Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by James H. Schmitz

  So they weren’t really sure about her.

  She’d split her attention again. Keth knew about that now, knew what to do to alert her if she didn’t seem to be behaving in a perfectly normal manner. With suspicious observers on hand, that had seemed an advisable precaution. Keth and the ladies carried most of the conversation—the ladies perhaps putting up unwitting verbal screens for their escorts, as Keth was maintaining one to give Telzey as much freedom for her other activities as possible. Now and then she was aware that the COS chiefs studied her obliquely, somewhat as one might watch a trapped, but not entirely predictable, animal. The psi recorders remained inactive. She made progress along expanding lines with Osselin, sampled a series of dishes with evident appreciation, joined occasionally in the talk—realized dinner was over.

  “Of course, I want to see Sorem!” she heard herself say. “But what in the world is a guilt-smeller?”

  Nelt’s lovely companion made fluttering motions with tapered white hands. “I’ll keep my eyes closed until he’s gone again!” she said apprehensively. “I looked at him once with his helmet off! I had nightmares for a month.”

  The others laughed. Osselin reached around for the yoli, perched at the moment on the back of his chair. He placed it on his lap. “I’ll keep my pet’s eyes closed, too, while he’s in the room,” he said, smiling at Telzey. “It isn’t easily frightened, but for some reason it’s in deathly fear of Sorem. Guilt-smeller . . . well, Sorem supposedly has the ability to pick anyone with a strong feeling of guilty apprehension out of a group.” He shrugged.

  “He’s unnatural,” Nelt’s lady told Telzey earnestly. “I don’t care what they say—Sorem never was human! He couldn’t have been.”

  “I might let him know your opinion of him,” Barrand rumbled.

  The girl paled in genuine fright. “Don’t! I don’t want him to notice me at all.”

  Barrand grinned. “You’re in no danger—unless, of course, you have something to hide.”

  “Everybody has something to hide!” she protested. “I—” She broke off.

  Faces turned to Telzey’s right. Sorem, summoned unnoticed by Barrand, had come into the room. She looked around.

  Sorem wore black uniform trousers and boots; a gun was fastened to his belt. The upper torso was that of a powerful man, narrow at the waist, wide in the shoulders, with massively muscled arms and chest. It was naked, hairless, a lusterless solid black, looking like sculptured rock. The head was completely enclosed by a large snouted helmet without visible eye slits.

  This figure came walking toward the table, helmet already turning slowly in Telzey’s direction. In Osselin’s mind, she had looked at the head inside the helmet. Black and hairless like the body, the head of an animal, of a huge dog, yellow-eyed and savage. Barrand’s bodyguard—a man who’d liked the idea of becoming a shape of fear enough to undergo considerable risks in having himself transformed into one. The great animal jaws were quite functional. Sorem was a triumph of the restructuring artists’ skills.

  The recorders had indicated no stir of psi throughout dinner. But they thought that perhaps she simply was being cautious now. Sorem was to frighten her, throw her off guard, jolt her into some revealing psi response. So she would show fear—which mightn’t be too difficult. Sorem’s mind was equipped with a shield like his employer’s, but a brutish mirth and cruelty washed through it as he made it plain his attention was on her. Telzey glanced quickly, nervously, around the table, looked back at him. Keth’s face was intent; he didn’t know what would happen, whether it wasn’t their executioner who had been called into the room. Sorem came up, steps slowing, a stalking beast. Telzey stopped breathing, went motionless, staring up at him. Abruptly, the helmet was swept away; the dog head appeared, snarling jaws half open. The eyes glared into Telzey’s.

  The yoli squealed desperately, struggling under Osselin’s hand.

  There were violent surges of psi energy then. The yoli wasn’t fully aware of what was happening, but a nightmare shape had loomed up in its dreams, and it wanted to get away. Telzey couldn’t afford to let it wake up now, and didn’t. The three psi recorders remained active for perhaps forty-five seconds. Then she’d wiped the fright impressions from the yoli’s mind, made it forget why it had been frightened . . .

  “It must have recognized your creature by his scent,” Osselin was saying. “I had its eyes covered.”

  He stroked the yoli’s furry head. It still whimpered faintly but was becoming reabsorbed by its fantasies. Sorem had turned away, was striding out of the room. Telzey watched him go, aware of Barrand’s and Nelt’s speculating eyes on her.

  “If I’d been able to breathe,” she gasped suddenly, “I’d have made more noise than that little animal!”

  The beautiful COS dolls tried to smile at her.

  “Their recorders couldn’t distinguish whether those psi jolts came from the yoli or from me,” Telzey said. “And with the racket the yoli was making, it really was more likely it was doing it.”

  “So the final decision still is being postponed?” Keth said.

  “Only on how to go about it, of course. The other two want to know whether I’m a psi or not, what we’ve learned, whether we were after the Big Deal in the first place. Osselin thinks that’s no longer so important. He wants to get rid of us in a way that’s safe, and take his chances on everything else. He’s giving Barrand and Nelt a few more hours to come up with a good enough reason against his plan—but that’s the way it’s to be.”

  Keth shook his head. “He thinks that?”

  “Yes, he thinks that.”

  “And at the same time he’s to make sure that it’s not the way it’s to be? Isn’t he aware of the contradiction?

  “He’s controlled,” Telzey said. “He’s aware of what I let him be aware. It just doesn’t occur to him that there is a contradiction. I really don’t know how else to explain that.”

  “Perhaps I get the idea,” Keth said.

  They were in Osselin’s house. Barrand and Nelt and their retinue had left shortly after the incident with Sorem and the yoli, having plans for the evening. Osselin had asked Keth and Telzey to stay on for a while.

  The difference of opinion among the COS chiefs was based on the fact that Osselin was less willing to risk a subsequent investigation than his colleagues. The forcing lie detector probes Barrand and Nelt wanted would involve traceable drugs or telltale physical damage if the subjects turned out to be as intractable as he suspected these subjects might be. A gentle anesthesia quiz wasn’t likely to accomplish much here. It would be necessary to get rid of the bodies afterwards. And the abrupt disappearance of Keth Deboll and a companion on Fermilaur would lead to rather stringent investigations even as a stage accident. Osselin intended to have them killed in a manner which could leave no doubt about the accidental manner of their death. A tragic disaster.

  “What kind of disaster?” Keth asked.

  “He’s got engineers working on that, and it’s probably already set up,” Telzey said. “We’ll be seen walking in good health into the ground level of our tower. Depending on the time we get there, there’ll be fifty to a hundred other people around. There’s an eruption of gas—equipment failure. A moment later, we’re all dead together. Automatic safeguards confine the gas to that level until it can be handled, so nobody else gets hurt.”

  Keth grunted. “Considerate of him.”

  Objectively considered, it was a sound plan. The tourist tower was full of important people; various top-level cliques congregated there. There’d be then a substantial sprinkling of important victims on the ground level. Even if sabotage were suspected, nothing would suggest that Keth and Telzey had been its specific targets.

  On a subterranean level of Osselin’s house was a vault area, and he was in it now. They hadn’t accompanied him because anyone else’s body pattern would bring the vault defenses into violent action. Telzey remained in mental contact; she hadn’t quite finished her work on Osselin, though there w
asn’t much left to do. He was sewed up as tightly as she’d ever sewed anyone up. But he remained a tough-minded individual, and she wanted to take no chances whatever tonight. Things seemed under control and moving smoothly. But she wouldn’t breathe easily again until Fermilaur vanished in space behind them.

  In one respect, things had gone better than they’d had any reason to expect. “Will you settle for a complete file on the Big Deal?” she’d asked Keth. “The whole inside information gathering program? The file goes back almost three years, which was when it started. Names, dates, the information they got, what they did with it—”

  Osselin kept duplicate copies of the file in the vault. She’d told him to bring up one copy for Keth and forget he’d had that copy then. After that, it would be a question of getting off Fermilaur—not too easy even with Osselin’s cooperation. He couldn’t simply escort them to a spaceport and see that they were let through. They were under COS surveillance, would be trailed again when they left the house. COS police waited at the ports. If anything began to look at all suspicious, Barrand and Nelt would hear about it at once, and act at once.

  Osselin obviously was the one best qualified to find a way out of the problem, and Telzey had instructed him to work on it. He came back up from the vault presently, laid two small objects on a table, said matter-of-factly, “I have some calls to make on the other matter,” and left the room again.

  Keth shook his head. “He seems so normal!”

  “Of course, he seems normal,” Telzey said. “He feels normal. We don’t want anybody to start wondering about him.”

  “And this is the COS file?” Keth had moved over to the table.

  “That’s it.”

  The objects were a pair of halfinch microtape cubes. Keth smiled lovingly at them, took out a card case, opened it, ran his thumb nail along a section of its inner surface. The material parted. “Shrink section,” he remarked. He dropped the cubes inside, sealed the slit with the ball of his thumb. The case was flat again and he returned it to an inner pocket.

  Telzey brushed her hair back from her face. The room wasn’t excessively warm, but she was sweating. Unresolved tensions—

  She swore mentally at herself. It was no time to get nervous! “How small are they now?” she asked.

  “Dust motes. I get searched occasionally. You drop the whole thing into an enlarger before you open it again, or you’re likely to lose whatever you’ve shrunk.” He glanced at his watch. “How far has he got on that other matter?”

  “I haven’t been giving much attention to it. I’m making sure I have him completely tied up—I’ll probably have to break contact with him again before we’re off Fermilaur.”

  “You still can’t control him at a distance?”

  “Oh, I might. But I wouldn’t want to depend on that. He seems to have the details pretty well worked out. He’ll tell us when he gets back.”

  “The pattern will be,” said Osselin, “that you’ve decided to go out on the resorts. What you do immediately after you leave the house doesn’t matter. Live it up, mildly, here and there, but work around toward Hallain Palace, and drop in there an hour and a half from now. If you don’t know the place, you’ll find its coordinates on your car controls.”

  “I can locate Hallain Palace,” Keth said. “I left money enough there five years ago.”

  “Tonight you’re not gambling,” Osselin told him. “Go to the Tourist Shop, thirteenth level, where two lamps have been purchased against Miss Amberdon’s GC account.”

  “Lamps?” repeated Keth.

  “They’re simply articles of the required size. You’ll go to the store’s shipping level with them to make sure they’re properly packaged, for transportation to Orado. They’re very valuable. You’ll find someone waiting for you with two shipping boxes. You’ll be helped into the boxes, which will then be closed, flown directly to Port Ligrit, passed through a freight gate under my seal, and put on board an Orado packet shortly before takeoff. In space, somebody will let you out of the boxes and give you your tickets.” Osselin looked at Telzey. “Miss Orm and her mother are on their way to another port, accompanied by two Hute specialists who will complete Miss Orm’s modeling reversion at her home. They’ll arrive at the Orado City Terminal shortly after you do. You can contact them there.”

  “How far can you trust him?” Keth asked, as Osselin’s house moved out of sight behind their car.

  “Completely now,” Telzey said. “Don’t worry about that part! The way we’re still likely to run into trouble is to do something at the last moment that looks suspicious to our snoops.”

  “We’ll avoid doing it then,” said Keth.

  Telzey withdrew from contact with Osselin. He considered the arrangements to be foolproof, providing they didn’t deviate from the timetable, so they probably were foolproof. Tracer surveillance didn’t extend into enclosed complexes like Hallain Palace, where entrances could be watched to pick them up again as they emerged. By the time anyone began to look through the Palace’s sections for them, they’d have landed on Orado. There’d be nothing to indicate then what had happened. Osselin himself would have forgotten.

  They stopped briefly at a few tourist spots, circling in toward Hallain Palace, then went on to the Palace and reached it at the scheduled time. They strolled through one of the casinos, turned toward the Tourist Shop section. At the comer of a passage, three men in the uniform of the Fermilaur police stepped out in front of them.

  There was a hissing sound. Telzey blacked out.

  VI

  Barrand said, “Oh, you’ll talk, of course. You’ll tell us everything we want to know. We can continue the interrogation for hours. You may lose your minds if you resist too stubbornly, and you may be physically destroyed, but we’ll have the truth from both of you before it gets that far.”

  It wasn’t the escape plan that had gone wrong. Barrand and Nelt didn’t know Osselin was under Telzey’s control, or that she and Keth would have been off Fermilaur in less than an hour if they hadn’t been picked up. They’d simply decided to override Osselin and handle the situation their own way, without letting him know until it was too late to do anything about it. Presumably they counted on getting the support of the COS associates when they showed that the move had produced vital information.

  Their approach wasn’t a good one. Telzey had been fastened to a frame used in restructuring surgery, while Keth was fastened to a chair across the room. Frame and chair were attachments of a squat lie-detecting device which stood against one wall. A disinterested-looking COS surgeon and an angular female assistant sat at an instrument table beside Telzey. The surgeon had a round swelling in the center of his forehead, like the lump left by a blow. Apparently neither he nor the assistant cared to have the miracles of cosmetology applied to themselves.

  They were the only two people in the room who weren’t much concerned about what was going on. Telzey couldn’t move her head very far and had caught only one glimpse of Nelt after she and Keth were awakened. But Barrand remained within her range of vision, and his heavy features were sheened occasionally with a film of sweat. It was understandable. Barrand had to get results to justify his maneuver against Osselin. He might have regarded this as an opportunity to break down Osselin’s prestige and following in the association. And so far Barrand could be certain of only one thing. He was, in fact, dealing with a psi.

  He looked as if he almost wished he hadn’t made the discovery.

  From Telzey’s point of view, it couldn’t be avoided. Regaining contact with Osselin might be the only possible way to get them out of the situation, and she didn’t know whether she could do it in time. The subtle approach was out now. While Keth, doing his part again, argued angrily and futilely with Barrand and Nelt, she’d been driving out a full-sweep search probe, sensitized to Osselin’s mind patterns. Barrand’s expression when he stared at her told her his psi recorder was registering the probe. So, of course, was Nelt’s, whose impatiently muttering voice Telzey cou
ld hear in the section of the room behind her. He was keeping it low, but it was fairly obvious that he was hurrying along preliminary briefing instructions to the lie detector as much as he could without confusing the device, or giving it insufficient information to work with. They were anxious to have it get started on her.

  She hadn’t picked up a trace of Osselin yet. But almost as soon as she began reaching out for him, she’d run into a storm of distress signals from another familiar mind.

  It had turned into a bad day for Uspurul. Shortly after noon, she was called in to COS Services’ regional office. Something happened there. She didn’t know what. A period of more than an hour appeared to have lapsed unnoticed, and nobody was offering any explanations. She’d heard of amnesia treatments, but why should they have given her one? It frightened her.

  She pretended that everything seemed normal, and when she was told to go to her quarters and rest for a few hours because she might be given a night assignment, she was able to convince herself that the matter was over—she’d been brushed briefly by some secret COS business, put to some use of which she was to know nothing, and restored to her normal duties.

  An hour ago then, she’d been told to check out an aircar for a night flight to the Ialgeris Islands, registering Miss Amberdon and a Mr. Deboll as her passengers. That looked all right. Amberdon was still her assignment. The Ialgeris tour, though a lengthy one, requiring an expert guide because it involved sporadic weather risks, was nothing unusual. She took the car to one of the Barrand centers where she was to pick up the passengers. There she was conducted to a sublevel room and left alone behind a closed door. Misgivings awoke sharply again. There was no detectable way of opening the door from within the room.

  Why should they lock her in? What was happening? Uspurul became suddenly, horribly, convinced that she’d been drawn deep into one of those dark COS activities she’d hardly even let herself think about.