Telzey Amberdon by James H. Schmitz

At any rate, she was perfectly safe here. The door to the room was locked; she had one key to it, Gilas Amberdon another. She was to let no one but Telzey in, and to make sure that no one else attempted to enter, Chomir was on guard in the corridor outside. It was comfortable to remember now that if Chomir was no shining light when it came to the standard doggy tricks, the protection of a human being was as solidly stamped into his nature as the gory skills of the arena. While he could move, only Gonwil or Telzey would open that door until one of them convinced him he could stop being a watchdog again.

And now that she was alone, Gonwil thought, there was something she should take care of promptly.

Opening the overnight bag she had taken from the college, she arranged her study materials on a desk shelf, then brought out the miniature camouflaged communicator which had come with the mail in the morning. She had dropped Junior’s unwanted token of affection in with the library and other items, intending to show it to Telzey later on.

She studied the tiny instrument a moment, pensively biting her lip. There had been no opportunity to tell Telzey about it, so no one here knew she had the thing. The lack of communicators among the room furnishings might mean that they’d rather she didn’t send messages outside. But they hadn’t said so.

And it seemed only fair to send Malrue a reassuring word through Junior now. There would be no need to mention the Bank of Rienne’s investigation. She could tell Junior a very harmless story, one designed only to keep his mother from becoming completely distraught when she heard from Pehanron College that Gonwil had chosen to disappear.

Gonwil glanced back a moment at the door. Then she placed the communicator in the palm of her left hand, and shifted the emerald arrowhead in its cover design a quarter turn to the right. That, according to the instructions which had come with it, made it ready for use. She placed it on the desk shelf, and pressed down with a fingertip on the golden pinhead stud in the center of the cover.

A slender fan of golden light sprang up and out from around the rim of the communicator, trembled, widened, and held steady. It was perhaps three feet across, not much over two high, slightly concave. This was the vision screen.

Now, if she turned the little arrowhead to the third notch, and Junior’s communicator was set to receive, he should hear her signal.

Some ten or twelve seconds passed. Then Rodel Parlin the Twelfth’s handsome, narrow face was suddenly there in the fan-shaped golden light screen before her.

“Well, at last!” he exclaimed. “I’ve been trying to call you but . . .”

“I didn’t switch it on until just now,” Gonwil admitted.

“Busy as all that with your tests?” Junior’s gaze shifted past her, went around the room. “What’s this?” he inquired. “Did Pehanron actually change your quarters because of the vendettist scare?”

So the Parlins hadn’t been told she was gone. Gonwil smiled.

“Pehanron didn’t!” she said. “I did. The fuss was getting too much for my nerves, so I sneaked out!”

For a moment, Junior looked startled. “You’ve left the college?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, I . . . where are you now?”

“I’m not telling anybody,” she said. “I’ve gone underground, so to speak, and I intend to stay out of sight until the thing blows over.”

“Well, uh, Malrue . . .”

“I know. That’s why I called the first chance I had. I don’t want Malrue to worry unnecessarily, so you tell her I’m in a perfectly safe place. Nobody here knows me, so nobody—including vendettists—can find out where I’ve gone. Tell Malrue I’m being very careful, and whenever you all decide there’s no more danger, I’ll come out again.”

Junior studied her, frowning doubtfully.

“Malrue,” he observed, “isn’t going to like that very much!”

“Yes, I . . . just a moment!” Gonwil turned towards the door. Sounds of scratching came from it, then a deep whine. “That’s Chomir! He heard us talking, and I’d better let him in before he arouses the neighborhood. It’s difficult enough to be inconspicuous with him around!”

“I can imagine.”

Gonwil unlocked the door and opened it partly, glancing up the hall as Chomir slid through into the room, ears pricked. The door at the far end of the corridor was closed; he hadn’t been heard in the office. She locked the door quietly again. Chomir stared for an instant at the image in the view-field, took a sniff at the air to confirm that while he’d heard Junior’s voice, Junior was not physically present. Chomir was familiar with the phenomenon of communicator screens and the ghosts that periodically appeared in them. Satisfied, he sat down beside the door.

“I was wondering whether you’d left him behind,” Junior remarked as Gonwil came back.

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that to Chomir! About Malrue . . .”

He grinned. “I know! She does carry on rather badly at times like this! I’ll be tactful in what I tell her.”

“Thanks,” Gonwil said gratefully. “I wouldn’t want her to feel that I’m avoiding her in particular. But would you please not tell her about sending me a personal communicator? Say I was just using a regular ComWeb in making this call. Otherwise, she’d want to argue me out of this, and I’d hate to have to refuse her.”

“You can depend on me. When will you call again?”

“Sometime early tomorrow?”

“I’ll be waiting.” He turned his head to the left, appeared to listen. Then he looked back at her.

“I believe I hear Malrue coming,” he said quietly. “Goodbye, Gonwil!”

” ‘By, Junior!”

His face vanished. Still smiling, Gonwil bent over the communicator, searching for the pinhead stud. Junior had been on his best behavior this time; she was very glad she’d decided to make the call.

She pushed down the stud, and the light screen disappeared.

From the far end of the corridor outside came the sound of a violently slammed door.

Startled, Gonwil swung about. Footsteps were pounding up the short corridor now, but she wasn’t aware of them. She stood dead-still, staring.

The white shape crouched across the room, ears back and down, huge teeth bared, could hardly be recognized as Chomir. He might have been listening to the approaching steps. But then the snarling head moved. The eyes found Gonwil, and instantly he was coming towards her in a flat, long spring, jaws wide.

* * *

As she watched Chomir move off beside Gonwil through the entrance tunnel to the Kyth hideout where the airvan had stopped, Telzey put out a tentative probe towards him.

This time, she was inside the dog’s mind at once and so definitely that she could sense him striding along and the touch of the hard flooring beneath his pads. Satisfied, she withdrew. The contacts established during the night’s work hadn’t faded; she could resume her investigation immediately.

Left alone in the room reserved for her, less than fifty feet from the one to which they had conducted Gonwil, Telzey settled into an armchair and closed her eyes. Chomir still seemed to be moving about, but that made no difference. At this stage, she could work below his awareness without disturbing him or interfering with his activities.

She picked up the familiar memory chains within seconds, and then hesitated. Something had changed here. There was a sense of being drawn quietly away from the memories towards another area of mind.

She didn’t know what it meant. But since psi seemed sometimes to work independently on problems in which one was involved, this might turn out to be a short-cut to the information for which she had been digging throughout the night. Telzey let herself shift in the indicated direction. There was a momentary odd feeling of sinking, then of having made a transition, of being somewhere else.

And it had been a short-cut. This was an aspect of mind she hadn’t explored before, but it wasn’t difficult to understand. A computer’s processes might have presented a somewhat similar pattern: impersonal, unaware, enormously detailed and busy. Its universe was the living animal body that generated it, and its function was essentially to see to it that its universe remained physically in good operating condition. As Telzey grasped that, her attention shifted once more—now to a disturbance point in the Chomir universe. Something was wrong there. The body-mind knew it was wrong but was unable to do anything about it.

Telzey studied the disturbance point absorbedly. Suddenly its meaning became clear; and then she knew this was the information she had come to find. And it was very ugly and disturbing information.

She opened her eyes. Her thoughts seemed sluggish, and for some seconds the room looked hazy and blurred about her. Then, as the body-mind patterns faded from her awareness, she discovered she was back in the ordinary sort of contact with Chomir—very clear, strong contact. She had a feeling of catching Gonwil’s voice impressions through him.

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