Hallerock scowled and laughed. “Well, I’ve been wondering all this time about those Bjantas. Now you take out after them—and I can hang around Ulphi dishing out a little therapy to a D.C. neurotic.”
“We all start out small,” said the Lannai. “Look at me—would you believe that a few short years ago I was nothing but the High Queen of Lar-Sancaya? Not,” she added loyally, “that there’s a sweeter planet anywhere, from the Center to the Clouds or beyond!”
“And that stretch distinctly includes Ulphi,” Hallerock stated, unreconciled to his fate. “When’s the new Agent coming out to this hive of morons?”
Pagadan slid to her feet off the edge of the desk and surveyed him pityingly. “You poor chump! What I gave you just now was Advance Mission Information, wasn’t it? Ever hear of a time that wasn’t restricted to Zone Agent levels? Or do I have to tell you officially that you’ve just finished putting in a week as a Z.A. under orders?”
Hallerock stared at her. His mouth opened and shut and opened again. “Here, wait a—” he began.
She waved him into silence with both fists.
“Close it kindly, and listen to the last instructions I’m giving you! Ulphi’s being taken in as a Class 18 System-outpost garrison. I imagine even you don’t have to be told that the only thing not strictly routine about the procedure will be the elimination of every traceable connection between its present culture and Moyuscane’s personal influence on it—and our recent corrective operation?”
“Well, of course!” Hallerock said hoarsely. “But look here, Pag—”
“Considerable amount of detail work in that, naturally—it’s why the monitors at Central have assigned you four whole months for the job. When you’re done here, report back to Jeltad. They’ve already started roughing out your robot, but they’ll need you around to transfer basic impulse patterns and so on. A couple of months more, and you’ll be equipped for any dirty work they can think up—and I gather the Chief’s already thought up some sweet ones especially for you! So God help you—and now I’m off. Unless you’ve got some more questions?”
Hallerock looked at her, his face impassive now. If she had been human he couldn’t have told her. But, unlike most of the men of Pagadan’s acquaintance, Hallerock never forgot that the Lannai were of another kind. It was one of the things she liked about him.
“No, I haven’t any questions just now,” he said. “But if I’m put to work by myself on even a job like this, I’m going to feel lost and alone. I just don’t have the feeling that I can be trusted with Z.A. responsibility.”
Pagadan waved him off again, impatiently.
“The feeling will grow on you,” she assured him.
And then she was gone.
* * *
As motion and velocity were normally understood, the Viper’s method of homeward progress was something else again. But since the only exact definition of it was to be found in a highly complex grouping of mathematical concepts, such terms would have to do.
She was going home, then, at approximately half her normal speed, her automatic receptors full out. Pagadan sat at her desk, blinking reflectively into the big vision tank, while she waited for a call that had to be coming along any moment now.
She felt no particular concern about it. In fact, she could have stated to the minute how long it would take Hallerock to recover far enough from the state of slight shock she’d left him in to reach out for the set of dossier-plates lying on his desk. A brief section of System Chief Jasse’s recent behavior-history, with the motivation patterns underlying it, was revealed in those plates, in the telepathic shorthand which turned any normally active hour of an individual’s life into as complete a basis for analysis as ordinary understanding required.
She’d stressed that job just enough to make sure he’d attend to it before turning to any other duties. And Hallerock was a quick worker. It should take him only three or four minutes to go through the plates, the first time.
But then he’d just sit there for about a minute, frowning down at them, looking a little baffled and more than a little worried. Poor old Hallerock! Now he couldn’t even handle a simple character-analysis any more unaided!
Grimly he’d rearrange the dossier-plates, tap them together into a neat little pile, and start all over again. He’d go through each one very slowly and carefully now, determined to catch the mistake that had to be there!
Pagadan grinned faintly.
Almost to the calculated second, his search-thought came flickering after her down the curving line to Jeltad. As the Viper’s receptors caught it and brought it in, she flipped over the transmitter switch:
“Linked, Hallerock—nice reach you’ve got! What gives, my friend?”
There was a short pause; then:
“Pag, what’s wrong with her—the D.C., I mean?”
“Wrong with her?” Pagadan returned, on a note of mild surprise.
“In the plates,” Hallerock explained carefully. “She’s an undeveloped parapsychic, all right—a Telep-Three, at the least. But she’s also under a master-delusion—thinks she’s a physical monster of some kind! Which she obviously isn’t.”
The Lannai hesitated, letting a trickle of uncertainty through to him to indicate a doubtful mental search. There wasn’t, after all, anything that took quite such ticklish, sensitive handling as a parapsychic mind that had gone thoroughly off the beam.
“Oh, that!” she said, suddenly and obviously relieved. “That’s no delusion, Hallerock—just one of those typical sub-level exaggerations. No doubt I overemphasized it a little. There’s nothing wrong with her really—she’s A-Class plus. Very considerably plus, as you say. But she’s not a Vegan.”
“Not a Vegan? Well, why should—”
“And, of course, she’s always been quite sensitive about that physical peculiarity!” Pagadan resumed, with an air of happy discovery. “Even as a child. But with the Traditionalist training she was getting, she couldn’t consciously admit any awareness of isolation from other human beings. It’s just that our D.C.’s a foundling, Hallerock. I should have mentioned it, I suppose. They picked her up in space, and she’s of some unidentified human breed that grows around eight foot tall—”
* * *
Back in the study of her mobile-unit, System Chief Jasse wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and pocketed her handkerchief decisively.
She’d blubbered for an hour after she first woke up. The Universe of the Traditionalists had been such a nice, tidy, easy-to-understand place to live in, even if she’d never felt completely at her ease there! It had its problems to be met and solved, of course; and there were the lesser, nonhuman races, to be coolly pitied for their imperfections and kept under control for their own good, and everybody else’s. But that A-Class humanity could work itself into such a dismally gruesome mess as it had done on Ulphi—that just wasn’t any part of the Traditionalist picture! They didn’t want any such information there. They could live more happily without it.
Well, let them live happily then! She was still Jasse, the spaceborn, and in return for knocking down the mental house of cards she’d been living in, the tricky little humanoid at any rate had made her aware of some unsuspected possibilities of her own which she could now develop.
She began to re-examine those discoveries about herself with a sort of new, cool, speculating interest. There were two chains of possibilities really—that silent, cold, whitely enchanted world of her childhood dreams came floating up in her mind again, clear and distinct under its glittering night-sky now that the barriers that had blurred it in her memory had been dissolved. The home-world of her distant race! She could go to it if she chose, straight and unerringly, and find the warm human strength and companionship that waited there. That knowledge had been returned to her, too.
But was that what she wanted most?
There was another sort of companionship, the Lannai had implied, and a different sort of satisfaction she could gain, beyond that of placidly living out her life among her own kind on even the most beautiful of frozen worlds. They were constructing a civilized galaxy just now, and they would welcome her on the job.
* * *
She’d bathed, put on a fresh uniform and was pensively waiting for her breakfast to present itself from the wall-butler in the study, when the unit’s automatic announcer addressed her:
“Galactic Zones Agent Hallerock requesting an interview.”
Jasse started and half turned in her chair to look at the closed door. Now what did that mean? She didn’t want to see any of them just yet! She intended to make up her own mind on the matter.
She said, a little resentfully:
“Well . . . let him right in, please!”
The study door opened as she flipped the lock-switch on her desk. A moment later, Hallerock was bowing to her from the entrance hall just beyond it.