“It probably would be,” Trigger agreed. “But unless you can unlock that door over there, we can’t get into the residence from this hall. The other door’s sealed with a force screen. Or was, a few minutes ago, after I came out here.”
Wrann looked startled. “Let’s check on that!”
The force screen was still present; and Wrann said he didn’t have the equipment to unlock the other door. “I’m afraid we’ll have to forget about Attuk’s guns!”
“Why?” said Trigger. “You know your way around here. Can’t we go to another entry to the residence?”
Wrann shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to try it! The garden’s part of a mechanism they call their playground—”
“I’ve been there,” Trigger said. “A maze effect.”
“Yes, a maze effect. When somebody’s let into the maze unaccompanied by one of the residents, the controlling apparatus develops an awareness of the fact and begins to mislead and confuse the visitor.”
“How did you get through it just now?”
Wrann said, “I’ve been shown the way. I’ve had occasion to use it. And I didn’t stay in the playground long enough to activate the mechanisms significantly. Working around to another residence entry would be another matter!” He shook his head again. “We’d never make it!”
Trigger said, “We do have to go through the playground to get to the lock?”
“It’s the only way that isn’t blocked for us.” Wrann looked at her. “I can get us there! Between us, we shouldn’t need a weapon to take the guard.”
“You’re Torai’s detective; I’m the prisoner, eh?”
“Right. I’m to put you on the Sebaloun cruiser. You have your hands on your back. When we get to the guard, you create a diversion.” Wrann grinned sourly. “You’ll think of something! I jump the guard. We can be off the satellite two minutes later.”
Leaving the Marells behind. Trigger said, “And then?”
“We get in touch with the authorities immediately. I don’t want to give Sebaloun a chance to get off the satellite. With luck, we’ll be back with the law before she even knows we’re gone.”
Trigger said, “Don’t you have a few things to hide yourself, Wrann?”
“Normally I’d have enough to hide,” he agreed. “I understand your suspicions. But I have no choice! We’re dealing with very dangerous people, Miss Argee! How long do you think I’d live—or you, for that matter—if those three stay at large, and the Sebaloun money is looking for us? As of now, I’ll be glad to settle for Rehabilitation!”
Trigger nodded. “All right. Let’s go! It could be a trap, of course.” Wrann looked startled. “What do you mean?”
“That door mightn’t have been sealed because I was in the hall but because someone knew you were on your way back to the residence.”
“I see. We’ll have to risk that.” Wrann added as they started down into the garden. “Stay close behind me! I’ll hurry as much as I can, but we must be careful. Setting off even one force screen would alert the playground—and then we’ll have had it!”
Wrann moved quickly, if cautiously, sometimes half running, rarely hesitating for more than a moment. Trigger concentrated on following in his steps. The maze remained silent and unresponsive as half a dozen illusion scenes slipped past. A stretch of flowering meadow was briefly there, and twice patches of mossy turf where Wrann’s greater weight made him sink in almost ankle deep at every step, though Trigger didn’t have much difficulty.
Then he vanished ahead of her again. She slowed, carefully took the same stride she’d watched him take— and went stumbling through pitch-blackness. She caught her balance, stood still, feeling sand under the soles of her boots.
“Wrann?” she said quietly.
There was no reply. Her heart began to race. Dry, musty odors, warm stirring of air . . . She listened, lips parted, barely breathing, and heard sounds then, soft ones, as if someone moved cautiously over the sand. The sounds didn’t seem close to her.
After a moment, they stopped, and Trigger realized the darkness was lifting. A dim, sourceless glow had come into the air. It strengthened slowly into a sullen light; she began to make out something of her surroundings. It looked like a stretch of steep-walled gully filled with sand, a dry watercourse. No way to tell yet what part was real, what part was illusion.
Then she saw something else. A shape stood on the other side of the gully, farther along it, back against the overhanging rock wall.
It didn’t move. Neither did Trigger, watching it, between moments of scanning the sand about her. A simulated dry watercourse might have contained some real rocks, and she would have felt better with a rock in either hand at the moment. She saw nothing but sand.
She didn’t think that shape was Wrann.
The glow strengthened again. The shape remained motionless and indistinct; but an abrupt jolt of fright had gone through her, for now she recognized the squat demon figure Perr Hasta’s image maker had showed her after she came awake. The thought that Perr was at play again flicked up, but she discarded it at once. The image maker had been used to introduce her to the satellite. It wouldn’t be involved here.
With that, she saw the anthropoid creature move away from the gully wall, start slowly toward her. There was a point some twenty feet to her left where the rock bank wasn’t too steep. She should be able to scramble up there, but she didn’t want to try it yet. She didn’t know what was above; a blur of light shrouded the upper levels of the gully. She looked back. The watercourse seemed to twist out of sight beyond its bank fifty feet away. She thought she was likely to meet a force field before she got nearly that far.
She could see the approaching anthropoid more clearly now than she liked. The dwarfishly broad body looked tremendously strong. He made crooning sounds which at moments seemed almost to become slurred words. The yellow eyes stared. Trigger felt a surge of revulsion, began to back away. He continued his unhurried advance as if he knew she wasn’t retreating far—and once those great hands closed on her, all her skills weren’t likely to be of much further use . . .
There was the glow of a force field behind her.
Trigger edged toward the left along the glow. The stalking creature angled in slowly to corner her between screen and bank. She shifted to the right and, as he swerved, back to the left. He came at her suddenly then, thick arms reaching, and she ducked, scooping up two handfuls of sand, slashed sand full into the yellow eyes, and was past him.
She heard snarling as she made a dash for that not-quite-vertical section of the gully’s bank, scrambled a dozen feet up it, and stopped. A screen had acquired glowing visibility overhead. She looked back. The anthropoid had followed, digging at his face with his hands. She dropped down, slipped under his swift lunge. Fingers clawed along her back and almost ripped the sweater from her, but then she was away and coming up with her hands full of sand again. As he swung around after her, she let him have the second dose. He uttered a gurgling howl.
Full daylight flooded the gully. Torai Sebaloun’s amplified voice announced from above, “I am seriously annoyed with you, Attuk!”
Trigger, moving back, glanced up. The haze effect was gone. A viewscreen had taken its place; and the enlarged faces of Torai and Perr Hasta were looking down through it.
Torai appeared very angry, while Perr obviously was enjoying herself. The anthropoid peered up at them, blinking painfully, before he turned and lumbered away. Abruptly, his shape blurred, seemed about to flow apart, then reassembled itself. What it reassembled into was the quite human appearance of Attuk, elegantly clothed. He stalked over to the wall of the gully, vanished into it. The screen had gone blank.
Trigger pulled down her sweater, brushed sand from her palms and turned as Torai and Perr Hasta came walking up the gully behind her.
“So now you know Attuk’s a shape-changer!” Perr said smilingly to her. “What you saw here is what we think is his own shape. It’s the one he almost always uses when he gets someo
ne into his place in the playground. A crude creature, isn’t he? He would have been rather careful with you, of course.”
“Careful or not,” said Torai, “if he’d damaged the body in the least, I should have killed him! As it is, I’ll have to think up a suitable punishment for Attuk. But that can wait.” She added curtly to Trigger, “I’m ready to transfer. You’ll come along now.”
Trigger went along, having no choice in the matter. Torai’s ring beams held her hemmed in as she walked ahead of the two, and the beams controlled the pace at which she could and must walk. Once she tried to slow her steps, and they simply lifted her and carried her on a few yards before she was set down to start walking again.
“Attuk did Wrann very well,” Perr Hasta was saying chattily from a little behind her. “The voice and manner of speaking, too! Of course, Attuk always is very good with voices.”
Torai said, “I’m also somewhat annoyed with you, Perr! You shouldn’t have let it go that far. Their bodies can die of fright, as you know. What good would this one have been to me then?”
“Oh, I called you in time!” said Pen. “Trigger’s charts show she isn’t the kind to die of fright.” She laughed. “Wasn’t it beautiful, the way she sanded up his eyes?”
The insane conversation went on until they were back in the residence. There Torai’s beams steered Trigger into a narrow room and to an armchair set up at its far end, turned her around and placed her in the chair. Torai took the computer control rod hanging from her belt in one hand and brought her thumbnail down on a point near its lower end. The beam effect released Trigger.
“Stretch your hand out toward me,” Torai said.
Trigger hesitated, reached out, saw a screen glow appear in the air a few feet ahead of her. She drew back her hand. The glow vanished.
“You’re sealed into that end of the room,” Torai told her. “So you might as well relax.” She turned her rings toward another armchair in the room, and the beams drew the chair over to a point opposite Trigger, about twelve feet from her. Torai settled herself in the chair, and Perr Hasta came up and stood beside her, smiling at Trigger.
Torai studied Trigger a moment then, with an expression that seemed both hungry and contented. She nodded slowly.
“Yes, a good selection!” she remarked. “I should be well satisfied with that one. And I see no reason for further delay.” She leaned back and closed her eyes.
Trigger waited. Presently, something began to happen; and she also shut her eyes to center her attention on it. A sense of eager greed and momentary scraps and bursts of what might be somebody’s thinking were pushing into her awareness. She studied them a moment, then started blanking out those impressions with clear strong thoughts of her own which had nothing to do with Torai Sebaloun or the Rasolmen satellite, but with people and events and things far away, back in time. It went on a while. Her defense appeared rather effective, though new Torai thoughts kept thrusting up, quivering with impatience and anger now, until Trigger blanked them away again. The Old Galactic shield remained tight, and it might be Torai hadn’t counted on that. Frustration grew in the thoughts still welling into Trigger’s awareness; then, abruptly, anxiety and acute alarm.
“Perr—you’re not helping! Perr! Perr Hasta!”
No reply from Perr. A sudden soft thumping noise, and Torai screamed once; and Trigger’s eyes flew open.
Torai had fallen out of the chair and lay shaking on the carpet; and Perr Hasta was on her knees beside her, peering down into her distorted face with much the same avidity Trigger had seen in Torai’s own expression and in the yellow eyes of anthropoid Attuk. Perr looked up at Trigger then, and laughed.
“I knew it!” she said. “She got stuck in that mind thing of yours, Trigger! If she had any difficulty, I was to start absorbing your personality to make it easier for her, but I didn’t. She can’t get through, and she can’t get back.”
Perr looked down at Torai again. “And—now, now, now! I’ve waited a long time for the personality of the Torai thing, and now I’ll take it all, and there’s nothing it can do about it.”
The child face went blank, though a smile still curved its lips; and Perr’s body began weaving gently back and forth above Torai.
Trigger got quietly out of her chair.
VIII
If Torai Sebaloun had succeeded in implanting her personality in Trigger’s body, she would have found herself behind the force screen which now held Trigger imprisoned at this end of the room, with the computer control rod which had switched on the screen fastened by its satin strap to the belt on the dead Torai body on the far side of the screen.
Hence, since Torai must regard Attuk and Perr Hasta as somewhat uncertain allies, there should be a device to release the screen on this side. Trigger had been waiting for an opportunity to start looking for that device; and now, with Torai helpless and Perr Hasta preoccupied, the opportunity was there.
Unfortunately, the switch, button, or whatever mechanism it was, seemed well hidden. Trigger went quickly over the smooth walls, glancing now and then at the two outside. Something that might be Torai’s thoughts still flickered occasionally through her mind, but they were barely perceptible, and she no longer bothered to blank them out. Perr Hasta, completely absorbed, showed no interest in what was happening on this side of the screen.
When the walls provided no clue, Trigger began searching the armchair. Engaged with that, she discovered suddenly that Perr was back on her feet and watching her. At the same time, she realized she could sense no more Torai thought impressions, and that Torai, who’d been stirring feebly when she looked last, was now quite motionless. Perr Hasta gave her a slow, dreamy smile.
“Torai was very good!” she said. “Every bit as good as I’d expected! So you’d like to get out?”
“Yes,” Trigger acknowledged. “Do you know what I have to do in here to turn off the screen?”
“No.”
Trigger bit her lip. “Look,” she said. “If you’ll take that control rod on Torai’s belt—”
“Goodness,” said Perr, turning away. “I wouldn’t know how to use the thing. Besides, why should I let you out? I must go find Attuk.”
She sauntered out of the room, humming. Trigger gritted her teeth and resumed her search. One nightmare was down; but two were still up and around! She had to get out, fast!
A tiny voice cried, “Trigger!”
She jerked about. Salgol and Runderin were dancing up and down on the other side of the glowing screen.
“We found your gun!” Salgol piped. “Is she dead? What is this thing between us?”
Trigger let out a breath of partial relief. “You have my gun? Good! Yes, she’s dead, but the other two might show up any time. That’s a force screen between us. Now, look—”
She explained rapidly about the computer control rod. She’d been watching Torai and was able to describe exactly where Torai had pressed on the rod to turn on the screen. There must be some kind of switch there.
The Marells confirmed there was a button there. In fact, the rod was covered with grouped rows of tiny buttons. The trouble was that depressing the button in question proved to be beyond their combined strength. Trigger, watching their struggles, exclaimed suddenly, “Stuff in my handbag!” They looked at her, breathing hard. “Keys!” she went on. “Something Salgol can slam down on the button—”
They’d turned and darted halfway out of the room while she was still speaking. Trigger resumed her investigation of the armchair. It seemed to her she’d already looked everywhere. In frustration, she banged her fist down on the chair’s padded backrest. There was a sharp click.
She stood frozen for an instant, swung back toward the screen, reaching out to it.
No glow . . .
No screen!
She stepped through the space where it had blocked her and unfastened the control rod from Torai’s belt with shaking fingers. Manipulating the ring beam mechanisms probably would take plenty of practice—no time to b
other with that now! She ran out of the room after the Marells.
The playground maze was still trying to be a problem; but the computer rod made the problem rather easy to handle. The force screen controls seemed to be grouped together at one end. When they encountered a screen now, Trigger hit the studs there in quick succession until she came to the one that switched off the screen; and they’d hurry on until checked again. Salgol, Runderin and Smee had no trouble keeping up with her. Her interference with the screens might be confusing the overall maze mechanism. Sound effects soon died away, and the scenery took on a static appearance. At this rate, it shouldn’t be long before they’d passed through the playground area.
Force screens, however, might not be the only difficulty. If Attuk was aware Torai’s transfer attempt had failed and that Trigger was again free, he could be waiting to intercept her with a gun near the periphery of the playground. He’d said an armed guard had been stationed at the spacelock; and if that was true, she might, in fact, have two guns to deal with before she got off the satellite. When the surrounding scenes began to look unfamiliar, she moved with growing caution.
One more screen went off. Trigger started forward over springy moss, along the side of a simulated weathered stone wall, watching the lop of the wall and the area ahead. The Marells followed close on her heels. Some thirty feet on, the wall turned to the right. She checked at the corner. The wall disappeared in dense artificial vegetation not far away. More of the stuff on the left. A path led between the two thickets.
Had a shadow shifted position in the shrubbery at the moment she appeared? Yes. She could make out something there now. It seemed to be a rather small dark shape.
She glanced down at Salgol who was peering up at her. She whispered, “Be careful, you three!” and started slowly toward the thicket. She stopped again. The shrubbery stirred—the half-glimpsed shape was moving. Something familiar about it?
A hand parted branches; a quite familiar face looked out warily. Telzey’s blue eyes went wide.
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 254