On disembarking at the spaceport, Telzey had checked in at a great commercial circuit called the Luerral Hotel. It had been selected for her because it was free of the psi blocks in rather general use here otherwise. The Luerral catered to the interstellar trade; and the force patterns which created the blocks were likely to give people unaccustomed to them a mildly oppressive feeling of being enclosed. For Telzey’s purpose, of course, they were more serious obstacles.
While registering, she was equipped with a guest key. The Luerral Hotel was exclusive; its portals passed only those who carried a Luerral key or were in the immediate company of somebody who did. The keys were accessories of the Luerral’s central computer and on request gave verbal directions and other information. The one Telzey selected had the form of a slender ring. She let it guide her to her room, found her luggage had preceded her there, and made a call to the Tongi Phon Institute. Tinokti ran on Institute time; the official workday wouldn’t begin for another three hours. But she was connected with someone who knew of her application to do legal research, and was told a guide would come to take her to the Institute when it opened.
She set out then on a stroll about the hotel and circled Tinokti twice in an hour’s unhurried walk, passing through portals which might open on shopping malls, tropical parks or snowy mountain resorts, as the circuit dipped in and out of the more attractive parts of the planet. She was already at work for Klayung, playing the role of a psi operator who was playing the role of an innocent student tourist. She wore a tracer which pinpointed her for a net of spacecraft deployed about the planet. The bracelet on her left wrist was a Service communicator; and she was in wispy but uninterrupted mind contact with a Service telepath whose specialty it was to keep such contacts undetectable for other minds. She also had armed company unobtrusively preceding and following her. They were probing Tinokti carefully in many ways; she was now one of the probes.
Her thoughts searched through each circuit section and the open areas surrounding it as she moved along. She picked up no conscious impressions of the Service’s quarry. But twice during that hour’s walk, the screens enclosing her mind like a flexing bubble tightened abruptly into a solid shield. Her automatic detectors, more sensitive than conscious probes, had responded to a passing touch of the type of mental patterns they’d been designed to warn her against. The psis were here—and evidently less cautious than they’d been on Orado after her first encounter with them.
* * *
When she’d come back to the hotel’s Great Lobby, Gudast, her Service contact, inquired mentally, “Mind doing a little more walking?”
Telzey checked her watch. “Just so I’m not late for the Phons.”
“We’ll get you back in time.”
“All right. Where do I go?”
Gudast said, “Those mind touches you reported came at points where the Luerral Hotel passes through major city complexes. We’d like you to go back to them, leave the circuit and see if you can pick up something outside.”
She got short-cut directions from the Luerral computer, set out again. The larger sections had assorted transportation aids, but, on the whole, circuit dwellers seemed to do a healthy amount of walking. Almost all of the traffic she saw was pedestrian.
She took an exit presently, found herself in one of the city complexes mentioned by Gudast. Her Luerral ring key informed her the hotel had turned her over to the guidance of an area computer and that the key remained at her service if she needed information. Directed by Gudast, she took a seat on a slideway, let it carry her along a main street. Superficially, the appearance of things here was not unlike that of some large city on Orado. The differences were functional. Psi blocks were all about, sensed as a gradually shifting pattern of barriers to probes as the slideway moved on with her. Probably less than a fifth of the space of the great buildings was locally open; everything else was taken up by circuit sections connected to other points of the planet, ranging in size from a few residential or storage rooms to several building levels. Milkily gleaming horizontal streaks along the sides of the buildings showed that many of the sections were protected by force fields. Tinokti’s citizens placed a high value on privacy.
Telzey stiffened suddenly. “Defense reaction!” she told Gudast.
“Caught it,” his thought whispered.
“It’s continuing.” She passed her tongue over her lips.
“See a good place to get off the slideway?”
Telzey glanced along the street, stood up. “Yes! Big display windows just ahead. Quite a few people.”
“Sounds right.”
She stepped off the slideway as it came up to the window fronts, walked over, started along the gleaming windows, then stopped, looking in at the displayed merchandise. “I’m there,” she told Gudast. “Reaction stopped a moment ago.”
“See what you can do. We’re set up.”
Her psi sensors reached out. She brought up the thought patterns she’d recorded in Melna Park and stored in memory, blurred them, projected them briefly as something carelessly let slip from an otherwise guarded mind. She waited.
Her screens tried to tighten again. She kept them as they were, overriding the automatic reaction. Then something moved faintly into awareness—a mind behind shielding, alert, questioning, perhaps suspicious. Still barely discernible.
“Easy—easy!” whispered Gudast. “I’m getting it. We’re getting it. Don’t push at all! Give us fifteen seconds . . . ten . . .”
Psi-block!
The impression had vanished.
Somewhere the being producing it had moved into a psi-blocked section of this city complex. Perhaps deliberately, choosing mental concealment. Perhaps simply because that was where it happened to be going when its attention was caught for a moment by Telzey’s broadcast pattern. The impression hadn’t been sufficiently strong to say anything about it except that this had been a mind of the type Telzey had encountered on Orado. They’d all caught for an instant the specific qualities she’d recorded.
The instant hadn’t been enough. Klayung had brought a number of living psi compasses to Tinokti, operators who could have pinpointed the position of the body housing that elusive mentality, given a few more seconds in which to work.
They hadn’t been given those seconds, and the mentality wasn’t contacted again. Telzey went on presently to the other place where she’d sensed a sudden warning, and prowled about here and there outside the Luerral Circuit, while Klayung’s pack waited for renewed indications. This time they drew a blank.
But it had been confirmed that the psis—some of them—were on Tinokti.
The problem would be how to dig them out of the planet-wide maze of force-screened and psi-blocked circuit sections.
* * *
Telzey’s Institute guide, a young man named Phon Hajugan, appeared punctually with the beginning of Tinokti’s workday. He informed Telzey he held the lowest Tongi Phon rank. The lower echelons evidently hadn’t been informed of the recent killings in the Institute vault and their superiors’ apprehensions—Phon Hajugan was in a cheery and talkative mood. Telzey’s probe disclosed that he was equipped with a chemical mind shield.
There was no portal connection between the Luerral Hotel’s circuit and that of the Institute. Telzey and her guide walked along a block of what appeared to be a sizable residential town before reaching an entry portal of the Tongi Phon Circuit, where she was provided with another portal key. She’d been making note of the route; in future she didn’t intend to be distracted by the presence of a guide. The office to which Phon Hajugan conducted her was that of a senior Phon named Trondbarg. It was clear that Phon Trondbarg did know what was going on. He discussed Telzey’s Pehanron project in polite detail but with an air of nervous detachment. It had been indicated to the Institute that she was a special agent of the Service, and that her research here was for form’s sake only.
The interview didn’t take long. Her credentials would be processed, and she was to return in four hours. She would have access then to normally restricted materials and be able to obtain other information as required. In effect, she was being given a nearly free run of the Institute, which was the purpose. Unless there were other developments, much of the Service’s immediate attention would be focused on the areas and personnel associated with the Tongi Phon’s psi technology projects. The Phon leadership didn’t like it but had no choice. They would have liked it less if they’d suspected that mind shields now would start coming quietly undone. The Service wanted to find out who around here was controlled and in what manner.
Some form of counteraction by the concealed opposition might be expected. Preparations were being made for it, and Telzey’s personal warning system was one part of the preparations.