Ti gave Telzey an engaging smile. He was a large, strongly muscled man, middle-aged, with a ruddy complexion and grizzled black hair. There was an air of controlled energy about him; and boundless energy he must have, to accomplish as much as he did. There was also an odd gentleness in gesture and voice. It was very easy to like Ti.
And he had a mind that couldn’t be touched by a telepath. Telzey had known that after the first few minutes—probe immune. Too bad! She’d sooner have drawn the information she wanted from him without giving him any inkling of what she was after.
“Do you use real people as models for them?” Telzey asked. “I mean when they’re being designed?”
“Physically?”
“Yes.”
Ti shook his head. “Not any one person. Many. They’re ideal types.” Telzey hesitated, said, “I had an odd experience a while ago. I saw a woman who looked so exactly like a Martri puppet I’d seen in a play, I almost convinced myself it was the puppet who’d somehow walked off the stage and got lost in the world outside. I suppose that would be impossible?”
Ti laughed. “Oh, quite!”
“What makes it impossible?”
“Their limitations. A puppet can be programmed to perform satisfactorily in somewhere between twenty and thirty-five plays. One of ours, which is currently in commercial use, can handle forty-two roles of average complexity. I believe that’s the record.
“At best, that’s a very limited number of specific situations as compared with the endlessly shifting variety of situations in the real world. If a puppet were turned loose there, the input stream would very quickly overwhelm its response capacity, and it would simply stop operating.”
“Theoretically,” said Telzey, “couldn’t the response capacity be pushed up to the point where a puppet could act like a person?”
“I can’t say it’s theoretically impossible,” Ti said, “but it would require a new technology.” He smiled. “And since there are quite enough real people around, there wouldn’t be much point to it, would there?”
She shook her head. “Perhaps not.”
“We’re constantly experimenting, of course.” Ti stood up. “There are a number of advanced models in various stages of development in another part of the building. They aren’t usually shown to visitors, but if you’d like to see them, I’ll make an exception.”
“I’d very much like to!” Telzey said.
She decided she wasn’t really convinced. New technologies were being developed regularly in other fields—why not in that of Martri puppetry? In any case, she might be able to settle the basic question now. She could try tapping the mind of one, or the other, of the advanced models he’d be showing her, and see how what she found compared with the patterns she’d traced in the mystery woman.
That plan was promptly discarded again. Ti had opened the door to a large office, and a bigboned young man sitting there at a desk looked up at her as they came in.
He was a telepath.
The chance meeting of two telepathic psis normally followed a standard etiquette. If neither was interested in developing the encounter, they gave no sign of knowing the other was a psi. If one was interested, he produced a mental identification. If the other failed to respond, the matter was dropped.
Neither Telzey nor the young man identified themselves. Ti, however, introduced them. “This is Linden, my secretary and assistant,” he said; and to Linden, “This is Telzey Amberdon, who’s interested in our puppets. I’m letting her see what we have in the vaults at present.”
Linden, who had come to his feet, bowed and said, “You’d like me to show Miss Amberdon around?”
“No, I’ll do that,” said Ti. “I’m telling you so you’ll know where I am.”
That killed the notion of probing one of the puppets in the vaults. Now they’d met, it was too likely that Linden would become aware of any telepathic activity in the vicinity. Until she knew more, she didn’t want to give any hint of her real interest in the puppets. There were other approaches she could use.
The half hour she spent in the vaults with Ti was otherwise informative. “This one,” he said, “is part of an experiment designed to increase our production speed. Three weeks is still regarded as a quite respectable time in which to turn out a finished puppet. We’ve been able to do a good deal better than that for some while. With these models, starting from scratch and using new hypergrowth processes, we can produce a puppet programmed for fifteen plays in twenty-four hours.” He beamed down at Telzey. “Of course, it’s probably still faulty—it hasn’t been fully tested yet. But we’re on the way! Speed’s sometimes important. Key puppets get damaged, or destroyed, and most of some Martri unit’s schedule may be held up until a replacement can be provided.”
That night at her home in Orado City, Telzey had an uninvited visitor. She was half asleep when she sensed a cautious mental probe. It brought her instantly and completely awake, but she gave no immediate indication of having noticed anything. It mightn’t be a deliberate intrusion.
However, it appeared then that it was quite deliberate. The other psi remained cautious. But the probing continued, a not too expert testing of the density of her screens, a search for a weakness in their patterns through which the mind behind them might be scanned or invaded.
Telzey decided presently she’d waited long enough. She loosened her screens abruptly, sent a psi bolt flashing back along the line of probe. It smacked into another screen. The probe vanished. Somebody somewhere probably had been knocked cold for an hour.
Telzey lay awake a while, reflecting. She’d had a momentary impression of the personality of the prowler. Linden? It might have been. If so, what had he been after?
No immediate answer to that.
II
There was a permanent Martri stage in Orado City, and Telzey had intended taking in a show there next day—a Martridrama looked like the best opportunity now to get in some discreet study on puppet minds. Her experience with the psi prowler made her decide on a shift in plans. If it had been Wakote Ti’s secretary who’d tried to probe her, then it could be that Ti had some reason to be interested in a telepath who was interested in Martri puppets, and her activities might be coming under observation for a while. Hence she should make anything she did in connection with the puppets as difficult to observe as she could—which included keeping away from the Orado City stage.
She made some ComWeb inquiries, arrived presently by pop transport shuttle in a town across the continent, where a Martridrama was in progress. She’d changed shuttles several times on the way. There’d been nothing to indicate she was being followed.
She bought a ticket at the stage, started up a hall toward the auditorium entry—
She was lying on her back on a couch, in a large room filled with warm sunshine. There was no one else in the room.
Shock held her immobilized for a moment.
It wasn’t only that she didn’t know where she was, or how she’d got there. Something about her seemed different, changed, profoundly wrong.
Realization came abruptly—every trace of psi sense was gone. She tried to reach out mentally into her surroundings, and it was like opening her eyes and still seeing nothing. Panic began to surge up in her then. She lay quiet, holding it off, until her breathing steadied again. Then she sat up on the couch, took inventory of what she could see here. The upper two-thirds of one side of the room was a single great window open on the world outside. Tree crowns were visible beyond it. Behind the trees, a mountain peak reached toward a blue sky. The room was simply furnished with a long table of polished dark wood, some chairs, the low couch on which she sat. The floor was carpeted. Two closed doors were in the wall across from the window.
Her clothes—white shirt, white shorts, white stockings and moccasins—weren’t the ones she’d been wearing.
None of that told her much, but meanwhile the threat of panic had withdrawn. She swung around, slid her legs over the edge of the couch. As she stood up,
one of the doors opened, and Telzey watched herself walk into the room.
It jolted her again, but less severely. Take another girl of a size and bone structure close enough to her own, and a facsimile skin, eye tints, a few other touches, could produce an apparent duplicate. There’d be differences, but too minor to be noticeable. She didn’t detect any immediately. The girl was dressed exactly as she was, wore her hair as she wore hers.
“Hello,” Telzey said, as evenly as she could. “What’s this game about?”
Her double came up, watching her soberly, stopped a few feet away. “What’s the last thing you remember before you woke up here?” she asked.
Her voice, too? Quite close to it, at any rate. Telzey said guardedly, “Something like a flash of white light inside my head.”
The girl nodded. “In Sombedaln.”
“In Sombedaln. I was in a hall, going toward a door.”
“You were about thirty feet from that door,” said her double. “And behind it was the Martri auditorium . . . Those are the last things I remember, too. What about psi? Has it been wiped out?”
Telzey studied her a moment. “Who are you?” she asked.
The double shrugged. “I don’t know. I feel I’m Telzey Amberdon. But if I weren’t, I might still feel that.”
“If you’re Telzey, who am I?” Telzey said.
“Let’s sit down,” the double said. “I’ve been awake half an hour, and I’ve been told a few things. They hit me pretty hard. They’ll probably hit you pretty hard.”
They sat down on the edge of the couch. The double went on. “There’s no way we could prove right now that I’m the real Telzey. But there might be a way we can prove that you are, and I’m not.”
“How?”
“Psi,” said the double. “Telzey used it. I can’t use it now. I can’t touch it. Nothing happens. If you—”
“I can’t either,” Telzey said.
The double drew a sighing breath.
“Then we don’t know,” she said. “What I’ve been told is that one of us is Telzey and the other is a Martri copy who thinks she’s Telzey. A puppet called Gaziel. It was grown during the last two days like other puppets are grown, but it was engineered to turn into an exact duplicate of Telzey as she is now. It has her memories. It has her personality. They were programmed into it. So it feels it’s Telzey.”
Telzey said, after some seconds, “Ti?”
“Yes There’s probably no one else around who could have done it.”
“No, I guess not. Why did he do it?”
“He said he’d tell us that at lunch. He was still talking to me when he saw in a screen that you’d come awake, and sent me down here to tell you what had happened.”
“So he’s been watching?” Telzey said.
The double nodded. “He wanted to observe your reactions.”
“As to which of you is Telzey,” said Ti, “and which is Gaziel, that’s something I don’t intend to let you know for a while!” He smiled engagingly across the lunch table at them. “Theoretically, of course, it would be quite possible that you’re both puppets and that the original Telzey is somebody else. However, we want to have some temporary way of identifying you two as individuals.”
He pulled a ring from his finger, put both hands under the table level, brought them to view again as fists. “You,” he said to Telzey, “will guess which hand is holding the ring. If you guess correctly, you’ll be referred to as Telzey for the time being, and you,” he added to the double, “as Gaziel. Agreed?”
They nodded. “Left,” Telzey said.
“Left it is!” said Ti, beaming at her, as he opened his hand and revealed the ring. He put it back on his finger, inquired of Linden, who made a fourth at the table, “Do you think she might have cheated by using psi?”
Linden glowered, said nothing.
Ti laughed. “Linden isn’t fond of Telzey at present,” he remarked. “Did you know you knocked him out for almost two hours when he tried to investigate your mind?”
“I thought that might have happened,” said Gaziel.
“He’d like to make you pay for it,” said Ti. “So watch yourselves, little dears, or I may tell him to go ahead. Now as to your future—Telzey’s absence hasn’t been discovered yet. When it is, a well-laid trail will lead off Orado somewhere else, and it will seem she’s disappeared there under circumstances suggesting she’s no longer alive. I intend, you see, to keep her indefinitely.”
“Why?” Telzey asked.
“She noticed something,” said Ti. “It wouldn’t have seemed too important if Linden hadn’t found out she was a telepath.”
“Then that was your puppet I saw?” Gaziel said. She glanced over at Telzey, added, “That one of us—Telzey—saw.”
“That we saw,” Telzey said. “That will be simplest for now.”
Ti smiled. “You live up to my expectations! . . . Yes, it was my puppet. We needn’t go further into that matter at present. As a telepath and with her curiosities aroused, Telzey might have become a serious problem, and I decided at once to collect her rather than follow the simpler route of having her eliminated. I had her background checked out, which confirmed the favorable opinions I’d formed during our discussion. She should make a most satisfactory subject. Within the past hour, she’s revealed another very valuable quality.”
“What’s that?” Telzey said.
“Stability,” Ti told her. “For some time, I’ve been interested in psis in my work, and with Linden’s help I’ve been able to secure several of them before this.” He shook his head. “They were generally poor material. Some couldn’t even sustain the effect of realizing I had created an exact duplicate of them. They collapsed into uselessness. So, of course, did the duplicates. But look at you two! You adjusted immediately to the situation, have eaten with every indication of a good appetite, and are no doubt already preparing schemes to get away from old Ti.”
Telzey said, “Just what is the situation? What are you planning to do with us?”
Ti smiled at her. “That will develop presently. There’s no hurry about it.”
“Another question,” said Gaziel. “What difference does it make that Telzey’s a psi when you’ve knocked out her psi ability?”
“Oh, that’s not an irreversible condition,” Ti informed her. “The ability will return. It’s necessary to keep it repressed until I’ve learned how to harness it, so to speak.”
“It will show up in the duplicate, too, not just in the original?” Gaziel asked.
Ti gave her an approving look. “Precisely one of the points I wish to establish! My puppets go out on various errands for me. Consider how valuable puppet agents with Telzey’s psi talent could be—a rather formidable talent, as Linden here can attest!”
He pushed himself back from the table. “I’ve enjoyed your questions, but I have work to take care of now. For the moment, this must be enough. Stroll about and look over your new surroundings. You’re on my private island. Two-thirds of it is an almost untouched wilderness. The remaining third is a cultivated estate, walled off from the forest beyond. You’re restricted to the estate. If you tried to escape into the forest, you’d be recaptured. There are penalties for disobedience, but more importantly, the forest is the habitat of puppet extravaganzas—experimental fancies you wouldn’t care to encounter! You’re free to go where you like on the estate. The places I wouldn’t wish you to investigate at present are outside your reach.”
“They have some way of knowing which of us is which, of course,” Gaziel remarked from behind Telzey. They were threading their way through tall flowering shrubbery on the estate grounds.
“It would be a waste of time trying to find out what it is, though,” Telzey said.
Gaziel agreed. The Martri duplicate might be marked in a number of ways detectable by instruments but not by human senses. “Would it disturb you very much if it turned out you weren’t the original?” she said.
Telzey glanced back at her. “I’m sur
e it would,” she said soberly. “You?”
Gaziel nodded. “I haven’t thought about it too much, but it seems there’s always been the feeling that I’m part of something that’s been there a long, long time. It wouldn’t be at all good to find out now that it was a false feeling—that I was only myself, with nothing behind me.”
“And somebody who wasn’t even there in any form a short while ago,” Telzey added. “It couldn’t help being disturbing! But that’s what one of us is going to find out eventually. And, as Ti mentioned, we may both be duplicates. You know, our minds do seem to work identically—almost.”
“Almost,” said Gaziel. “They must have started becoming different minds as soon as we woke up. But it should be a while before the differences become too significant.”
“That’s something to remember,” Telzey said.
They emerged from the flower thicket, saw the mountain again in the distance, looming above the trees. It rose at the far tip of the island, in the forest area. The cultivated estate seemed to cover a great deal of ground. When they’d started out from a side door of the round gleaming-white building which stood approximately at its center, they couldn’t see to the ends of it anywhere because groups of trees blocked the view in all directions. But they could see the mountain and had started off toward it.
If they kept on toward it, they would reach the wall which bordered the estate—
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 218