun, and the wind intermittently whipped her hair about her cheeks.

  Under such circumstances, it seemed almost impossible to hang on to nighttime tensions. The relaxation which had eluded Telzey at the hotel gradually came to her now—she grew tempted to park the car and settle down for an hour’s nap in the sunshine before going on. But it would take her some hours to reach Robane’s house, and she wanted to get there early enough in the day to be finished with him before evening. The uneasiness she still felt about the matter wasn’t serious, but there was a half-conviction that the reactions she had experienced meant she might run into problems with Robane she hadn’t foreseen. The more time she would have available to study the situation before she got into contact with him, the better.

  Near noon, she came out into the series of mile-wide plateaus dropping from the point where the great Cil Chasm cut through the mountains to the southern forestland. Robane’s house stood at the edge of the forest. Telzey opened a compartment in the car and took out a pair of small, powerful binoculars. After a while, she had the house in the lenses. It looked precisely as it had a month ago—neat and trim; and something was moving in the garden which appeared to be a maintenance robot. So presumably the house was tenanted. One of the notions which had disturbed Telzey was that the park authorities might have become aware there was something wrong with Robane’s condition and had him taken away. It had never seemed likely; and it looked less likely now.

  She could have sent a thought to him from where she was. But she had most of the day still left, and the remnant of uneasiness made her wary. She had kept her psi screen closed throughout the trip across the park and was in no hurry to open it. Some of the aircars in sight above the plateau were those of park rangers; and while they were about she did not want to get too close to Robane’s house in any case. For a while, she kept the Cloudsplitter drifting aimlessly over the plateau—one more sight-seeing tourist among the forty or fifty in immediate view.

  Then she brought the car down behind a rise which hid Robane’s house from her, moved along back of the rise for about a mile and settled to the ground at the edge of a stand of sizable trees. She slipped out of the car, carrying the binoculars, walked up to the top of the rise and across it, threading her way among the trees until she came to a point from which she could see Robane’s house without being observed herself.

  This was the closest she had come to it today. She held it in the glasses for about ten minutes. The thing moving in the garden was a robotic tending device as she had thought; it was out of sight in some shrubbery for a while, then emerged and began moving back and forth across one of the lawns while a silvery mist arising from the shrubbery indicated a watering system had been turned on in there. Finally the robot trundled to the side of the house, paused before it. A wide door slid open in the wall, and the machine rolled inside.

  Telzey put the binoculars down. She had got a look through the door before it closed again. A large aircar stood behind it.

  So Robane appeared to be at home. If somebody else hadn’t had him removed from the house, she thought, he was almost bound to be. Her mental operation hadn’t left him enough initiative to leave the house again for purposes of his own.

  And now, she thought, a light—very light and alert—mental probe. Just enough to make quite sure that Robane was, in fact, as she had left him. that there had been no strange—and really impossible—developments in that once-wicked mind which might be connected with her still unexplained anxieties during the night.

  Leaning against the sun-warm trunk of a tall tree, just out of sight of Robane’s house, she closed her eyes and gradually lightened the bubble of psi energy about her mind, let it open out. She felt the sudden tug of some fear resistance, but the bubble stayed open. The thousandfold blended whispers of life currents on the plateau all about flowed into her awareness.

  And everything seemed very normal. Relieved, because she simply hadn’t known what she might have encountered at this moment, she flicked a thread of thought down to the forest, to Robane’s house, touched for a moment the half-man’s familiar mental patterns.

  Something like a shout flashed through her mind. Not words, nothing even partly verbalized; nevertheless, it was a clear, incisive command accompanied by the ring of triumphant, contemptuous laughter. The laughter, the contempt, were directed at her. The command—

  During the split instant of shock before she snapped the psi shield shut, tight, hard, she was aware of a blurred image rushing towards her. Then the image, the laughing voice-thought, her glimpse of Robane’s mind, were cut off together by the barrier.

  Shaking, breathing carefully, Telzey opened her eyes, glanced about. For long seconds, she remained motionless. The trees stirred lazily above her as a breeze rustled through the bushes. But nothing was changed or different, here in the world of reality. What had happened? Exactly what had she run into at Robane’s house?

  A sound reached her—the rolling thunder of explosion. It faded away.

  It seemed to have come from the forest to the south. Telzey listened a moment, licked her lips, moved forward cautiously until she could look out from behind the trees at Robane’s house.

  A roiling cloud of ugly yellow smoke still partly concealed the area where the house had stood. But it was already clear that the house and the garden about it had been savagely obliterated.

  And that, Telzey thought numbly, was in part her answer.

  By the time she got back to the Cloudsplitter and lifted it off the ground, she could see a number of tourist aircars gliding cautiously towards the site of the explosion. A moment later, an alerted ranger car screamed down out of the sky, passed over her and vanished. Telzey remained behind the rise of ground along which she had approached for a closer look at the house, moving off to the west. She was almost certain that whoever had blown up Robane in his house was not physically in the area—very likely not even in Melna Park. But there was no reason to expose herself any more than she�
�d already done. As it was, this might be a very bad situation—

  Robane had been used as bait—bait to trap a psi. The fact that he had been destroyed then meant that whoever had set up the trap believed the psi it had been intended for was now caught. In whatever she did next, she would have to be extremely careful.

  To start with, who were they? There seemed to be at least two telepaths involved. Telzey brought out the thought-impression she had recorded before shutting her shield, examined it closely.

  It was brief but vivid—very vivid. And studying it now, she became aware of a number of details she had not consciously noted in the moment of recording it. This psi was human, must be; and yet the thought-form had almost the sense of an alien species about it. She had never felt anything like that in the thoughts of other human psis she had tapped. It had been hurled at her with arrogance, hatred and contempt, as if the psi himself felt he was different from and superior to human beings. Perhaps it was . . . his thought held an impression of force and power which had been as startling to her in that unprotected instant as the sudden, angry roar of an animal nearby.

  Blended into that had been a communication—not directed at her and not too clear to her. It was, she thought, the sort of mental shortcode that seemed to develop among associated telepaths; a flick of psi which might carry a very involved meaning. She could see the basic meaning here: Success! The quarry was hooked! So he had one or more companions with whom he felt on equal footing. His own kind, whatever that was.

  Then the third part, the least clear part of that thought-structure. It had death in it. Her death. It was a command; and she was almost certain it had been directed at the indistinct shape she’d seemed to glimpse in the same instant, rushing towards her. Something that might have been a sizable animal.

  Her death . . . how? Telzey swallowed uncomfortably. What had been their connection with Robane? Possibly the one she had come here to investigate. Minds like that should have no objection to delivering one human being to another, to be hunted down and killed for sport. But psis could have other uses for Robane. The halfman’s inventive genius might have been at the disposal of a watching mind which set him profitable problems and left him to work them out, not knowing why he did it, in the solitude of Melna Park.

  Whatever their interest in Robane, they had discovered what had been done to the half-man and knew that only another psi could have done it in that exact manner. She had sealed most of Robane’s memories away but left them intact; and they could guess from that that she intended to be back to search through them for more information. They could have destroyed Robane immediately as being of no further use to them, but they’d wanted the unidentified meddler off their track. Perhaps they were concerned about what she might already know. To psis with something to hide, other psis must present a constant threat of exposure.

  So they had set up the trap. Robane’s mind was the bait. The telepath who touched it again would spring the trap on himself. And, some twenty minutes ago, cautious and light as her touch had been, she had sprung it.

  Immediately afterwards, she had locked the psi bubble around her. Perhaps that had nullified whatever had been planned for her at Robane’s house. Perhaps, she thought. She had to accept the probability that she still was in the trap—and she didn’t yet know what it was.

  The Cloudsplitter went gliding at its measured thirty miles an hour across the upper plateaus of the valley, a hundred feet from the ground. The southern forest where Robane’s house had stood had sunk out of sight behind her. The flanks of the mountains curved away ahead. Telzey turned the car farther in towards them. Another aircar slipped past at the edge of her vision, three hundred yards away. She had a momentary impulse to swing around again and follow it; to remain near other people. But she kept the Cloudsplitter on its course. The company of others meant no safety for her, and mingling with them might simply distract her attention dangerously.

  She returned the car to its automatic controls, sat gazing at the mountains through the windshield. That other impression at the instant of touching Robane’s mind—the image, the vague shape like an animal’s rushing towards her. Perhaps a hallucination, her own mind’s symbol of some death energy directed at her by the waiting psi. At any rate, she had seen it before, though not quite in the same way.

  She went over the last section of her dream two nights ago, of being in Robane’s house . . . the shadows, several watching in the distance—one moving towards her, until a fright reaction brought her awake, shield closed. During the dream, a tendril of psi might have drifted from her to Robane’s mind, too tenuous to spring the trap but enough to begin setting its mechanism in motion. Something in her had recognized that, drawn quickly back.

  Her anxieties at the hotel again began after she had been thinking of Robane and her experience with him. Here in Melna Park, the background to that experience, such thoughts could have produced enough contact between them to disturb the trap’s mechanism once more. There had been a feeling then that something prowled around in the star-pale night outside, searching for her but unable to find her behind the psi barrier.

  Something? Psi energy could kill, quickly, impersonally, directly; it could be used as a weapon by a mind which understood its use for that purpose and was equipped to handle the force it turned on another. But if that was the trap, it seemed to her she would have interpreted it differently—not as a moving shadow, a half-glimpsed animal shape, an image which drifted through the night looking for her.

  What else could it be? Telzey shook her head. She didn’t know. She could find out; eventually she would have to find out. But not yet.

  She glanced at the watch in her wrist-talker. Give them another hour, she decided. They didn’t know her physical identity; but it could do no harm to place more physical distance between herself and the area of Robane’s house before she tried anything else. They had caught at least momentary glimpses of her mind—bad enough, but it couldn’t be helped now. In that respect, she must have seemed to vanish for them as she closed her shield. It was even possible they believed she had been destroyed by whatever trick they had prepared; and if that was true, she already was reasonably safe again—if she did nothing to bring herself to their attention.

  They might very well still be watching closely for her at the moment. But an hour from now, they should be less alert. There was a trick of her own she could use then to determine what the situation was, without much risk of revealing herself.

  An hour later, the effects of having passed a nearly sleepless night were more noticeable. Not enough to bother her seriously, but there were moments of reduced alertness and physical lassitude of which she suddenly grew aware. Under different circumstances, she could have ignored that; now, she felt some concern. The nearest park ranger car would have hustled a stimulant over to her if she’d used the car’s communicator to ask for it, but she would be in for a period of questioning solicitude then, at the very least. She’d simply have to remain wakeful long enough to make sure she was free of the situation she’d got into through Robane.

  The test she had prepared was a simple one. The psi bubble would flash open, instantly be shut again. During that moment, her perceptions, extended to the utmost, would be set to receive two impressions: thought-patterns of the telepath who had laid a trap for her, and the vaguely seen animal shape involved with the trap. If either was still in her mental vicinity, still a menace, some trace of it would be obtained, however faintly. If nothing was there, she could at last, Telzey thought, begin to relax. Unless they were as intently prepared as she was to detect some sign from her, that momentary flicker of psi should pass unobserved.

  The bubble flicked open, flicked shut, as her sensitized perceptions made their recording. Telzey sat still for a moment then, feeling the drumming of fear.

  Slowly, like an afterimage, she let the recorded picture grow up again in her awareness.

  A gray beast shape. What kind of beast it represented she didn’t know. Something
like a great, uncouth baboon—a big heavy head, strong body supported on four hand-paws.

  As the bubble opened, she’d had the feeling of seeing it near her, three-dimensional, every detail of its structure clearly etched, though it stood in a vague nothingness. The small red eyes stared in her direction. And short as the moment of exposure was, she was certain she’d seen it start in recognition, begin moving towards her, before it vanished behind the barrier again.

  What was it? A hallucination—a projection insinuated into her mind by the other psi in the instant of contact between them, something she was supposed to develop to her own destruction now?

  She didn’t think so. It seemed much too real, too alertly, menacingly, alive. In some way she’d seen what was there—the vague animal image she’d glimpsed before, come close and no longer vague. In physical space, it might be hundreds of miles away; or perhaps it was nowhere in that sense at present. In the other reality they shared, it hadn’t lost her. While she was concealed behind the psi barrier, it had waited; and at each brief new impression it received of her mind, it had moved “closer” again. What would happen when, in its manner, it reached her, touched her?

  She didn’t know the answer to that. She let the image fade, began searching for traces of the psi-mind associated with it. After long seconds, she knew nothing had been recorded in her perceptions there. The psi was simply gone. He had drawn her to his trap, set the creature on her, then apparently turned away to other matters—as if confident that nothing more needed to be done at present.

  The thought was briefly more chilling than the waiting beast image. But if it was only an animal she had to deal with, Telzey told herself, escape might be an easier matter than it would have been if minds like the one she had encountered had remained on her trail.

  Nevertheless, the animal seemed bad enough. She had never heard of a creature which tracked down prey by sensing mental emanations, as this one evidently did. It must be native to a world not generally known in the Hub; and she could guess it had been imported here with the primary purpose of turning it into a hunter of human psis—psis who could be a problem to its masters. It knew about psi barriers. Either it had dealt with those in its natural state, too, or it had been trained to handle them. At any rate, it seemed quite aware that it need only wait, with a carnivore’s alert patience, until the quarry’s shield relaxed. As her bubble would relax eventually. She couldn’t stay awake forever; and asleep she didn’t have enough control of the barrier to keep so steady and relentless a watcher from detecting occasional traces of her mental activity.