“Why?” asked Telzey.
“For the celebration, of course.”
“Eh?”
Jessamine sighed. “Oh, Telzey! You’ve become the most absent-minded dear lately! That’s your birthday, remember? You’ll be sixteen.”
III
Citizens of Tinokti tended to regard the megacities of other Federation worlds as overgrown primitive villages. They, or some seventy percent of them, lived and worked in the enclosed portal systems called circuits. For most it was a comfortable existence; for many a luxurious one.
A portal, for practical purposes, was two points in space clamped together to form one. It was a method of moving in a step from here to there, within a limited but considerable range. Portal circuits could be found on many Hub worlds. On Tinokti they were everywhere. Varying widely in extent and complexity, serving many purposes, they formed the framework of the planet’s culture.
On disembarking at the spaceport, Telzey had checked in at a great commercial circuit called the Luerral Hotel. It had been selected for her because it was free of the psi blocks in rather general use here otherwise. The Luerral catered to the interstellar trade; and the force patterns which created the blocks were likely to give people unaccustomed to them a mildly oppressive feeling of being enclosed. For Telzey’s purpose, of course, they were more serious obstacles.
While registering, she was equipped with a guest key. The Luerral Hotel was exclusive; its portals passed only those who carried a Luerral key or were in the immediate company of somebody who did. The keys were accessories of the Luerral’s central computer and on request gave verbal directions and other information. The one Telzey selected had the form of a slender ring. She let it guide her to her room, found her luggage had preceded her there, and made a call to the Tongi Phon Institute. Tinokti ran on Institute time; the official workday wouldn’t begin for another three hours. But she was connected with someone who knew of her application to do legal research, and was told a guide would come to take her to the Institute when it opened.
She set out then on a stroll about the hotel and circled Tinokti twice in an hour’s unhurried walk, passing through portals which might open on shopping malls, tropical parks or snowy mountain resorts, as the circuit dipped in and out of the more attractive parts of the planet. She was already at work for Klayung, playing the role of a psi operator who was playing the role of an innocent student tourist. She wore a tracer which pinpointed her for a net of spacecraft deployed about the planet. The bracelet on her left wrist was a Service communicator; and she was in wispy but uninterrupted mind contact with a Service telepath whose specialty it was to keep such contacts undetectable for other minds. She also had armed company unobtrusively preceding and following her. They were probing Tinokti carefully in many ways; she was now one of the probes.
Her thoughts searched through each circuit section and the open areas surrounding it as she moved along. She picked up no conscious impressions of the Service’s quarry. But twice during that hour’s walk, the screens enclosing her mind like a flexing bubble tightened abruptly into a solid shield. Her automatic detectors, more sensitive than conscious probes, had responded to a passing touch of the type of mental patterns they’d been designed to warn her against. The psis were here—and evidently less cautious than they’d been on Orado after her first encounter with them.
When she’d come back to the hotel’s Great Lobby, Gudast, her Service contact, inquired mentally, “Mind doing a little more walking?” Telzey checked her watch. “Just so I’m not late for the Phons.”
“We’ll get you back in time.”
“All right. Where do I go?”
Gudast said, “Those mind touches you reported came at points where the Luerral Hotel passes through major city complexes. We’d like you to go back to them, leave the circuit and see if you can pick up something outside.”
She got short-cut directions from the Luerral computer, set out again. The larger sections had assorted transportation aids, but, on the whole, circuit dwellers seemed to do a healthy amount of walking. Almost all of the traffic she saw was pedestrian.
She took an exit presently, found herself in one of the city complexes mentioned by Gudast. Her Luerral ring key informed her the hotel had turned her over to the guidance of an area computer and that the key remained at her service if she needed information. Directed by Gudast, she took a seat on a slideway, let it carry her along a main street. Superficially, the appearance of things here was not unlike that of some large city on Orado. The differences were functional. Psi blocks were all about, sensed as a gradually shifting pattern of barriers to probes as the slideway moved on with her. Probably less than a fifth of the space of the great buildings was locally open; everything else was taken up by circuit sections connected to other points of the planet, ranging in size from a few residential or storage rooms to several building levels. Milkily gleaming horizontal streaks along the sides of the buildings showed that many of the sections were protected by force fields. Tinokti’s citizens placed a high value on privacy.
Telzey stiffened suddenly. “Defense reaction!” she told Gudast.
“Caught it,” his thought whispered.
“It’s continuing.” She passed her tongue over her lips.
“See a good place to get off the slideway?”
Telzey glanced along the street, stood up. “Yes! Big display windows just ahead. Quite a few people.”
“Sounds right.”
She stepped off the slideway as it came up to the window fronts, walked over, started along the gleaming windows, then stopped, looking in at the displayed merchandise. “I’m there,” she told Gudast. “Reaction stopped a moment ago.”
“See what you can do. We’re set up.”
Her psi sensors reached out. She brought up the thought patterns she’d recorded in Melna Park and stored in memory, blurred them, projected them briefly—something carelessly let slip from an otherwise guarded mind. She waited.
Her screens tried to tighten again. She kept them as they were, overriding the automatic reaction. Then something moved faintly into awareness—mind behind shielding, alert, questioning, perhaps suspicious. Still barely discernible.
“Easy . . . easy!” whispered Gudast. “I’m getting it. We’re getting it. Don’t push at all! Give us fifteen seconds . . . ten—”
Psi block!
The impression had vanished.
Somewhere the being producing it had moved into a psi-blocked section of this city complex. Perhaps deliberately, choosing mental concealment. Perhaps simply because that was where it happened to be going when its attention was caught for a moment by Telzey’s broadcast pattern. The impression hadn’t been sufficiently strong to say anything about it except that this had been a mind of the type Telzey had encountered on Orado. They’d all caught for an instant the specific qualities she’d recorded.
The instant hadn’t been enough. Klayung had brought a number of living psi compasses to Tinokti—operators who could have pinpointed the position of the body housing that elusive mentality, given a few more seconds in which to work.
They hadn’t been given those seconds, and the mentality wasn’t contacted again. Telzey went on presently to the other place where she’d sensed a sudden warning, and prowled about here and there outside the Luerral Circuit, while Klayung’s pack waited for renewed indications. This time they drew a blank.
But it had been confirmed that the psis—some of them—were on Tinokti.
The problem would be how to dig them out of the planet-wide maze of force-screened and psi-blocked circuit sections.
Telzey’s Institute guide, a young man named Phon Hajugan, appeared punctually with the beginning of Tinokti’s workday. He informed Telzey he held the lowest Tongi Phon rank. The lower echelons evidently hadn’t been informed of the recent killings in the Institute vault and their superiors’ apprehensions—Phon Hajugan was in a cheery and talkative mood. Telzey’s probe disclosed that he was equipped with a chemi
cal mind shield.
There was no portal connection between the Luerral Hotel’s circuit and that of the Institute. Telzey and her guide walked along a block of what appeared to be a sizable residential town before reaching an entry portal of the Tongi Phon Circuit, where she was provided with another portal key. She’d been making note of the route; in future she didn’t intend to be distracted by the presence of a guide. The office to which Phon Hajugan conducted her was that of a senior Phon named Trondbarg. It was clear that Phon Trondbarg did know what was going on. He discussed Telzey’s Pehanron project in polite detail but with an air of nervous detachment. It had been indicated to the Institute that she was a special agent of the Service, and that her research here was for form’s sake only.
The interview didn’t take long. Her credentials would be processed, and she was to return in four hours. She would have access then to normally restricted materials and be able to obtain other information as required. In effect, she was being given a nearly free run of the Institute, which was the purpose. Unless there were other developments, much of the Service’s immediate attention would be focused on the areas and personnel associated with the Tongi Phon’s psi technology projects. The Phon leadership didn’t like it but had no choice. They would have liked it less if they’d suspected that mind shields now would start coming quietly undone. The Service wanted to find out who around here was controlled and in what manner.
Some form of counteraction by the concealed opposition might be expected. Preparations were being made for it, and Telzey’s personal warning system was one part of the preparations.
She returned to the Luerral Circuit and her hotel room alone except for her unnoticeable Service escorts, spent the next two hours asleep to get herself shifted over to the local time system, then dressed in a Tinokti fashion item, a sky-blue belted jacket of military cut and matching skirt, and had a belated breakfast in a stratosphere restaurant of the hotel. Back in the Great Lobby, she began to retrace the route to the Tongi Phon Institute she’d followed with Phon Hajugan some five hours ago. A series of drop shafts took her to a scenic link with swift-moving slideways; then there was a three-portal shift to the southern hemisphere where the Institute’s major structures were located. She moved on through changing patterns of human traffic until she reached the ninth portal from the Great Lobby. On the far side of that portal, she stopped with a catch in her breath, spun about, found herself looking at a blank wall, and turned again.
Her mental contact with Gudast was gone. The portal had shifted her into a big, long, high-ceilinged room, empty and silent. She hadn’t passed through any such room with Phon Hajugan. She should have exited here instead into the main passage of a shopping center.
She touched the wall through which she’d stepped an instant ago—as solid now as it looked. A one-way portal. The room held the peculiar air of blankness, a cave of stillness about the mind, which said it was psi-blocked and that the blocking fields were close by. Watching a large closed door at the other end of the room, Telzey clicked on the bracelet communicator. No response from the Service . . . No response either, a moment later, from the Luerral ring key!
She’d heard that in the complexities of major portal systems, it could happen that a shift became temporarily distorted and one emerged somewhere else than one had intended to go. But that hadn’t happened here. There’d been people directly ahead of her, others not many yards behind, her Service escorts among them, and no one else had portaled into this big room which was no part of the Luerral Circuit.
So it must be a trap—and a trap set up specifically for her along her route from the hotel room to the Tongi Phon Institute. As she reached the portal some observer had tripped the mechanisms which flicked in another exit for the instant needed to bring her to the room. If the Service still had a fix on the tracking device they’d given her, they would have recognized what had happened and be zeroing in on her now, but she had an unpleasantly strong conviction that whoever had cut her off so effectively from psi and communicator contacts also had considered the possibility of a tracking device and made sure it wouldn’t act as one here.
The room remained quiet. A strip of window just below the ceiling ran along the wall on her left, showing patches of blue sky and tree greenery outside. It was far out of her reach, and if she found something that let her climb up to it, there was no reason to think it would be possible to get through that window. But she started cautiously forward. The room was ell-shaped; on her right, the wall extended not much more than two thirds of its length before it cornered.
She could sense nothing but yet someone could be waiting behind the corner for her until she got there. No one was. That part of the room was as bare as the other. At the end of it was a second closed door, a smaller one.
She turned back toward the first door, checked, skin crawling. Mind screens had contracted abruptly into a hard shield. One of them had come into this psi-blocked structure.
One or more of them . . .
The larger door opened seconds later. Three tall people came into the room.
IV
Telzey’s continuing automatic reaction told her the three were psis of the type she’d conditioned herself to detect and recognize. Whatever they were, they had nothing resembling the bulk and massive structure of the Elaigar mind masters she’d studied in the old Nalakian records. They might be nearly as tall. The smallest, in the rich blue cloak and hood of a Sparan woman, must measure at least seven feet, and came barely up to the shoulders of her companions who wore the corresponding gray cloaks of Sparan men. Veils, golden for the woman, white for the men, concealed their faces below the eyes and fell to their chests.
But, of course, they weren’t Sparans. Telzey had looked into Sparan minds. They probably were the Hub’s most widespread giant strain, should have the average sprinkling of psi ability. They weren’t an organization of psis. Their familiar standardized dressing practices simply provided these three with an effective form of concealment.
Telzey, heart racing, smiled.
“I hope I’m not trespassing!” she told them. “I was in the Luerral Hotel just a minute ago and have no idea how I got here! Can you tell me how to get back?”
The woman said in an impersonal voice, “I’m sure you’re quite aware you’re not here by accident. We’ll take you presently to some people who want to see you. Now stand still while I search you.”
She’d come up as she spoke, removing her golden gloves. Telzey stood still. The men had turned to the left along the wall, and a recess was suddenly in sight there . . . some portal arrangement. The recess seemed to be a large, half-filled storage closet. The men began bringing items out of it, while the woman searched Telzey quickly. The communicator and the Service’s tracking device disappeared under the blue cloak. The woman took nothing else. She straightened again, said, “Stay where you are,” and turned to join her companions who now were packing selected pieces of equipment into two carrier cases they’d taken from the closet. They worked methodically but with some haste, occasionally exchanging a few words in a language Telzey didn’t know. Finally they snapped the cases shut, began to remove their Sparan veils and cloaks.
Telzey watched them warily. Her first sight of their faces was jarring. They were strong handsome faces with a breed similarity between them. But there was more than a suggestion there of the cruel cat masks of Nalakia. They’d needed the cover of the Sparan veil to avoid drawing attention to themselves.
The bodies were as distinctive. The woman, now in trunks, boots and short-sleeved shirt, as were the men, a gun belt fastened about her, looked slender with her height and length of limb, but layers of well-defined muscle shifted along her arms and legs as she moved. Her neck was a round strong column, the sloping shoulders correspondingly heavy, and there was a great depth of rib cage, drawing in sharply to the flat waist. She differed from the human standard as a strain of animals bred for speed or fighting might differ from other strains of the same species. Her co
mpanions were male counterparts, larger, more heavily muscled.
There’d been no trace of a mental or emotional impression from any of them; they were closely screened. The door at the end of the room opened now, and a third man of the same type came in. He was dressed almost as the others were, but everything he wore was dark green; and instead of a gun, a broad knife swung in its scabbard from his belt. He glanced at Telzey, said something in their language. The woman looked over at Telzey.
“Who are you?” Telzey asked her.
The woman said, “My name is Kolki Ming. I’m afraid there’s no time for questions. We have work to do.” She indicated the third man. “Tscharen will be in charge of you at present.”
“We’ll leave now,” Tscharen told Telzey.
They were in a portal circuit. Once out of the room where Telzey had been trapped, they used no more doors. The portal sections through which they passed were small ones, dingy by contrast with the Luerral’s luxuries, windowless interiors where people once had lived. Lighting and other automatic equipment still functioned; furnishings stood about. But there was a general air of long disuse. Psi blocks tangibly enclosed each section.
The portals weren’t marked in any way, but Tscharen moved on without hesitation. They’d reach a wall and the wall would seem to dissolve about and before them; and they’d be through it, somewhere else—a somewhere else which didn’t look very different from the section they’d just left. After the sixth portal shift, Tscharen turned into a room and unlocked and opened a wall cabinet.
A viewscreen had been installed in the cabinet. He manipulated the settings, and a brightly lit and richly furnished area, which might have been the reception room of some great house, appeared in the screen. There was no one in sight; the screen was silent. Tscharen studied the room for perhaps a minute, then switched off the screen, closed and locked the cabinet, motioned to Telzey and turned to leave. She followed.
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 235