Telzey Amberdon by James H. Schmitz

She didn’t know what it meant. She opened her eyes again, nerves on edge, and as the psi whisperings receded from her awareness, the side screen showed her Chomir already standing in the contact chamber, looking sleepy and bored. She reached out quickly, switched the center screen back on.

Pitch-blackness appeared before her, gleaming with a suggestion of black glass. After a puzzled instant, Telzey realized she must be looking at the projection field within which the Verifier sometimes produced impressions connected with the search it was conducting. The field hadn’t come into action when the Parlins were in the chamber; there had been nothing to show. Its appearance in the screen now indicated the machine had begun its work on the dog.

Too late to stop it; she could give Gilas no plausible reason for interrupting the hearing at this point. She watched the screen, waiting, her hands gripping the chair.

There was a sudden strong impression of somebody looking at her. Automatically, Telzey glanced around at the blank wall of the cubicle. No one was there, but the feeling persisted.

Then she knew Transcluster’s Verifier had found her.

Her left hand made a panicky flick to her communicator, jabbed down a tiny button. Why had she imagined it would be similar to a human mind, the mind of any living being? This was like being stared at by the sea. And like a vast, cold sea wave it was coming towards her. The bubble snapped tight.

Ordinarily, it might give only a splinter of its attention to the ethics hearings for which it was supposedly here, and to the relatively unimportant people involved in them; so perhaps it wasn’t until this moment that it had become aware some telepathic meddler had been at work on the animal mind it was to investigate . . . and that the meddler was present at the hearing. In any event, it was after the meddler now.

The cold psi wave reached the bubble, rolled over it, receded, came again. An unprotected mind must have been flooded in an instant. As it was, Telzey stayed untouched. It closed over the bubble again, and now it remained.

It might have lasted only for seconds. There was a sense of weight building up, of slow, monstrous pressures, shifting, purposely applied. Then the pressures relaxed and withdrew.

The machine mind was still there, watching. She had the feeling that others watched through it.

She brought out the thought record she had prepared for them, and flicked the bubble shielding away from it. And if that let them see she had never been so scared in her life, the thought record still spoke for itself.

“Take a good look!” she invited.

Almost instantly, she was alone.

Her eyes fastened, somewhat blurrily, on the projection field in the screen. Colors were boiling up in it. Then there was a jarring sensation of opening alien eyes and looking out from them.

How it was done Telzey couldn’t imagine. But she, and presumably everyone else watching the verification field at that moment, was suddenly aware of being inside Chomir’s head. There came a reddish flash, then a wave of rage building up swiftly to blazing fury. The fury receded again.

A picture came into being, in glimpsed fragments and scraps of almost nightmarish vividness, of the white-walled room in which Chomir had found himself when he awoke with the microscopic Askanam device freshly inserted in his brain. As he had done then, he was pacing swiftly and irritably about the room, the walls and a semi-transparent energy barrier at one end flowing past him in the projection field.

Again came the red flash, followed by the surge of rage. The dog stopped in mid-stride, head swinging towards the barrier. A figure moved vaguely behind the barrier. He hurled himself at it. The barrier flung him back, once, twice. As he came smashing up against it for the third time, the scene suddenly froze.

At this distance, only inches away, the energy field was completely transparent. Three people stood in the section of the room beyond. Rodel Parlin the Twelfth a few feet ahead of his parents, right hand holding an instrument, a small but readily recognizable one. His thumb was on a plunger of the instrument, pressing it down. All three stared at the dog.

The projection field went blank.

For a second, Telzey had the feeling of somebody’s screams echoing through her thoughts. It was gone immediately, so she couldn’t be sure. But precisely how Malrue Parlin was reacting to what she had just seen in the Verifier’s projection field was obviously of no particular importance now.

Telzey put the tip of her left forefinger on the second of the two little buttons she’d had programmed recently in her communicator, and pushed it gently down.

* * *

A ComWeb chimed persistently. Half awake, Telzey frowned. She had been dreaming, and there seemed to have been something important about the dream because she was trying to hang on to it. But it faded from her awareness like a puff of thin smoke, and she couldn’t recall what it had been. She woke up all the way just as the ComWeb went silent.

And where was she? Couch in the semi-dark of a big, comfortable room, rustic type, with the smell of pine trees . . . The far wall was a single window and it was night outside. Moving pinpoints of light and a steadier radiance glittered through a pale, ghostly swirling. . . .

Tor Heights . . .

Of course! Tor Heights, the mountain sports resort . . . in starshine with a snowstorm moving past. With the hearing over, Gilas had suggested she go ahead with Chomir and rent a cabin here, so she and Gonwil could relax from recent stresses for a few days before returning to Pehanron College. He and Gonwil would stay on until the posthearing arrangements with the Transcluster adjudicators and the Parlins’ attorneys had been concluded, and then follow. After she’d secured the cabin and fed Chomir, she found herself getting sleepy and curled up for a nap.

That might have been a couple of hours ago.

As she climbed off the couch, the ComWeb began chiming again in the adjoining room. This time the summons was accompanied by Chomir’s attention-requesting rumble. Glancing at her watch, Telzey ran to take the call. She switched on the instrument, and Gonwil’s face appeared in the screen, eyes big and sober.

“Hi!” she said. “Your father and I are leaving Draise in about twenty minutes, Telzey. Thought I’d let you know.”

“Everything over?” Telzey asked.

“Not quite. They still have a lot of details to settle, but they don’t need us around for that. What made it all very simple was that Malrue and Rodel Senior signed up for voluntary Rehabilitation, rather than take Transcluster’s penalties.” She hesitated. “I almost feel sorry for them now.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Telzey said thoughtfully. “They’ve had it coming for years.”

“I know. But still . . . well, I couldn’t have done it! Not to keep from losing the money.”

Telzey admitted she couldn’t have done it either. “What about Junior?”

Gonwil smiled briefly. “He wasn’t having any! He told the adjudicators that losing his Lodis holdings still would leave him enough to be a playboy the rest of his life, and he couldn’t care less about getting placed on Transcluster’s black list. The adjudicators said he was practically frothing! Apparently, they were all in a severe state of shock when the hearing ended.”

“Glad to hear it,” Telzey said. She didn’t find herself feeling in the least sorry for the Parlins. “How will you like having Malrue back in Lodis Associates after they let her out of Rehabilitation?”

“I don’t know just how I would feel about it,” Gonwil said, “but I won’t be there when she comes back. That ruling’s been canceled, and I’m selling to the Bank of Rienne. I decided I’m not really cut out to be a Tayun financier. Besides, I’ve . . . oh, started to develop other interests.”

“Like in the Federation Navy?” Telzey asked.

Gonwil colored slightly. “Perhaps.”

* * *

After she had switched off, Telzey found and pushed the button which started the big fireplace in the main room going, then another button which let the sound of the soft, roaring rush of the storm pass through the cabin. She got a glass of milk and sat down reflectively with it before the fire.

Of course, the Parlins had realized they’d lost the hearing as soon as they saw themselves in the projection field. They must have nearly gone out of their minds for a while. But they couldn’t prove they’d never been in such a room with Chomir, and to dispute a Verifier’s report was useless. What had happened seemed impossible! But they were trapped, and they knew it.

Nevertheless, Telzey thought, it was very unlikely the senior Parlins would have preferred rehabilitation to losing their Lodis stock—if it had been left up to them. That was what had jolted Gonwil: she knew such a decision didn’t really go with the kind of people they were. But it couldn’t be explained to her, or to anybody else, that the decision hadn’t been their own.

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