She followed him mentally. Essu knew what he was doing and it wouldn’t occur to him to wonder why he was doing it. He’d simply serve her with mechanical loyalty, incapable of acting in any other way. As he reached the portal toward which he’d been headed and passed through it, his thought patterns vanished. But here, within the psi blocks enclosing the great hall and part of the structure behind Telzey, something else remained. The vague impression of a Tolant mentality.
So that veteran wild human Thrakell Dees had managed to follow them, as he’d said he would, and was now trying to remain unobtrusive! Telzey considered. Shortly after the encounter with the old Elaigar, she’d become aware of Thrakell’s light, stealthy probe at her screens. She’d jabbed back irritatedly with psi and drawn a startled reaction. After that, Thrakell refrained from manifesting himself. She hadn’t been sure until now that he was around.
He might, she thought, turn out to be more of a problem than a help. In any case, they’d have to have a definite understanding if they were to work together to reach a portal exit. He’d soon realize that Essu had left the area. Telzey decided to wait and see what he would do.
She settled herself on the gallery floor behind the balustrade, from where she could keep watch on the portal where Essu presently would reappear, and began bringing up information she’d tapped from the old Elaigar’s mind and hadn’t filtered through her awareness yet. She could spend some time on that now. Part of her attention remained on Thrakell’s dimly shifting Tolant cover impressions.
The hodgepodge of information started to acquire some order as she let herself become conscious of it. The Elaigar’s name was Korm. He’d been Suan Uwin once, a High Commander, who’d fallen into disgrace. . . .
She made some unexpected discoveries next.
They seemed a stranger variation of the human race than she’d thought, these Elaigar! Their individual life span was short—perhaps too short to have let them develop the intricate skills of civilization if they’d wanted to. As they considered it, however, mental and physical toil were equally unworthy of an Elaigar. They prided themselves on being the masters of those who’d acquired advanced civilized skills and were putting that knowledge now to Elaigar use.
She couldn’t make out clearly what Korm’s measurement of time came to in Federation units, but by normal human standards, he wasn’t more than middle-aged, if that. As an Elaigar, he was very old. That limitation was a race secret, kept concealed from serfs. Essu and the Tanvens assumed Sattarams and Otessans were two distinct Elaigar strains. But one was simply the mature adult, the other the juvenile form, which apparently made a rather abrupt transition presently to adulthood.
The Alattas? A debased subrace. It had lost the ability to develop into Sattarams, and it worked like serfs because it had no serfs. Beyond that, the Alattas were enemies who might threaten the entire Elaigar campaign in the human Federation
Telzey broke off her review of Korm’s muddled angry mind content.
Had there been some change in those fake Tolant impressions put out by Thrakell Dees? . . . Yes, there had! She came fully alert.
“Thrakell?”
No response. The impressions shifted slowly.
“You might as well start talking,” she told him. “I know you’re there!”
After a moment, his reply came sulkily. “You weren’t very friendly a while ago!”
He didn’t seem far away. Telzey glanced along the gallery, then over at the door through which she’d come out on it. Behind the door, a passage ran parallel to the gallery. Thrakell Dees probably was there.
She said, “I didn’t think it was friendly of you either to try to get to my mind when you thought I might be too busy to notice! If we’re going to work together, there can’t be any more tricks like that.”
A lengthy pause. The screening alien patterns blurred, reformed, blurred again.
“Where did you send the Tolant?” Thrakell Dees asked suddenly.
“He’s getting something for me.”
“What kind of thing?”
This time it was Telzey who didn’t reply. Stalling, she thought. Her skin began to prickle. What was he up to?
She glanced uneasily up and down the gallery. He wasn’t there. But—
Her breath caught softly.
It was as if she’d blinked away a blur on her vision.
She took Essu’s gun from her jacket pocket, turned, pointed the gun toward the gallery wall on her right.
And there Thrakell Dees, moving very quietly toward her, barely twenty feet away, came to an abrupt halt, eyes widening in consternation.
“Yes, I see you now!” Telzey said between her teeth, cheeks hot with anger. “I know that not-there trick! And it won’t work on me when I suspect it’s being used.”
Thrakell moistened his lips. He was a bony man of less than average height, who might be forty years of age. He wore shirt and trousers of mottled brown shades, a round white belt encircling his waist in two tight loops. He had small intent blue eyes, set deep under thick brows, and a high bulging forehead. His long hair was pulled sharply to the back of his head and tied there. A ragged beard framed the lower face.
“No need to point the gun at me,” he said. He smiled, showing bad teeth. “I’m afraid I was trying to impress you with my abilities. I admit it was a thoughtless thing to do.”
Telzey didn’t lower the gun. She felt quite certain there’d been nothing thoughtless about that stealthy approach. He’d had a purpose; and whatever it had been, it wasn’t simply to impress her with his abilities.
“Thrakell,” she said, “just keep your hands in sight and sit down over there by the balustrade. You can help me watch the hall while I watch you. There’re some things I want you to tell me about—but better not do anything at all to make me nervous before Essu gets back!”
He shrugged and complied. When he was settled on the floor to Telzey’s satisfaction, she laid the gun down before her. Thrakell might be useful, but he was going to take watching, at least until she knew more about him.
He seemed anxious to make amends, answering her questions promptly and refraining from asking questions himself after she’d told him once there was no time for that now.
* * *
The picture she got of the Elaigar circuit was rather startling. What the Service was confronted with on Tinokti was a huge and virtually invisible fortress. The circuit had no official existence; there never had been a record of it in Tongi Phon files. Its individual sections were scattered about the planet, most of them buried among thousands of sections of other circuits, outwardly indistinguishable from them. If a section did happen to be identified and its force screens were overpowered, which could be no simple matter in populated areas, it would be cut automatically out of the circuit from a central control section, leaving searchers no farther than before. The control section itself lay deep underground. They’d have to start digging up Tinokti to locate it.
Then there was a device called the Vingarran, connected with the control section. Telzey had found impressions of it in the material drawn from Korm’s mind. Korm knew how the Vingarran was used and hadn’t been interested in knowing more. Thrakell couldn’t add much. It was a development of alien technology, constructed by the Elaigar’s serf scientists. It was like a superportal with a minimum range which made it unusable within the limited extent of a planet. Its original purpose might have been to provide interplanetary transportation. The Elaigar used it to connect the Tinokti circuit with spaceships at the fringes of the system. They came and went customarily by that method, though there were a number of portal exits to the planetary surface. They were in no way trapped here by the Service’s investment of Tinokti.
“How could a circuit like that get set up in the first place?” Telzey asked.
Thrakell bared his teeth in an unpleasant grimace.
“Phons of the Institute planned it and had it done. Who else could have arranged it secretly?”
“Why did they do it?”
He shrugged. “It was their private kingdom. Whoever was brought into it, as I was one day, became their slave. Escape was impossible. Our Phon lords were responsible to no one and did as they pleased—until the Elaigar came. Then they were no more than their slaves and died with them.”
Telzey reflected. “You’ve been able to tap Elaigar minds without getting caught at it?” she asked.
“I’ve done it on occasion,” Thrakell said, “but I haven’t tried it for some time. I made a nearly disastrous slip with a relatively inexperienced Otessan, and decided to discontinue the practice. An Elaigar mind is always dangerous—the creatures are suspicious of one another and alert for attempted probes and controls. Instead I maintain an information network of unshielded serfs. I can pick up almost anything I want to know from one or the other of them, without running risks.” He added, “Of course, old Korm can be probed rather safely, as I imagine you discovered.”