She turned to Soad’s presence at the fringes of consciousness. Gradually and very cautiously—since she didn’t know what he might do if he chose—she began to develop her awareness of him.
V
“Gulhas,” she said presently.
The technician started, looked around at her. “Yes?”
“Will talking distract the computer?”
Gulhas shook his head glumly. “It’s out of communication. There’s nothing to indicate whether that’s a malfunction or a necessary part of the tracing process. But it won’t respond to any type of signal, and couldn’t register our voices.”
“It is still trying to trace out Hide’s programs?”
“It’s still doing something,” Gulhas said. “I don’t know what. Our problem set sections of it working against other sections. It may have destroyed itself in part and gone insane in its fashion. That was the risk we took.”
“I know.” Telzey reflected. “You can get a screen view of what it looks like outside, of the area around the mine?”
“Yes. A three hundred and sixty degree view. That screen on your left!” Gulhas pressed a button. The indicated screen lit up. He said, “You think Soad may be out there somewhere?”
“Not yet.” Telzey’s glance slipped over the screen, held on Mannafra’s pale hot sun hanging low above the dunes. “How long before sunset?” she asked.
Gulhas looked at a console chronometer. “Perhaps half an hour.”
“Does it get dark quickly after that?”
“Quite quickly in these latitudes. It will be night in approximately another half hour.”
“I see.” Telzey was silent a moment. Gulhas, watching her, said abruptly, “You’re a mentalist, aren’t you?”
She glanced at him. “A telepath, a psi, yes.”
“I thought you must be,” Gulhas said. “It seemed the only explanation for what’s happened.” He cleared his throat. “I want to thank you. I still feel something like loyalty toward Soad, but I realize now that loyalty was forced on us. We never would have served such a creature of our own will.”
“No, you hardly would,” Telzey agreed.
“He seems to know what’s been going on since you and Mr. Ralke arrived.”
“Unfortunately, he does,” she said.
“Then why hasn’t he appeared?” Gulhas asked her. “You’d think he’d act immediately to restore the situation he created here.”
Telzey said, “He can’t move now. Sunlight would kill him. Even the starblaze produces more radiation than he likes, but he can stand that. He’ll come when it’s night. He’s waiting.”
“So we have till then!” Gulhas blinked at her. “That’s why he always came at night for the oil—we thought it was simply that he was trying to reduce the chance of being seen from the air. You’re certain he’ll come?”
“Quite certain. He’s changed his plans.”
“In what way?”
Should she tell him? Telzey decided it could do no harm to weaken further his enforced subservience to Soad. She said, “He’s given up on getting back the djeel oil Mr. Ralke look from the mine. He’d be safer having it, but he’s been experimenting with what he’s collected and thinks he already has as much as he really needs—especially if he adds to it what’s been processed here during the past days. So he’ll come for that.”
“Then he’ll leave?” Gulhas asked, staring at her.
“That’s what he intends. We gave him a surprise he didn’t like today. He hadn’t expected to have any trouble with humans.”
“In that case, why not let him know he’s welcome to the djeel oil?” Gulhas suggested. “Perhaps—” Telzey shook her head.
“If we did, he wouldn’t just pick it up and go,” she said. “Everybody at the mine, dead or alive, would be going with him. He isn’t leaving anybody behind to talk about the Children of the Gods—or about what they use djeel oil for either.”
“No,” Gulhas said after a moment. “You’re right. He wouldn’t want that.” He reflected. “Can’t you use telepathy to have someone outside send over a few aircars to pull us out of here?”
“It’s not too likely,” she told him. “I’ve been trying, but that kind of thing generally doesn’t work when you most want it to.”
“I see.” Gulhas sighed heavily. “I’m not really myself yet,” he remarked. “I know I should be horrified by this situation, but somehow I’m not extremely alarmed. It’s as if someone else were sitting here . . .” He shrugged. “Well, I’ll keep watching the Romango. If it gives me an opening, I’ll cut in and let you know. Then we might be able to do something. But our prospects don’t look good there either.”
He swung about in the chair and settled himself again before the console. Telzey said nothing. There was no reason to tell Gulhas that she hadn’t been letting him feel frightened. He knew enough now to make sure there’d be no lingering subjective hesitation to help her act against the Child of the Gods if the opportunity came. She’d equipped him with a provisional psi screen, which should reduce Soad’s awareness of what went on in the technician’s mind. But it couldn’t be completely effective. The less Gulhas was told of what really counted here, the better.
She returned her attention fully to Soad. She’d found out a great deal about that entity. Soad didn’t seem to have the equivalent of a human psi’s shield; and apparently it was a while before he began to suspect that she might be gathering information through the contact between them. Then he’d suddenly interposed a confusion of meaningless psi impressions, which she wasn’t trying to penetrate at present.
Soad was in a machine in the desert west of the Ralke Mine. Telzey wasn’t sure of the distance, but it might be something like forty miles. The machine was almost completely buried in sand drifts and screened against metal-locating devices. She’d thought at first it was a spaceship; but it wasn’t that, though it could serve as one. It was more like Soad’s permanent home and base of operations, and in time of need apparently also his fortress—a single massive block threaded by a maze of chambers and narrow tunnels, through which his protean, semimetallic body flowed with liquid smoothness. He’d been stranded on Mannafra with the machine for a long time.
He needed djeel oil to get away. He might have enough now, but his tests indicated it would be enough by a narrow margin at best. That made it essential to add the oil on hand at the Ralke Mine to his stores. If Telzey hadn’t made an unanticipated nuisance of herself, there would have been no problem about it.
It seemed likely that his kind hadn’t developed the ability to shape psi energy into killing bolts, as she and other human psis had done. Otherwise, he should have attacked as soon as he saw that she was threatening to interfere, at least temporarily, with his plans. So far, she’d made only a restrained use of the weapon herself, in knocking out the mine personnel.
Used to its full extent, she thought it might stop Soad. But that was a possibility to hold in reserve. There was no doubt that the Children of the Gods were savagely formidable beings. They preyed on other species and warred regularly among themselves; and minds like that must be dangerously equipped, in ways still unknown to her. Any serious mistake she made about Soad now was likely to be a fatal one.
So she attempted no immediate new moves. She maintained light contact with the meaningless-seeming flow of psi impressions which veiled Soad’s mentality, and probed cautiously at the mentality itself whenever she could, trying to outline further its alien strengths and weaknesses. She thought Soad might be doing much the same thing.
More distantly, Telzey probed also for the touch of any human mind she might use to inform the Federation Station of Soad’s presence on Mannafra, and of the plight of the survivors at the Ralke Mine. She’d need luck there, particularly since she could afford to give only partial attention to it; and as the minutes passed, it seemed luck wasn’t going to be with her. In the viewscreen, the dune shadows lengthened while the sun dropped toward the horizon. Then the sun was gone and the
desert lay in shadow everywhere. Above it, the starblaze was brightening.
And, finally, there was a development.
Telzey wasn’t immediately sure what it was. There was psi charge building up, and building up here, at the mine. She waited. Something took shape, was formed swiftly. And now she knew. Soad, having studied her, was constructing a slave mechanism specifically designed for her, an involved and heavily charged one. She didn’t think it could affect her seriously through her shield, but she didn’t care to take chances with the alien device. Her psi knives slashed through it, shredded and tore it apart, then took care of two designs she found beginning to attach themselves to Gulhas and Alicar.
Now she and Soad again had learned something about the other’s capabilities; but Soad had learned more than she. That couldn’t have been avoided; and since she was no longer giving anything away, she destroyed the other control mechanisms still functioning at the mine in quick sequence in the same manner. Frustrated anger washed about her as she did it—so he had intended to use those constructions in some way when he came.
Minutes later, she realized suddenly that he already was on the move.
“Gulhas,” she said, “any change?”
He shook his head without looking around.
“None whatever!”
Telzey reached through the defensive screen she’d closed about his mind, and took full control of him.
She was sitting in the Romango’s operator chair soon afterwards, while Gulhas lay stretched out on the floor beside Alicar’s carrier. Both men were in an unconscious paralysis from which nothing, specifically new mechanisms employed by Soad, was likely to arouse them during the next few hours. So was everybody else at the mine. At least, Soad wouldn’t be able to turn enslaved minds against her again in some still unpredictable way.
The Romango type of computer was unfamiliar, but that didn’t make much difference now. If the machine resolved the blocks they’d set it to work against, a panel on the console before Telzey would turn green, informing her that the communication systems had been released. She’d be able to take the Romango under voice control then, assuming it was still functional. Her eyes moved between the panel and the screen which showed the surrounding desert, scanners defining every detail of the landscape as clearly as in bright daylight. Somewhere on the dunes, Soad would presently appear.
She knew the moment wasn’t far away; and if the computer remained out of commission, the Ralke Mine’s mechanical barriers would be no obstacle to Soad. His strange body could form its substance into heavy battering rams; he’d break through, flow inside, and when he came to her at last, she’d be destroyed. If that wasn’t to happen, she must prevent it herself. Her psi weapons were ready, but she wouldn’t begin to use them until she caught sight of the swiftly moving great shape in the screens. There was a personal limit to the sheer quantity of destructive energy she could channel into a single bolt, a personal limit also to the number of such bolts she could handle within a given time period. Having tested herself to the danger point, she knew rather closely what the limits were. At peak effort, she might last a little more than four minutes. If Soad could absorb such an assault and keep coming, she couldn’t stop him. Nor would she know she’d failed.
She’d be unconscious, probably close to death.
So she waited. Then it was Soad who struck first.
Telzey didn’t realize at once that it was an attack. There’d been a gradual increase in the vividness of the random psi impressions Soad was pouring out as if he were trying to shroud himself more completely during his approach. The impressions were distracting enough; she had to give conscious effort now to maintain awareness of him. Then something like lines of fire flickered behind her eyes, blurring her physical vision, and a psi storm burst about her like shrieking sound, an impossibly swift swirling of hallucinations at every sensory level.
She knew then what was happening. Soad wasn’t able to reach her mind directly through its shield. But he could let her face chaos. None of it was real, but she couldn’t ignore what seemed to hammer at all her senses simultaneously. Her attention was torn this way and that.
It was sweeping to her through her psi contact with Soad. She could stop it in an instant by breaking the contact.
And that, of course, was what Soad intended. If he put her out of effective action during the critical period, the mine would have no defense against him. Telzey thought that if she waited any longer, he’d succeed. She either would lose contact with him and find herself unable to regain it in the short time left, or get bludgeoned into temporary insanity.
She lashed out with the heaviest bolt she could muster, sensed shock pass through Soad. The storm of illusion faltered. She struck again at once, and illusion was gone, replaced by reactions of agonized violence.
Soad had expected nothing like this. His kind never had encountered such a weapon. Telzey, committed now, slamming in bolt after bolt, searching for vital centers in the alien mind, felt him slow to a wavering halt, knew then that he’d already almost reached the perimeter of the mine’s defense zone.
Stop him there—paralyze him . . .
His desperation and fury howled at her. Troublesome as she’d been, Soad had looked on the human psi as an essentially insignificant opponent. Belatedly now, he drove himself into the full destructive action he would have taken in an encounter with one of his own grim species. Chaos crashed at Telzey again, intensified, and her mind seemed to flow apart. She clung to shreds of awareness of Soad, of herself, slashed blindly into something horribly damaged but unyielding, was whirled through an exploding universe and knew abruptly that she was no longer reaching Soad, while the tumult still seemed to increase. Vast thunders shook her then, and blackness folded in about her.
“No, I didn’t do it,” Telzey said. “That Child of the Gods was simply too much for me! I was finished. I did hurt him rather badly and slowed him down, but even so he’d come halfway through the defense zone when the computer finally got itself unblocked.”
“And you ordered it to attack the creature?” asked Alicar Troneff. He was lying in a narrow hospital vat half filled with something that looked like green mud and smelled like vinegar, in the process of getting his beam-mangled left leg restructured.
Telzey shook her head.
“No. I was completely out of it by then. But I didn’t have to give the order. I’d told the Romango earlier to cut loose on Soad if he showed up in the defense zone, and the instruction was recorded. So that’s the first thing it did. The radiation guns finished him at once then, of course. He couldn’t even stand sunlight. That was an awfully close call, Alicar!”
“Yes, it was,” he agreed. He regarded her a moment. “And it seems I’m no longer in control of you. She smiled. “No.”
“I never did trust you!” Alicar remarked dourly. “But how did it happen? You shouldn’t have been able even to try to identify my controls, let alone tamper with them.”
Telzey said, “If you’d left it at the specific controls, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do it. At least, not in time. But you put me under a binding general injunction besides, remember? Whatever I did had to be what was best for you—in your interest. That overrode everything else. After you’d been shot, I realized it would be very much in your interests if I got back every scrap of ability I’d had, fast.” She laughed. “And that broke the whole spell, Alicar! Including the injunction itself, since considering what might, or might not, be to your advantage from moment to moment in that situation certainly would have handicapped me in dealing with something like Soad.”
He grunted, scratched his chin with his left hand. “Mind telling me where I am at present then?”
“Well, you’re not going to like that part of it,” Telzey said. “You’re on a hospital ship of the Psychology Service.”
He swore softly and bitterly. “I suspected something of the sort! I noticed the area is psi-blocked.”
“Yes, it is,” Telzey said. “Bu
t don’t take it too hard. If I’d been looking out only for you, this still is exactly where you’d have wound up.”
“What do you mean?”
“Soad wasn’t the only problem we had there.”
“Huh?”
“His supply of djeel,” she said. “After we got to the mine and he decided it might be too risky to send you back for the oil you’d taken away, he began experimenting with what he’d collected to find out how close he was to the minimum he’d need. He miscalculated finally and started a reaction—the same kind of reaction that tore up Tosheer. That’s why he was desperate to get what was at the mine. He needed it at once to balance out the reaction.” Alicar had paled. “And did—”
“No, it didn’t,” said Telzey. “But I’d picked that up from him at the end, and as far as I knew, it was going to happen. So as soon as I started thinking again, I had the Romango connect me with the Federation Station. When I mentioned psi was involved, the Service moved in, and everyone on Mannafra was evacuated in an awful hurry.”
“But the djeel didn’t go off then, after all?”
“Oh, it went off, all right,” she said. “Four hours later. All it did though was to leave a hole in the desert about five hundred yards across where Soad’s machine had been. It seems there simply hadn’t been enough djeel affected by the reaction to do more than that.”
Alicar said after a moment, “Not that the information is likely to be of much use to me, but exactly what does djeel oil do?”
“I don’t know exactly what it does,” Telzey said. “And I’m not going to try to find out. In general though, processed djeel oil interacts with psi energy. The Service already knew that, though they haven’t talked about it. As to what it does when it works as it’s intended to, the Children of the Gods use it in connection with psi as their main form of transportation. They still have accidents with it, at least planned ones. Soad seems to have been in a fight with some of the others, and they started an uncontrolled psi reaction in the djeel of his machine that whipped him and the machine across intergalactic space—”
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 249