“We knew this psi would be arriving on Orado today,” he went on. “We’d had no previous contact with her, and only one earlier report which indicated she had acted as a xenotelepath—that is, she had been in mental communication with members of a telepathic nonhuman race. That particular ability appears in a relatively small number of psis, but its possessor is more often than not a Class One who fails to develop any associated talents.
“The check made at the spaceport showed immediately that this youngster is not Class One. She is beginning to learn to read human minds, with limitations perhaps due chiefly to a lack of experience, and she has discovered the art of telephypnosis, which is a misnamed process quite unrelated to ordinary hypnotic methods, though it produces similar general effects. These developments have all taken place within the past few weeks.”
The visitor gave him a startled look. “You make that child sound rather dangerous!”
Boddo shrugged. “As far as this office is concerned, she is at present simply a Class Two, with a quite good though still largely latent potential. She picked up a scrambled telepathic impulse directed deliberately at her, but was not aware then that her mind was being scanned by our machine. A really accomplished Class Two would sense that. Neither did she realize that the machine was planting a compulsion in her mind.”
“A compulsion?” the official repeated.
Boddo considered, said, “In effect, she’s now provided with an artificial conscience regarding her paranormal talents which suggests, among other things, that she should seek proper authorization in using them. That’s the standard procedure we follow after identifying a Class Two.”
“It prevents them from using their abilities?”
“Not necessarily. It does tend to keep them out of minor mischief, but if they’re sufficiently self-willed and motivated, they’re quite likely to override the compulsion. That’s particularly true if they discover what’s happened, as some of them do. Still, it places a degree of restraint on them, and eventually leads a good number to the Psychology Service . . . which, of course, is what we want.”
The visitor reflected. “What would you have done if the girl had realized the Customs machine was investigating her mind?”
Boddo smiled briefly. “Depending on her reactions, the procedure might have become a little more involved at that point. The ultimate result would have been about the same—the compulsion would have been installed.”
There was a pause. The official looked thoughtful. He said finally, “You feel then that the Service’s method of supervising psis is adequate?”
“It appears to keep the Class Two psis from causing trouble well enough,” Boddo said. “Naturally, it isn’t completely effective. For one thing, we can’t expect to get a record of all of them. Then there’s a divergent group called the unpredictables. Essentially they’re just that. You might say the one thing they show in common is a highly erratic development of psionic ability.”
“What do you do about them?”
Boddo said, “We have no formula for handling unpredictables. It wouldn’t be worth the trouble to try to devise one which was flexible enough to meet every possibility. They’re very rarely encountered.”
“So rarely that there’s no reason to worry about them?”
Boddo scratched his cheek, observed, “The Service doesn’t regard an unpredictable as a cause for serious concern.”
Chapter 2
Scowling with concentration, Telzey Amberdon sat, eyes closed, knees drawn up and arms locked about them, on the couch-bed in her side of duplex bungalow 18-19, Student Court Ninety-two, of Pehanron College. When she’d looked over at the rose-glowing pointers of a wall clock on the opposite side of the room, they had told her there wasn’t much more than an hour left before Orado’s sun would rise. That meant she had been awake all night, though she was only now beginning to feel waves of drowsiness.
Except for the glow from the clock, the room was dark, its windows shielded. She had thought of turning on lights, but there was a chance that a spot check by the college’s automatic monitors would record the fact; and then Miss Eulate, the Senior Counselor of Section Ninety-two, was likely to show up during the morning to remind Telzey that a fifteen-year-old girl, even if she happened to be a privileged Star Honor Student, simply must get in her full and regular sleep periods.
It would be inconvenient just now if such an admonishment was accompanied by a suspension of honor student privileges. So the lights stayed out. Light, after all, wasn’t a requirement in sitting there and probing about in an unsuspecting fellow-creature’s mind, which was what Telzey had been engaged in during the night.
If the mind being probed had known what was going on, it might have agreed with Miss Eulate. But it didn’t. It was the mind of a very large dog named Chomir, owned by Gonwil Lodis who occupied the other side of the duplex and was Telzey’s best college friend, though her senior by almost four years.
Both Gonwil and Chomir were asleep, but Chomir slept fitfully. He was not given to prolonged concentration on any one subject, and for hours Telzey had kept him wearily half dreaming, over and over, about certain disturbing events which he hadn’t really grasped when they occurred. He passed most of the night in a state of vague irritation, though his inquisitor was careful not to let the feeling become acute enough to bring him awake.
It wasn’t pleasant for Telzey either. Investigating that section of Chomir’s mind resembled plodding about in a dark swamp agitated by violent convulsions and covered by a smothering fog. From time to time, it became downright nerve-wracking as blasts of bewildered fury were transmitted to her with firsthand vividness out of the animal’s memories. The frustrating side of it, however, was that the specific bits of information for which she searched remained obscured by the blurry, sporadic, nightmarish reliving which seemed to be the only form in which those memories could be made to show up just now. And it was extremely important to get the information because she suspected Chomir’s experiences might mean that somebody was planning the deliberate murder of Gonwil Lodis.
She had got into the investigation almost by accident. Gonwil was one of the very few persons to whom Telzey had mentioned anything about her recently acquired ability to pry into other minds, and she had been on a walk with Chomir in the wooded hills above Pehanron College during the afternoon. Without apparent cause, Chomir suddenly had become angry, stared and sniffed about for a moment, then plunged bristling and snarling into the bushes. His mistress sprinted after him in high alarm, calling out a warning to anyone within earshot, because Chomir, though ordinarily a very well-mannered beast, was physically capable of taking a human being or somebody else’s pet dog apart in extremely short order. But she caught up with him within a few hundred yards and discovered that his anger appeared to have spent itself as quickly as it had developed. Instead, he was acting now in an oddly confused and worried manner.
Gonwil thought he might have scented a wild animal. But his behavior remained a puzzle—Chomir had always treated any form of local wildlife they encountered as being beneath his notice. Half seriously, since she wasn’t entirely convinced of Telzey’s mind-reading ability, Gonwil suggested she might use it to find out what had disturbed him; and Telzey promised to try it after lights-out when Chomir had settled down to sleep. It would be her first attempt to study a canine mind, and it might be interesting.
Chomir turned out to be readily accessible to a probe, much more so than the half-dozen nontelepathic human minds Telzey had looked into so far, where many preliminary hours of search had been needed to pick up an individual’s thought patterns and get latched solidly into them. With Chomir she was there in around thirty minutes. For a while, most of what she encountered appeared grotesquely distorted and incomprehensible; then something like a translating machine in Telzey’s brain, which was the xenotelepathic ability, suddenly clicked in, and she found herself beginning to change the dog’s sleep impressions into terms which had a definite meaning to her. It was a little like discovering the key to the operation of an unfamiliar machine. She spent an hour investigating and experimenting with a number of its mechanisms; then, deciding she could control Chomir satisfactorily for her purpose, she shifted his thoughts in the direction of what had happened that afternoon.
Around an hour or so later again, she stopped to give them both a rest.
The event in the hills didn’t look any less mystifying now, but it had begun to acquire definitely sinister overtones. If Chomir had known of the concept of unreality, he might have applied it to what had occurred. He had realized suddenly and with a blaze of rage that somewhere nearby was a man whom he remembered from a previous meeting as representing a great danger to Gonwil. He had rushed into the woods with every intention of tearing off the man’s head, but then the fellow suddenly was gone again.