“No,” Iliff said, “I can’t.”
“Wait till you hear this then! After we’d congratulated each other and so on, he brought the subject back to various Lannai with whom he’d become acquainted. It developed presently he was interested in the whereabouts of one particular Lannai he’d met in a social way right here on Jeltad a few weeks before. He understood she was doing work—”
“All right,” Iliff interrupted. “It was Pagadan.”
The Co-ordinator appeared disappointed. “Yes, it was. She told you she’d met him, did she?”
“She admitted to some circulating in our upper social levels,” Iliff said. “What did you tell him?”
“That she was engaged in highly confidential work for the Department at present, but that we expected to hear from her within a few days—I had my fingers crossed there!—and that I’d see to it she heard he’d been inquiring about her. Afterwards, after he’d gone, I sat down and sweated blood until I got her message from the destroyer.”
“You don’t suspect, I suppose, that she might have psychoed him?”
“Nonsense, Iliff!” the Co-ordinator smiled blandly. “If I had the slightest suspicion of that, it would be my duty to investigate immediately. Wouldn’t it? But now, there’s one point—your robot, of course, made every effort to keep Pagadan from realizing there was no human crew manning the ship. However, she told me frankly she’d caught on to our little Department secret and suggested that the best way to keep it there would be to have her transferred from Interstellar to Galactic. As a manner of fact, she’s requested Zone Agent training! Think she’d qualify?”
“Oh, she’ll qualify!” Iliff said dryly. “At that, it might be a good idea to get her into the Department, where we can try to keep an eye on her. It would be too bad if we found out, ten years from now, that a few million Lannai were running the Confederacy.”
For an instant, the Co-ordinator looked startled. “Hm-m-m,” he said reflectively. “Well, that’s hardly likely. However, I think I’ll take your advice. I might send her over to your Zone in a week or so, and—”
“Oh, no,” Iliff said quietly. “Oh, no, you don’t! I’ve been waiting right along for the catch, and this is one job Headquarters is going to swing without me.”
“Now, Iliff—”
“It’s never happened before,” Iliff added, “but right now the Department is very close to its first case of Zone Agent mutiny.”
“Now, Iliff, take it easy!” The Co-ordinator paused. “I must disapprove of your attitude, of course, but frankly I admire your common sense. Well, forget the suggestion—I’ll find some other sucker.”
He became pleasantly official.
“I suppose you’re on your way back to your Zone at present?”
“I am. In fact, we’re almost exactly in the position we’d reached when you buzzed me the last time. Now, there wouldn’t happen to be some little job I could knock off for you on the way?”
“Well—” the Co-ordinator began, off guard. For the shortest fraction of a second, he had the air of a man consulting an over-stuffed mental file.
Then he started and blinked.
“In your condition? Nonsense, Iliff! It’s out of the question!”
* * *
On the last word, Iliff’s thought and image flickered out of his mind. But the Third Co-ordinator sat motionless for another moment or so before he turned off the telepath transmitter. There was a look of mild surprise on his face.
Of course, there had been no change of expression possible in that immobilized and anaesthetized embryonic figure—not so much as the twitch of an eyelid! But in that instant, while he was hesitating, there had seemed to flash from it a blast of such cold and ferocious malignity that he was almost startled into flipping up his shields.
“Better lay off the little devil for a while!” he decided. “Let him just stick to his routine. I’ll swear, for a moment there I saw smoke pour out of his ears.”
He reached out and tapped a switch.
“Psych-tester? What do you think?”
“The Agent requires no deconditioning,” the Psych-tester’s mechanical voice stated promptly. “As I predicted at the time, his decision to board U-1’s ship was in itself sufficient to dissolve both the original failure-shock and the artificial conditioning later connected with it. The difficulties he experienced, between the decision and his actual entry of the ship, were merely symptoms of that process and have had no further effect on his mental health.”
The Co-ordinator rubbed his chin reflectively.
“Well, that sounds all right. Does he realize I . . . uh . . . had anything to do—?”
“The Agent is strongly of the opinion that you suspected Tahmey of being U-1 when you were first informed of the Interstellar operative’s unusual report, and further, that you assigned him to the mission for this reason. While approving of the choice as such, he shows traces of a sub-level reflection that your tendency towards secretiveness will lead you to . . . out-fox . . . yourself so badly some day that he may not be able to help you.”
“Why—”
“He has also begun to suspect,” the Psych-tester continued, undisturbed, “that he was fear-conditioned over a period of years to the effect that any crisis involving U-1 would automatically create the highest degree of defensive tensions compatible with his type of mentality.”
The Co-ordinator whistled softly.
“He’s caught on to that, eh?” He reflected. “Well, after all,” he pointed out, almost apologetically, “it wasn’t such a bad idea in itself! The boy does have this tendency to bull his way through, on some short-cut or other, to a rather dangerous degree. And there was no way of foreseeing the complications introduced by the Ceetal threat and his sense of responsibility towards the Lannai, which made it impossible for him to obey that urgent mental pressure to be careful in whatever he did about U-1.”
He paused invitingly, but the Psych-tester made no comment.
“It’s hard to guess right every time!” the Co-ordinator concluded defensively.
He shook his head and sighed, but then forgot Iliff entirely as he turned to the next problem.
The Illusionists
The three Bjanta scouts were within an hour’s flight of the yellow dwarf star of Ulphi when the Viper’s needle-shape drove into their detection range, high up but on a course that promised almost to intersect their own.
It didn’t exactly come to that point, though the unwary newcomer continued to approach for several minutes more. But then, with an abruptness which implied considerable shock on board at discovering Bjanta ahead, she veered off sharply and shot away at a very respectable speed.
The scout disks swung about unhurriedly, opened out in pursuit formation and were presently closing in again, with leisurely caution, on the fugitive. Everything about that beautifully designed, blue-gleaming yacht suggested the most valuable sort of catch. Some very wealthy individual’s plaything it might have been, out of one of the major centers of civilization, though adventuring now far from the beaten path of commercial spaceways. In which case, she would be very competently piloted and crewed and somewhat better armed than the average freighter. Which should make her capable of resisting their combined attack for a maximum of four or five minutes—or, if she preferred energy-devouring top velocity, of keeping ahead of them for even one or two minutes longer than that.
But no Bjanta was ever found guilty of impulsive recklessness. And, just possibly, this yacht could also turn out to be another variation of those hellish engines of destruction which Galactic humanity and its allies had been developing with ever-increasing skill during the past few thousand years, against just such marauders as they.
As it happened, that described the Viper exactly. A Vegan G.Z. Agent-Ship, and one of the last fifty or so of her type to be completed, she was, compared with anything else up to five times her three-hundred-foot length, the peak, the top, the absolute culmination of space-splitting sudden death. And, furthermore, she knew it.
“They’re maintaining pattern and keeping up with no sign of effort,” her electronic brain reported to her pilot. “Should we show them a little more speed?”
“The fifteen percent increase was plenty,” the pilot returned in a pleasant soprano voice. Her eyes, the elongated silver eyes and squared black pupils of a Lannai humanoid, studied the Bjantas’ positions in the vision tank of the long, wide control desk at which she sat. “If they edge in too far, you can start weaving, but remember they’re sensitive little apes! Anything fancy before we get within range of our cruiser is bound to scare them off.”
There was silence for a moment. Then the ship’s robot voice came into the control room again.
“Pagadan, the disk low in Sector Twelve is almost at contact beaming range. We could take any two of them at any moment now, and save the third for the test run!”
“I know it, little Viper,” Pagadan said patiently. “But this whole job’s based on the assumption that the Bjantas are operating true to form. In that case, the Mother Disk should be somewhere within three light-years behind us, and the cruiser wants to run two of these scouts back far enough to show just where it’s lying. We need only the one for ourselves.”