Agent of Vega and Other Stories by James H. Schmitz

“They all were,” Iliff recollected, without noticeable enthusiasm. “Well, I’ll see what turns up.”

“That’s fine!” The Co-ordinator brightened visibly. He added, “We wouldn’t, of course, want you to take any unnecessary risks—”

* * *

For perhaps half a minute after the visualization tank of his telepath transmitter had faded back to its normal translucent and faintly luminous green, Iliff continued to stare into it.

Back on Jeltad, the capitol planet of the Confederacy, fourteen thousand light-years away, the Co-ordinator’s attention was turning to some other infinitesimal-seeming but significant crisis in the Department’s monstrous periphery. The chances were he would not think of Iliff again, or of Zone Seventeen Eighty-two, until Iliff’s final mission report came in—or failed to come in within the period already allotted it by the Department’s automatic monitors.

In either event, the brain screened by the Co-ordinator’s conversational inanities would revert once more to that specific problem then, for as many unhurried seconds, minutes or, it might be, hours as it required. It was one of the three or four human brains in the galaxy for which Zone Agent Iliff had ever felt anything remotely approaching genuine respect.

“How far are we from Gull now?” he said without turning his head.

A voice seemed to form itself in the air a trifle above and behind him.

“A little over eight hours, cruising speed—”

“As soon as I get the reports off the pigeon from Jeltad, step it up so we get there in four,” Iliff said. “I think I’ll be ready about that time.”

“The pigeon just arrived,” the voice replied. It was not loud, but it was a curiously big voice with something of the overtones of an enormous bronze gong in it. It was also oddly like a cavernous amplification of Iliff’s own type of speech.

The agent turned to a screen on his left, in which a torpedo-like twenty-foot tube of metal had appeared, seemingly suspended in space and spinning slowly about its axis. Actually, it was some five miles from the ship—which was as close as it was healthy to get to a homing pigeon at the end of its voyage—and following it at the ship’s exact rate of speed, though it was driven by nothing except an irresistible urge to get to its “roost,” the pattern of which had been stamped in its molecules. The roost was on Iliff’s ship, but the pigeon would never get there. No one knew just what sort of subdimensions it flashed through on its way to its objective or what changes were wrought on it before it reappeared, but early experiments with the gadget had involved some highly destructive explosions at its first contact with any solid matter in normal space.

So now it was held by barrier at a safe distance while its contents were duplicated within the ship. Then something lethal flickered from the ship to the pigeon and touched it; and it vanished with no outward indication of violence.

For a time, Iliff became immersed in the dossiers provided both by Interstellar and his own department. The ship approached and presently drove through the boundaries of Zone Seventeen Eighty-two, and the big voice murmured:

“Three hours to Gull.”

“All right,” Iliff said, still absently. “Let’s eat.”

Nearly another hour passed before he spoke again. “Send her this. Narrow-beam telepath—Gull itself should be close enough, I think. If you can get it through—”

He stood up, yawned, stretched and bent, and straightened again.

“You know,” he remarked suddenly, “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the old girl wasn’t so wacky, after all. What I mean is,” he explained, “she really might need a Zone Agent.”

“Is it going to be another unpredictable mission?” the voice inquired.

“Aren’t they always—when the man picks them for us? What was that?”

There was a moment’s silence. Then the voice told him, “She’s got your message. She’ll be expecting you.”

“Fast!” Iliff said approvingly. “Now listen. On Gull, we shall be old Trader Casselmath with his stock of exotic and expensive perfumes. So get yourself messed up for the part—but don’t spill any of the stuff, this time.”

* * *

The suspect’s name was Deel. For the past ten years he had been a respected—and respectable—citizen and merchant of the mono-planet System of Gull. He was supposed to have come there from his birthplace, Number Four of the neighboring System of Lycanno.

But the microstructural plates the operative made of him proved he was the pirate Tahmey who, very probably, had once been a middling big shot among the ill-famed Ghant Spacers. The Bureau of Interstellar Crime had him on record; and it was a dogma of criminology that microstructural identification was final and absolute—that the telltale patterns could not be duplicated, concealed, or altered to any major degree without killing the organism.

The operative’s people, however, were telepaths, and she was an adept, trained in the widest and most intensive use of the faculty. For a Lannai it was natural to check skeptically, in her own manner, the mechanical devices of another race.

If she had not been an expert she would have been caught then, on her first approach. The mind she attempted to tap was guarded.

By whom or what was a question she did not attempt to answer immediately. There were several of these watch-dogs, of varying degrees of ability. Her thought faded away from the edge of their watchfulness before their attention was drawn to it. It slid past them and insinuated itself deftly through the crude electronic thought-shields used by Tahmey. Such shields were a popular commercial article, designed to protect men with only an average degree of mental training against the ordinary telepathic prowler and entirely effective for that purpose. Against her manner of intrusion they were of no use at all.

But it was a shock to discover then that she was in no way within the mind of Tahmey! This was, in literal fact, the mind of the man named Deel—for the past ten years a citizen of Gull, before that of the neighboring System of Lycanno.

The fact was, to her at least, quite as indisputable as the microstructural evidence that contradicted it. This was not some clumsily linked mass of artificial memory tracts and habit traces, but a living, matured mental personality. It showed few signs of even as much psychosurgery as would be normal in a man of Deel’s age and circumstances.

But if it was Deel, why should anyone keep a prosperous, reasonably honest and totally insignificant planeteer under telepathic surveillance? She considered investigating the unknown watchers, but the aura of cold, implacable alertness she had sensed in her accidental near-contact with them warned her not to force her luck too far.

“After all,” she explained apologetically, “I had no way of estimating their potential.”

“No,” Iliff agreed, “you hadn’t. But I don’t think that was what stopped you.”

The Lannai operative looked at him steadily for a moment. Her name was Pagadan and, though no more human than a jellyfish, she was to human eyes an exquisitely designed creature. It was rather startling to realize that her Interstellar dossier described her as a combat-type mind—which implied a certain ruthlessness, at the very least—and also that she had been sent to Gull to act, among other things, as an executioner.

“Now what did you mean by that?” she inquired, on a note of friendly wonder.

“I meant,” Iliff said carefully, “that I’d now like to hear all the little details you didn’t choose to tell Interstellar. Let’s start with your trip to Lycanno.”

“Oh, I see!” Pagadan said. “Yes, I went to Lycanno, of course—” She smiled suddenly and became with that, he thought, extraordinarily beautiful, though the huge silvery eyes with their squared black irises, which widened or narrowed flickeringly with every change of mood or shift of light, did not conform exactly to any standard human ideal. No more did her hair, a silver-shimmering fluffy crest of something like feathers—but the general effect, Iliff decided, remained somehow that of a remarkably attractive human woman in permanent fancy dress. According to the reports he’d studied recently, it had pleased much more conservative tastes than his own.

“You’re a clever little man, Zone Agent,” she said thoughtfully. “I believe I might as well be frank with you. If I’d reported everything I know about this case—though for reasons I shall tell you I really found out very little—the Bureau would almost certainly have recalled me. They show a maddening determination to see that I shall come to no harm while working for them.” She looked at him doubtfully. “You understand that, simply because I’m a Lannai, I’m an object of political importance just now?”

Iliff nodded.

“Very well. I discovered in Lycanno that the case was a little more than I could handle alone.” She shivered slightly, the black irises flaring wide with what was probably reminiscent fright.

“But I did not want to be recalled. My people,” she said a little coldly, “will accept the proposed alliance only if they are to share in your enterprises and responsibilities. They do not wish to be shielded or protected, and it would have a poor effect on them if they learned that we, their first representatives among you, had been relieved of our duties whenever they threatened to involve us in personal danger.”

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