“Remember me, eh?” she nodded. “Pelial, of Galactic Zones, at your service! I was scoping the area from ten miles above and spotted you drifting along by yourself. What occurs, my tall colleague? Are you just going sightseeing in that piece of primitive craftsmanship, or did your pilot fall out?”
“Ulp—!” began Jasse, nodding and shaking her head at the same time. Pagadan’s contemplative eyes became a little bigger.
“Skip it!” she said apprehensively. “From close up, you look both chewed on and distraught, my girl! What happ— Hey, hang on a moment and I’ll slide in close and take you aboard. Maybe you ought to be home in bed, or something.”
The head withdrew; and Jasse took a deep, sighing breath, raked a snarled strand of black hair out of her forehead and dabbed tentatively at a deep scratch on the back of her hand.
She did look a mess, now that she noticed it—the Greens were badly ripped and streaked with the blue chalk of the pavement over which she had rolled; and her jeweled cap was gone. A moment passed before she realized suddenly that the clinging constrictions of the mental attack were gone, too!
She was still wondering about that as she swung over into the space-skiff, steadied by Pagadan’s gloved hand.
Then, as the skiff’s lock slammed shut behind her, she made another discovery:
Her shield-bracelet hung free, attached to her wrist now only by its safety chain. The shield switch flickered, warningly red, on “Open”—
“Your mind-shield?” The Lannai Agent, measuring a rose-colored liquid carefully from a fat little jug into a cup, absently repeated Jasse’s stunned exclamation. “Probably snagged the bracelet while you were climbing in from the car. It happens.” She glanced around and her eyes caught the light with a wicked crystalline glitter. “Why? Could it matter? Was someone pressuring you?”
“They were before,” Jasse whispered; and suddenly there wasn’t any question about her being frightened! Panic hammered into her brain and stayed; a dizzy shimmering grew before her eyes. Mixed with that came a queer, growing feeling as if something were surging and pulsing within her skull—a wildly expectant feeling of something about to happen.
She realized the Lannai was holding the filled cup to her lips.
“Drink that!” the cool voice ordered. “Whatever you’ve got it’s good for. Then just settle back, relax, and let’s hear what you know!”
* * *
The liquid she had gulped, Jasse noticed, wasn’t really rose-colored as she had thought, but a deep, dim, ruby red, almost black—an enormously quiet color—and with a highly curious slowing-down effect on things, too! For instance, you might realize perfectly well that somewhere, out around the edges of you, you were still horribly upset, with fear-thoughts racing about everywhere at a dizzy speed. Every so often, one of them would turn inwards and come shooting right at you, flashing like a freezing arrow into the deep-red dusk where you were. But just as you started to shrink away from it, you noticed it was getting slower and slower, the farther it came; until finally it just stayed where it was, and then gradually melted away.
They never could get through to reach you. It was rather comical!
It appeared she had asked some question about it, because the big-eyed little humanoid was saying:
“You like the effect, eh? That’s just antishock, little chum! Thought you knew the stuff . . . don’t they teach you anything at Cultures?”
That was funny, too! Cultures, of course, taught you everything there was to know! But wait—hadn’t there been . . . what had there been that she—? Jasse decided to examine that point about Cultures very carefully, some other time.
By and large there seemed to be a good deal of quiet conversation going on around her. Perhaps she was doing some of it, but it was hard to tell; since, frankly, she wasn’t much interested in those outside events any more. And then, for a while, the two tall shapes, the man and the woman, came up again to the barrier in her past and tried to talk to her, as they always did when she was feeling anxious and alone. A little puzzled, because she didn’t feel that way now, Jasse watched them from her side of the barrier, which was where the explosions and shrieking lights were, that had brought terror and hurt and the sudden forgetting which none of Culture’s therapists had been able to lift. Dimly, she could sense the world behind them, to which they wanted her to go—the star-glittering cold and the great silent flows of snow, and the peace and enchantment that were there. But she could make no real effort to reach it now, and in the end the tall shapes seemed to realize that and went away.
Or else, they merely faded out of her sight as the color about her deepened ever more from ruby redness into the ultimate, velvety, all-quieting, all-slowing-down black—
“Wonderful—” Jasse murmured contentedly, asleep.
* * *
“Hallerock?”
“Linked in, Pag! I’m back on the Observation Ship again. Go ahead.”
“Just keep this thought-line down tight! Everything’s working like a charm, so far. I tripped the D.C.’s shield open when I took her aboard, and our good friend Moyuscane came right in, all set to take control and find out whether we actually knew something about him and his setup here or not. Then he discovered I was around, and he’s been lying quiet and just listening through her ever since.”
“What makes him shy of you?” Hallerock inquired.
“He tried a long-range probe at my shields a couple of weeks ago. I slapped him on the beak—some perfectly natural startled-reaction stuff by another telepath, you understand. But he certainly didn’t like it! He went out fast, that time—”
“I don’t blame him,” Hallerock said thoughtfully. “Sometimes you don’t realize your own strength. Does the D.C. really have anything on him?”
“No. It’s about as we suspected. She made some sort of innocent remark—I couldn’t take the chance of digging around in her mind long enough to find out just what—and Moyuscane jumped to the wrong conclusions.”
“I was wondering, you know,” Hallerock admitted, “whether you mightn’t have done some work on the Cultures girl in advance—something that would get her to drop a few bricks at some appropriate occasion.”
“Well, you’re just naturally a suspicious little squirt!” Pagadan replied amiably. “To use Confederacy personnel against their will and knowledge for any such skulduggery is strictly counter-regulation. I advise you to make a note of the fact! However, it was the luckiest sort of coincidence. It should save us a week or two of waiting, especially since you have the hospital ship and staff all prepared. Moyuscane’s got himself a listening-post right in our ranks now, and that’s all he needs to stay reasonably safe—he thinks!”
Hallerock appeared to be digesting this information for a moment. Then his thought came again:
“Where are you at present?”
“Down at the Central City spaceport, still in the Viper’s skiff. The D.C.’s under antishock and asleep on the bunk here.”
“Oh,” said Hallerock, “you’re all ready to start the drive then?”
“Wake up, little brother!” Pagadan advised him. “It started ten minutes ago! The last thing I told the girl before she went down deep was that a Vegan Fleet Hospital Ship was approaching Ulphi with a brand-new, top-secret drug against space-fear, called Kynoleen—a free gift from the Confederacy to the afflicted population of this planet.”
“Well . . . I suppose I’d better set the H-Ship down at the spaceport about an hour from now, then?”
“One hour would be about right. Moyuscane must be in a considerable stew at the prospect of having the Kynoleen disclose the fact that most of the local population is suffering from an artificially imposed space-fear psychosis, but it won’t take him long to see to it that the drug won’t actually be used around here for quite some time. When that’s settled, we’ll let him breathe easier for about three hours. Then I’ll wake up the D.C., make sure he’s listening through her and feed him the big jolt. So see I get that message we’ve prepared half an hour beforehand—three hours and thirty minutes from now! And send it as a straight coded communication, to make it look authentic.”
“All right,” Hallerock said doubtfully. “But wouldn’t it be better to check over the entire schedule once more—just to be sure nothing can go wrong?”
“There’s no need for that!” the Lannai said, surprised. “We’ve got Moyuscane analyzed down to the length of his immortal whiskers, and we’ve worked out the circumstances required to produce the exact effects we want. It’s just a matter of timing it now. You’re not letting yourself get rattled by a Telepath of the Second Order, are you? If he didn’t happen to have the planet under control, this wouldn’t be a job for Galactic Zones at all.”