She returned to the Luerral Circuit and her hotel room alone except for her unnoticeable Service escorts, spent the next two hours asleep to get herself shifted over to the local time system, then dressed in a Tinokti fashion item, a sky-blue belted jacket of military cut and matching skirt, and had a belated breakfast in a stratosphere restaurant of the hotel. Back in the Great Lobby, she began to retrace the route to the Tongi Phon Institute she’d followed with Phon Hajugan some five hours ago. A series of drop shafts took her to a scenic link with swift-moving slideways; then there was a three-portal shift to the southern hemisphere where the Institute’s major structures were located. She moved on through changing patterns of human traffic until she reached the ninth portal from the Great Lobby. On the far side of that portal, she stopped with a catch in her breath, spun about, found herself looking at a blank wall, and turned again.
Her mental contact with Gudast was gone. The portal had shifted her into a big, long, high-ceilinged room, empty and silent. She hadn’t passed through any such room with Phon Hajugan. She should have exited here instead into the main passage of a shopping center.
She touched the wall through which she’d stepped an instant ago—as solid now as it looked. A one-way portal. The room held the peculiar air of blankness, a cave of stillness about the mind, which said it was psi-blocked and that the blocking fields were close by. Watching a large closed door at the other end of the room, Telzey clicked on the bracelet communicator. No response from the Service. . . . No response either, a moment later, from the Luerral ring key!
She’d heard that in the complexities of major portal systems, it could happen that a shift became temporarily distorted and one emerged somewhere else than one had intended to go. But that hadn’t happened here. There’d been people directly ahead of her, others not many yards behind, her Service escorts among them, and no one else had portaled into this big room which was no part of the Luerral Circuit.
So it must be a trap—and a trap set up specifically for her along her route from the hotel room to the Tongi Phon Institute. As she reached the portal some observer had tripped the mechanisms which flicked in another exit for the instant needed to bring her to the room. If the Service still had a fix on the tracking device they’d given her, they would have recognized what had happened and be zeroing in on her now, but she had an unpleasantly strong conviction that whoever had cut her off so effectively from psi and communicator contacts also had considered the possibility of a tracking device and made sure it wouldn’t act as one here.
The room remained quiet. A strip of window just below the ceiling ran along the wall on her left, showing patches of blue sky and tree greenery outside. It was far out of her reach, and if she found something that let her climb up to it, there was no reason to think it would be possible to get through that window. But she started cautiously forward. The room was L-shaped; on her right, the wall extended not much more than two thirds of its length before it cornered.
She could sense nothing, but wasn’t sure no one was waiting behind the corner for her until she got there. No one was. That part of the room was as bare as the other. At the end of it was a second closed door, a smaller one.
She turned back toward the first door, checked, skin crawling. Mind screens had contracted abruptly into a hard shield. One of them had come into this psi-blocked structure.
One or more of them. . . .
The larger door opened seconds later. Three tall people came into the room.
Chapter 4
Telzey’s continuing automatic reaction told her the three were psis of the type she’d conditioned herself to detect and recognize. Whatever they were, they had nothing resembling the bulk and massive structure of the Elaigar mind masters she’d studied in the old Nalakian records. They might be nearly as tall. The smallest, in the rich blue cloak and hood of a Sparan woman, must measure at least seven feet, and came barely up to the shoulders of her companions who wore the corresponding gray cloaks of Sparan men. Veils, golden for the woman, white for the men, concealed their faces below the eyes and fell to their chests.
But, of course, they weren’t Sparans. Telzey had looked into Sparan minds. They probably were the Hub’s most widespread giant strain, should have the average sprinkling of psi ability. They weren’t an organization of psis. Their familiar standardized dressing practices simply provided these three with an effective form of concealment.
Telzey, heart racing, smiled at them.
“I hope I’m not trespassing!” she told them. “I was in the Luerral Hotel just a minute ago and have no idea how I got here! Can you tell me how to get back?”
The woman said in an impersonal voice, “I’m sure you’re quite aware you’re not here by accident. We’ll take you presently to some people who want to see you. Now stand still while I search you.”
She’d come up as she spoke, removing her golden gloves. Telzey stood still. The men had turned to the left along the wall, and a recess was suddenly in sight there . . . some portal arrangement. The recess seemed to be a large, half-filled storage closet. The men began bringing items out of it, while the woman searched Telzey quickly. The communicator and the Service’s tracking device disappeared under the blue cloak. The woman took nothing else. She straightened again, said, “Stay where you are,” and turned to join her companions who now were packing selected pieces of equipment into two carrier cases they’d taken from the closet. They worked methodically but with some haste, occasionally exchanging a few words in a language Telzey didn’t know. Finally they snapped the cases shut, began to remove their Sparan veils and cloaks.
Telzey watched them warily. Her first sight of their faces was jarring. They were strong handsome faces with a breed similarity between them. But there was more than a suggestion there of the cruel cat masks of Nalakia. They’d needed the cover of the Sparan veil to avoid drawing attention to themselves.
The bodies were as distinctive. The woman, now in trunks, boots and short-sleeved shirt, as were the men, a gun belt fastened about her, looked slender with her height and length of limb, but layers of well-defined muscle shifted along her arms and legs as she moved. Her neck was a round strong column, the sloping shoulders correspondingly heavy, and there was a great depth of rib cage, drawing in sharply to the flat waist. She differed from the human standard as a strain of animals bred for speed or fighting might differ from other strains of the same species. Her companions were male counterparts, larger, more heavily muscled.
There’d been no trace of a mental or emotional impression from any of them; they were closely screened. The door at the end of the room opened now, and a third man of the same type came in. He was dressed almost as the others were, but everything he wore was dark green; and instead of a gun, a broad knife swung in its scabbard from his belt. He glanced at Telzey, said something in their language. The woman looked over at Telzey.
“Who are you?” Telzey asked her.
The woman said, “My name is Kolki Ming. I’m afraid there’s no time for questions. We have work to do.” She indicated the third man. “Tscharen will be in charge of you at present.”
“We’ll leave now,” Tscharen told Telzey.
* * *
They were in a portal circuit. Once out of the room where Telzey had been trapped, they used no more doors. The portal sections through which they passed were small ones, dingy by contrast with the Luerral’s luxuries, windowless interiors where people once had lived. Lighting and other automatic equipment still functioned; furnishings stood about. But there was a general air of long disuse. Psi blocks tangibly enclosed each section.
The portals weren’t marked in any way, but Tscharen moved on without hesitation. They’d reach a wall and the wall would seem to dissolve about and before them; and they’d be through it, somewhere else—a somewhere else which didn’t look very different from the section they’d just left. After the sixth portal shift, Tscharen turned into a room and unlocked and opened a wall cabinet.
A viewscreen had been installed in the cabinet. He manipulated the settings, and a brightly lit and richly furnished area, which might have been the reception room of some great house, appeared in the screen. There was no one in sight; the screen was silent. Tscharen studied the room for perhaps a minute, then switched off the screen, closed and locked the cabinet, motioned to Telzey and turned to leave. She followed.