Robane had been used as bait—bait to trap a psi. The fact that he’d been destroyed then indicated that whoever set the trap believed the psi for whom it was intended had been caught. And there must be a reason for that belief. In whatever she did now, she’d better be extremely careful.
She brought the thought impressions she’d recorded back into awareness, examined them closely.
They were brief but strong and vivid. She began to distinguish details she hadn’t consciously noted in the instant of sensing them. This psi was human, must be; and yet the flavor of the thought forms suggested almost an alien species. They were heavy with arrogance as if the psi himself felt he was different from and superior to human beings. The thrust of hard power carrying the impressions had been as startling to her as the sudden angry roar of an animal nearby. She recalled feeling that a curse was being pronounced on her.
And blended in was a communication—not intended for her, and not too clear. It was, Telzey thought, the sort of mental shortcode which developed among associated telepaths: a flick of psi which might transmit an involved meaning. She could guess the basic meaning here. Success! The quarry was snared! He’d had one or more companions. His own kind, whatever it was.
Finally, the third part, the least clear section of the thought structure. It had death in it. Her death. It was a command; and she was almost certain it had been directed at the indistinct shape she’d seemed to glimpse rushing toward her. Something that might have been a large animal.
Her death . . . how? Telzey swallowed uncomfortably. They might have been involved with the ring which had catered to Robane’s criminal inclinations—minds like that would have no objection to delivering one human being to another, to be hunted down and killed for sport. But psis would have recognized a special value in Robane. He was a precision instrument that could provide them with machines to extend and amplify their powers. His inventive genius had been at the disposal of a telepath who’d set him problems and left him to work them out, not knowing why he did it, or for whose benefit, in the solitude of Melna Park.
She’d put an end to Robane’s usefulness and might presently have come on clues pointing to them in the unconscious recesses of his mind if they hadn’t discovered what had been done. They knew it was the work of another psi. She’d sealed most of Robane’s memories away but left them intact; and that told them she planned to return to look for more information. They could have destroyed Robane at once, but they wanted to dispose of the unidentified meddler. So they’d set up the trap with Robane’s mind as the bait. The psi who touched that mind again would spring the trap. And, some twenty minutes ago, cautious and light as her touch had been, she’d sprung it.
Immediately afterwards, she’d locked her screens. In doing it, she might have escaped whatever was planned for her. But she had to accept the probability that she still was in the trap—and she didn’t yet know what it was.
The Cloudsplitter went gliding at its thirty miles an hour across the upper plateaus of the plain, a hundred feet above the ground. The southern forest where the house had stood had sunk out of sight. The flanks of the mountains curved away ahead. Telzey turned the car in farther toward them. Another car slipped past at the edge of her vision, half a mile to the left. She had an impulse to follow it, to remain near other people. But she kept the Cloudsplitter on its course. The company of others would bring her no safety, and mingling with them might distract her attention dangerously.
She set the car on automatic control, sat gazing at the mountains through the windshield. The other impression at the moment of touching Robane’s mind—the shape like an animal’s—it might have been a hallucination, her own mind’s symbol of some death energy directed at her. Psi could kill swiftly, could be used as a weapon by minds which understood its use for that purpose and could handle the forces they turned on another. But if that had been the trap, it seemed to her she would have interpreted it differently—not as a moving shadow, a half-glimpsed animal shape, an image darting toward her.
What else could it be? Telzey shook her bead. She didn’t know, and she couldn’t guess. She could find out; eventually she’d have to find out. But not yet.
She glanced at the car clock. Give it another hour. Evidently they hadn’t identified her physically; but it could do no harm to place more physical distance between herself and the area of Robane’s house before she made any revealing moves. Mentally, she should have seemed to vanish for them as her shield closed. The difficulty was that the shield couldn’t stay closed indefinitely.
* * *
An hour later, the effects of having passed a night with very little sleep were becoming noticeable. There were moments of reduced wakefulness and physical lassitude of which she’d grow suddenly aware. The nearest ranger car would have provided her with a stimulant if she’d put out a communicator call for one, but her enemies might have means of monitoring events in the park she didn’t know about. It didn’t seem at all advisable to draw attention to herself in that way, or in any other way. She’d simply have to remain alert long enough to get this situation worked out.
The test she intended was a simple one. The psi shield would flash open, instantly be closed again. During that moment, her perceptions, fully extended, would be set to receive two impressions: thought patterns of the telepath who’d laid a trap for her, and the animal shape involved with the trap. If either was still in her mental vicinity, some trace would he obtained, however faintly. If neither was there, she could begin to believe she’d eluded them. Not indefinitely; psis could determine who had destroyed Robane’s effectiveness if they put in enough work on it. But that would be another problem. Unless they were as intently prepared as she was to detect some sign from her now, the momentary exposure of her mind should pass unnoticed.
The shield flicked open, flicked shut, as her sensitized perceptions made their recording. Telzey sat still for a moment then, feeling the heavy drumming of fear.
Slowly, like an afterimage, she let the recorded picture form again in awareness.
A dark beast shape. What kind of beast she didn’t know. Something like a great uncouth baboon—a big heavy head, strong body supported on four huge hand-paws.
As the shield opened, she had the feeling of seeing it near her, three-dimensional, every detail clearly etched though it stood in a vague nothingness. The small red eyes stared in her direction. And short as the moment of exposure was, she was certain she’d seen it start in recognition, begin moving toward her, before it vanished beyond the shield again.
What was it? A projection insinuated into her mind by the other telepath in the instant of contact between them—something she was supposed to develop to her own destruction now?
She didn’t think so. It seemed too real, too alertly, menacingly, alive. In some way she’d seen what was there—the vague animal shape she’d glimpsed—nearby and no longer vague. In physical space, it might be hundreds of miles away; or perhaps it was nowhere in that sense at present. In the other reality they shared, she hadn’t drawn away from it. After its attention was turned on her, it had waited while she was concealed by her shield, moved closer at the brief new impression it received of her mind. . . . What would happen when, in its manner, it reached her, touched her?
She didn’t know the answer to that. She let the image fade, began searching for traces of the telepathic mind associated with it. After long seconds, she knew nothing had been recorded in her perceptions there. The psi was gone. He’d prepared the trap, set the creature on her; then apparently turned away—as if confident he’d done all that needed to be done to dispose of her.
The thought was briefly more chilling than the waiting beast image. But if it was only an animal she had to deal with, Telzey told herself, escape might be an easier matter than it would have been if minds like the one she had encountered had remained on her trail.
The animal still seemed bad enough. She’d never heard of a creature which tracked down prey by sensing mental emanations, as this one evidently did. It might be a native of some unrecorded world, brought to the Hub for the specific purpose of turning it into a hunter of human psis—psis who could make trouble for its masters. It knew about mind shields. Either it had dealt with such defenses in its natural state, or it had been trained to handle them. At any rate, it seemed quite aware that it need only wait with a predator’s alert patience until the quarry’s shield relaxed. As hers would eventually. She couldn’t stay awake indefinitely; and asleep she didn’t have enough control to keep so steady and relentless a watcher from detecting mental activity.