The only people who could see a connection between the dead spook and Robane were the smugglers who’d provided him with an animal of that kind, and they’d have no interest in the fact that it was dead. If anyone who might be associated with Robane in his general work with psi machines became aware of his present condition, the mental damage would be attributed to a miscalculated experiment. Psi machines were considered uncertain devices in that respect. In any case, there was nothing to link Telzey to him. Nor was there really any reason why she couldn’t go quietly back to Melna Park at any time to conclude her investigation. She wouldn’t need to come within half a mile of the house for that.
She kept putting it off. She wasn’t quite sure why. When the weekend came around, she simply found herself unwilling to make the trip. Robane was unfinished business. It wasn’t usually her way at all to leave unfinished business lying around. But she told herself she’d take care of it the following week.
One night then she had a dream. It was an uncomfortable, sweaty, nightmarish sort of dream, though nothing much really happened. It seemed to go on for some time. She appeared to be floating in the air near Robane’s house, watching it from various angles, aware that Robane watched her in turn, hating her for what she’d done to him and waiting for a chance to destroy her. In the dream, Telzey reminded herself quite reasonably that it wasn’t possible—Robane couldn’t remember what she’d done or anything about her; he wouldn’t recognize her if she were standing before him. Then she realized suddenly that it wasn’t Robane but the house itself which watched her with such spiteful malice, and that something was about to happen to her. She woke up with a start of fright.
That settled it. She lay awake a while, considering. A weekend was coming up again. She could fly to Melna Park after her last scheduled lecture in the afternoon, and register at a park hotel. She’d have two full days if necessary to wind up matters at Robane’s house. That certainly would be time enough. She’d extract the remaining information she wanted from him, then see to it that somebody among the park authorities discovered a good reason to pay the recluse a visit at his home. When they saw the condition he was in, they’d transfer him to an institution; and Robane shouldn’t be disturbing her sleep again.
* * *
He did, however, that night in her room at the park hotel. Or something did. She’d retired soon after dinner, wanting to get off to an early start, found then that she wasn’t at all sleepy, tuned in somnomusic, switched on the window screen, and went over to it in the darkened room. She stood there a while, looking out. In the cluster light, Melna Park sloped away, dim and vast, toward the northern mountains. Robane’s house lay behind a fold of the mountains. At the restricted pace possible in the park, it would take her almost four hours to get to the house from the hotel tomorrow—twice the time she’d spent crossing half a continent from Pehanron College in the evening.
The music was producing drowsiness in her, but tensions seemed to fight it. It was almost an hour before she got to bed and fell asleep, and it turned then into an uncomfortable night. There were periods of disagreeable dreaming, of which she could recall only scraps when she woke up. For the most part, she napped fitfully; kept coming awake. Something in her simply didn’t want to relax; and as she began to go to sleep and her mental screens loosened normally, it drew them abruptly tight, bringing her back to weary alertness. She was up at daybreak at last, heavy-lidded and irritable. But a cold shower opened her eyes, and after she’d had breakfast, she seemed reasonably refreshed.
Ten minutes later, she was on her way to Robane’s house through a breezy late-autumn morning. Melna Park was famed for varied and spectacular color changes in its vegetation as winter approached, and the tourist traffic was much heavier now than three weeks ago. Almost everywhere Telzey looked, aircars floated past, following the rolling contours of the ground. The Cloudsplitter moved along at the steady thirty miles an hour to which it was restricted. She’d slipped the canopy down; sun warmth seeped through her, while a chilled wind intermittently whipped her hair about her cheeks. Nighttime tensions grew vague and unreal. The relaxation which had eluded Telzey at the hotel came to her, and she was tempted to ground the car and settle down for an hour’s nap in the sunshine before going on. But she wanted to reach the house early enough to be finished with Robane before evening.
Near noon, she reached the series of mile-wide plateaus dropping from the point where Cil Canyon cut through the mountains to the southern forests where Robane’s house stood. She circled in toward the house, brought it presently into the car’s viewscreen. It looked precisely as she remembered seeing it in the cluster light, neat, trim, quiet. A maintenance robot moved slowly about in the garden.
She considered relaxing her screens and directing a probing thought to Robane’s mind from where she was. But she had most of the day left, and a remnant of uneasiness made her wary. She dropped the car behind a rise which hid Robane’s house from her, moved on back of the rise for about a mile and settled to the ground at the edge of a stand of trees. Carrying a pocket telscreen, she walked to the top of the rise and across it, threading her way among the trees until she came to a point from where she could watch the house without being picked up in scanning devices from there.
She kept the house area in the telscreen for about ten minutes. The only sign of life was the tending machine in the garden. That was out of sight in some shrubbery for a while, then emerged and began moving back and forth across one of the lawns while a silvery mist arising from the shrubbery indicated a watering system had been turned on. Finally the robot trundled to the side of the house and paused before it. A wide door slid open in the wall, and the machine rolled inside.
Telzey put the telscreen down. She’d had a look through the door before it closed. A large aircar stood behind it. Robane, as was to be expected in his present state, should be at home.
And now, she decided, a light—a very light—probe. Just enough to make quite sure Robane was, in fact, as she’d left him, that there’d been no unforeseen developments of any kind around here.
Leaning against the sun-warm trunk of a tall tree she closed her eyes and thinned the screens about her mind, let them open out. She felt a sudden tug of anxiety resistance, but the screens stayed open. The blended whispers of life currents about her began to flow into her awareness.
Everything seemed normal . . . She flicked a thread of thought down to the forest then, to Robane’s house, touched for a moment the patterns she remembered.
Something like a shout flashed through her mind. Not words, nothing even partly verbalized; nevertheless, it was a clear sharp command, accompanied by a gust of hate like a curse. The hate was directed at her. The command—
In the split instant of shock as her screens contracted into a tight hard shield, she’d seemed aware of a blurred dark image rushing toward her. Then the image, the command-and-hate impressions, the touch of Robane’s mind, were blocked off together by the shield.
Telzey opened her eyes, glanced about. For long seconds, she remained motionless. The trees stirred above as a breeze rustled past. Here in the world of material reality, nothing seemed changed or different. But what had she run into at Robane’s house?
A sound reached her . . . the rolling thunder of explosion. It faded away, echoing across the plain.
It seemed to have come from the forest to the south. Telzey listened a moment, moved forward until she could look out from behind the trees.
An ugly rolling cloud of yellow smoke partly concealed the area where the house had stood. But it was clear that house and garden had been violently obliterated.
And that, Telzey thought numbly, was in part her answer.
* * *
By the time she got back to the Cloudsplitter and lifted it from the ground, tourist aircars were gliding in cautiously toward the site of the explosion. A ranger car screamed down out of the sky, passed above her and vanished. Telzey remained behind the rise and continued to move to the west. She was almost certain that whoever had blown up Robane in his house wasn’t physically in the area. But there was no need to expose herself any more than she’d already done.