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"Yes, I . . . just a moment!" Gonwil turned towards the door. Sounds of
scratching came from it, then a deep whine. "That's Chomir! He heard us
talking, and I'd better let him in before he arouses the neighborhood. It's
difficult enough to be inconspicuous with him around!"
"I can imagine."
Gonwil unlocked the door and opened it partly, glancing up the hall as Chomir
slid through into the room, ears pricked. The door at the far end of the
corridor was closed; he hadn't been heard in the office.
She locked the door quietly again. Chomir stared for an instant at the image
in the view-field, took a sniff at the air to confirm that while he'd heard
Junior's voice, Junior was not physically present. Chomir was familiar with
the phenomenon of communicator screens and the ghosts that periodically
appeared in them. Satisfied, he sat down beside the door.
"I was wondering whether you'd left him behind," Junior remarked as Gonwil
came back.
"Oh, I wouldn't do that to Chomir! About Malrue . . ."
He grinned. "I know! She does carry on rather badly at times like this! I'll
be tactful in what I tell her."
"Thanks," Gonwil said gratefully. "I wouldn't want her to feel that I'm
avoiding her in particular. But would you please not tell her about sending me
a personal communicator? Say I was just using a regular
ComWeb in making this call. Otherwise, she'd want to argue me out of this, and
I'd hate to have to refuse her."
"You can depend on me. When will you call again?"
"Sometime early tomorrow?"
"I'll be waiting." He turned his head to the left, appeared to listen. Then he
looked back at her.
"I believe I hear Malrue coming," he said quietly. "Goodbye, Gonwil!"
" 'By, Junior!"
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His face vanished. Still smiling, Gonwil bent over the communicator, searching
for the pinhead stud.
Junior had been on his best behavior this time; she was very glad she'd
decided to make the call.
She pushed down the stud, and the light screen disappeared.
From the far end of the corridor outside came the sound of a violently slammed
door.
Startled, Gonwil swung about. Footsteps were pounding up the short corridor
now, but she wasn't aware of them. She stood dead-still, staring.
The white shape crouched across the room, ears back and down, huge teeth
bared, could hardly be recognized as Chomir. He might have been listening to
the approaching steps. But then the snarling head moved. The eyes found
Gonwil, and instantly he was coming towards her in a flat, long spring, jaws
wide.
* * *
As she watched Chomir move off beside Gonwil through the entrance tunnel to
the Kyth hideout where the airvan had stopped, Telzey put out a tentative
probe towards him.
This time, she was inside the dog's mind at once and so definitely that she
could sense him striding along and the touch of the hard flooring beneath his
pads. Satisfied, she withdrew. The contacts established during the night's
work hadn't faded; she could resume her investigation immediately.
Left alone in the room reserved for her, less than fifty feet from the one to
which they had conducted
Gonwil, Telzey settled into an armchair and closed her eyes. Chomir still
seemed to be moving about, but that made no difference. At this stage, she
could work below his awareness without disturbing him or interfering with his
activities.
She picked up the familiar memory chains within seconds, and then hesitated.
Something had changed here. There was a sense of being drawn quietly away from
the memories towards another area of mind.
She didn't know what it meant. But since psi seemed sometimes to work
independently on problems in which one was involved, this might turn out to be
a short-cut to the information for which she had been digging throughout the
night. Telzey let herself shift in the indicated direction. There was a
momentary odd feeling of sinking, then of having made a transition, of being
somewhere else.
And it had been a short-cut. This was an aspect of mind she hadn't explored
before, but it wasn't difficult to understand. A computer's processes might
have presented a somewhat similar pattern: impersonal, unaware, enormously
detailed and busy. Its universe was the living animal body that generated it,
and its function was essentially to see to it that its universe remained
physically in good operating condition. As
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Telzey grasped that, her attention shifted once more now to a disturbance
point in the Chomir universe. Something was wrong there. The body-mind knew it
was wrong but was unable to do anything about it.
Telzey studied the disturbance point absorbedly. Suddenly its meaning became
clear; and then she knew this was the information she had come to find. And it
was very ugly and disturbing information.
She opened her eyes. Her thoughts seemed sluggish, and for some seconds the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]