Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Read online

  “A fitting resting place for the Immortal One!” Jasse commented piously.

  That brought a murmur of general appreciation from the local citizens. She suspected wryly that she, with her towering height and functional Vegan uniform, was the real center of interest in this colorfully robed group of little-people—few of them came up to a point much above the level of her elbows. But otherwise, the Tomb of Moyuscane must seem well worth a visit to a people as culturally self-centered as the Ulphians. Set against the rather conventional background of a green grove and whispering fountains, it was a translucently white moment, combining stateliness and exquisite grace with the early sweeping style which the last four centuries had preserved and expanded over the planet.

  “The common people have many interesting superstitions about the Tomb,” Requada-Attan confided loudly. “They say that Moyuscane’s illusions are still to be seen within this park occasionally. Especially at night.”

  His round, pink face smiled wisely up at her. It was obvious that he, a historical scientist, did not share such superstitions.

  Illusion performances, Jasse thought, nodding. She’d seen a few of those of a minor sort herself, but the records indicated that some centuries ago on Ulphi they had been cultivated to an extent which no major civilization would tolerate nowadays. The Illusionists of Ulphi had been priest-entertainers and political leaders; their mental symphonies—a final culmination and monstrous flowering of all the tribal dances and varied body-and-mind shaking communal frenzies of history—had swayed the thinking and the emotional life of the planetary race. And Moyuscane the Immortal had wound up that line of psychic near-rulers as the greatest of them all.

  It was rather fascinating at that, she decided, to go adventuring mentally back over the centuries into the realm of a human power which, without word or gesture, could sweep up and blend the emotions of thousands of other human beings into a single mighty current that flowed and ebbed and thundered at the impulses of one will through the channels its imagination projected.

  Fascinating—but a little disturbing, too!

  “I think—” she began, and stopped.

  Words and phrases which had been no previous part of her thoughts suddenly were floating up in her mind—and now, quite without her volition, she was beginning to utter them!

  “But that explains it!” her voice was saying, with a note of pleased, friendly surprise. “I’ve been wondering about you, Requada-Attan, you and your mysterious, beautiful world! I should have known all along that it was simply the dream-creation of an artist—that one of your Great Illusionists was still alive!”

  The last words seemed to drop one by one into a curiously leader! silence, and then they stopped. Jasse was still only completely, incredulously astonished. Then something began to stir in that heavy silence about her; and her head came sharply around.

  It was their faces that warned her—once before, she’d seen the expression of a mob that was acting under mental compulsion; and so she knew at once and exactly what she’d have to do next. Not stop to figure out what had happened, or try to reason with them, argue, threaten, or waste time yelling for help. Just get out of the immediate neighborhood, fast!

  There weren’t, of course, really enough Ulphians around to be called a mob—hardly more than twenty adults in all. That they had been directed against her was obvious enough, in the eyes that saw only her now, and in the synchronized motion with which they were converging quietly on the spot where she stood.

  They stopped moving as if at a command Jasse could not hear, as she swung about, unconsciously with a very similar quietness, to face them.

  Requada-Attan was under it, too! He still stood nearest her, about four steps to her left. Straight ahead, between, Jasse and the gate, was the next closest group: two husky looking young men with the shaved heads and yellow robes of professionals from the School of Athletes; and immediately behind them another silver-robed historian whom she had noticed previously—an elderly man, very thin and tall. No weapons in sight anywhere—

  The three ahead were the ones to pass then! Jasse took two quick steps in their direction; and gravel scattered instantly under their sandaled feet, as they came to meet her in a rush. All about was the same sudden noise and swirl of motion.

  But it was Requada-Attan who reached her first, with a quickness she hadn’t counted on in a man of his plump build. Abruptly his weight was dragging at her arm, both hands gripped about her wrist, and jerking sideways to throw her off balance. Jasse twisted free sharply—that wrist-carried her mind-shield bracelet and had to be guarded!—hauled the Hereditary Custodian off his feet with her right hand, hesitated a moment, half turned and rather regretfully sent him rolling before the knees of the charging yellow-robes.

  They went down in a satisfactorily sprawling confusion, the thin historian turning a complete clumsy somersault with flapping garments across them a moment later. But the others had arrived by then, and Jasse became temporarily the center of a clawing, grappling, hard-breathing but voiceless cluster of humanity. What sent the first shock of real fright through her was that most of them seemed to be trying to get at her shield-bracelet! Because that indicated a mental attack was impending—mental attacks and mass compulsions on present-day Ulphi!

  The jolt of that realization—the implication that hidden powers had been roused into action against her on this innocuous-looking world-might have resulted in a rash of snapping necks and other fatal incidents all around Jasse. Though Cultures frowned on weapons for its officials, the ancient Terran Art of the Holds was highly regarded among Traditionalists everywhere and had been developed by them to a polished new perfection. But she hauled herself back promptly from the verge of slipping into that well-drilled routine, which she never yet had put to its devastating practical use. The situation, so far, certainly wasn’t as bad as all that—if she just kept her head! Slapping, shoving, shaking and turning, she twisted her way through this temporarily demented group of little-people, intent primarily on staying on her feet and keeping her left wrist out of reach.

  Then the yellow-robed athletes were up again, and Jasse bumped the two shaven heads together with measured violence, stepped with great caution across an overturned but viciously kicking little boy found herself suddenly free, and tripped up the last of the lot to come plunging in, a youngish, heavy-set woman.

  The brief and practically bloodless melee had circled to within a dozen strides of the gateway of the park. She darted through it, slammed the high bronze gate behind her, saw Requada-Attan’s key still in the lock and had her assailants shut in an instant later.

  She could spare a moment then to look back at them. Most of them were still on the ground or clambering awkwardly to their feet. With one exception, all stared after her with those chillingly focused and expressionless eyes. The exception was a white-robed, dark-skinned man of middle age with a neatly trimmed fringe of brown beard around his chin, who stood on a tiled walk a little apart from the others. He was watching them, and Jasse could not recall having noticed him before.

  Then their eyes met for an instant as she was turning away, and there was conscious intelligence in his look, mingled with something that might have been fright or anger.

  At least, she thought, loping worriedly down one of the corridors towards the main halls of the Institute from which she had come, she wasn’t the only one who had got a surprise out of the affair! She would have time to think about that later. The immediate problem was how to get out of this mess, and it would be stupid to assume that she had succeeded in that.

  There were plenty of other people in those buildings ahead, and she had no way at all of knowing what their attitude: would be.

  III.

  She came with swift caution out of the corridor, into a long, sun-bright and apparently deserted hall.

  The opposite wall was formed of vertical blue slabs of some marbled-like mineral with wide window embrasures between. The tops of feathery trees and the upper parts of b
uildings, a good distance off, were visible beyond the windows. Several hundred feet away in either direction a high doorway led out of the hall.

  Both exits were blocked just now by a wedged, immobile mass of little-people. Robes of all colors—citizens of all types arid classes, hastily assembled to stop her again. Even at this distance their faces sickened her. Apparently they had been directed simply to prevent her from leaving this hall, until—

  It clamped down then about her skull—and tightened!

  Mental attach!

  Jasse’s hands leaped to her temples in a convulsive, involuntary motion, though she knew there was nothing tangible there to seize. It was inside her, an enormous massing of tiny, hard pressures which were not quite pain, driving upon an equal number of critical linkages within her brain. In her first flash of panicky reaction, it seemed the burst of an overwhelming, irresistible force. A moment later, she realized it was quite bearable.

  She should have known, of course—with her mind-shield activated as it was, it would take some while before that sort of thing could have much effect. The only immediately dangerous part of it was that it cut down the time she could afford to spend on conducting her escape.

  She glanced again at the nearer of the two doorways, and knew instantly she wasn’t even going to consider fighting her way through another mindless welter of grappling human bodies like that! The nearest window was a dozen steps away.

  A full hundred yards beneath her, the building’s walls dropped sheer into a big, blue-paved courtyard, with a high-walled park on the opposite side and open to the left on a city street, a block or more away. The street carried a multicolored, murmuring stream of traffic, too far off to make any immediate difference. A few brightly dressed people were walking across the courtyard below—they made no difference either. The important thing was the row of flow-cars parked against the wall down there, hardly eighty feet to her right.

  Her hand dropped to her belt and adjusted the gravmoc unit. She felt almost weightless as she swung over the sill and pushed away from the building; but she touched the pavement in something less than eighteen seconds, rolled over twice and came up running.

  There was scattered shouting then.

  Two young women, about to step out of one of the cars, stared in open-mouthed surprise as she came towards them. But neither they nor anyone else made any attempt to check her departure.

  She had one of the vehicles airborne, and headed in the general direction of the lake-front section which was being used as a spaceport by the one Vegan destroyer stationed on Ulphi, before she was reminded suddenly that Central City had police ships for emergency use, which could fly rings around any flow-car—and that long, silvery, dirigiblelike shapes seemed to be riding on guard directly over the area to which she wanted to go!

  A few minutes later, she realized the ship might also be several miles to either side of the spaceport. At this distance and altitude she couldn’t tell, and the flow-car refused to be urged any higher.

  She had kept the clumsy conveyance on its course, because she hadn’t really much choice of direction. There was no way of contacting or locating any of the other Vegan officials currently operating on Ulphi except through the destroyer itself or through the communicators in her own study; and her mobile-unit was also in the spaceport area. There were enough similar cars moving about by themselves to keep her from being conspicuous, though traffic, on the whole, was moderate over the city and most of it was confined to fairly definite streams between the more important points.

  A second police ship became briefly visible far to her right, gliding close to the building tops and showing hardly more than its silhouette through a light haze which veiled that sector. If they knew where she was, either of the two could intercept her within minutes.

  Very probably though, Jasse reassured herself, nobody did know just where she was. The mental force still assailing her shield was non-directional in any spatial sense; and her departure from the Historical Institute must have been much more sudden and swift than had been anticipated by her concealed attackers. In spite of her size, strangers were quite likely to underestimate her because of her slender build and rather childlike features, and on occasions like this that could be very useful. But-

  Jasse bit her lip gently, conscious of a small flurry of panic bubbling up inside her and subsiding again, temporarily.

  Because they needed only to ring off the spaceport, far enough away from the destroyer to avoid arousing its interest, and then wait for her arrival. She would have to come to them then—and soon! Her shield was still absorbing the punishment it was getting, but secondary effects of that unrelenting pressure had begun to show up. The barest touch of a dozen different, slowly spreading sensations within her brain—burning, tingling, constricting, dully throbbing sensations. Within the last few minutes, the first flickering traces of visual and auditory disturbances had appeared.; Effects like that could; build up for an indeterminate time without doing any real damage. But in the end they would merge suddenly into an advanced stage of blurred confusion—technically, her shield might still maintain its function; but she would no longer know or be able to control what she did.

  A curiously detached feeling overcame Jasse then as the flow-car carried her steadily forward into whatever lay ahead. What she had to do was clear enough: go on until she was discovered and then ground the flow-car and try her luck on foot. But meanwhile, who or what had stirred up this mess about her? What were they after?

  She sat quietly behind the flow-cat’s simple controls, leaning forward a trifle to conceal herself, while her mind ran over the implications of the odd little speech she had made in the park before Moyuscane’s tomb. Those hadn’t been her thoughts; if they had been, she wouldn’t have uttered them voluntarily—so, shielded or not, somebody must have been tampering with her mind before this! Were there opposing groups of mental adepts on Ulphi, and was one of them trying to use her, and Vega, against the other in some struggle for control; of this planetary civilization?

  Once more then, System Chief Jasse surprised herself completely—this time by a flash of furious exasperation with the lofty D.C. policies which had put her in a spot like this unarmed. To trust in the innate rightness of A-Class humanity was all very well. But, mysterious superior mentalities or not, a good, ordinary, old-fashioned blaster in her hand would have been so satisfactory just now!

  “Oh, Suns and Planets!” Jasse muttered aloud, shocked into a half-forgotten Traditionalist invocation acquired during her childhood. “They’ve got me fighting mad!”

  And at that moment, a clean-edged shadow, which was not the shadow of any cloud, came sliding soundlessly over the flow-car and stayed there.

  Jasse, heart pounding wildly, was still trying to twist around far enough to look up without pitching herself out of the car or releasing its controls when a voice, some twenty feet above her, remarked conversationally:

  “Say—I thought it was you!”

  She stared up speechlessly.

  The words had been Vegan—and nothing like that dull-green, seamless, thirty-foot sliver of space-alloy floating overhead had even been dreamed up on Ulphi! While the pert, huge-eyed face that peered down at her out of the craft’s open lock—she remembered suddenly the last time she’d met that member of a nonhuman race in a G.Z. space-duty uniform and the polite effort she’d made to mask the antipathy and suspicions which were bound to arise in a Traditionalist when confronted by any such half-and-half creature.

  But—safe!

  A shaking began in her knees. She sat down quietly.

  And Zone Agent Pagadan, for whom any kind of thought-shield on which she really directed her attention became as sheerest summer gossamer—unless, of course, it was backed by a mind that approximated her own degree of nerve-energy control-smiled amiably and chalked one up to her flair for dramatic timing.

  “Remember me, eh?” she nodded. “Pelial, of Galactic Zones, at your service! I was scoping the area from ten
miles above and spotted you drifting along by yourself. What occurs, my tall colleague? Are you just going sightseeing in that piece of primitive craftsmanship, or did your pilot fall out?”

  “Ulp—!” began Jasse, nodding and shaking her head at the same time. Pagadan’s contemplative eyes became a little bigger.

  “Skip it!” she said apprehensively. “From close up, you look both chewed on and distraught, my girl! What happ—Hey, hang on a moment and I’ll slide in close and take you aboard. Maybe you ought to be home in bed, or something.”

  The head withdrew; and Jasse took a deep, sighing breath, raked a snarled strand of black hair out of her forehead and dabbed tentatively at a deep scratch on the back of her hand.

  She did look a mess, now that she noticed it—the Greens were badly ripped and streaked with the blue chalk of the pavement over which she had rolled; and her jeweled cap was gone, A moment passed before she realized suddenly that the clinging constrictions of the mental attack were gone, too!

  She was still wondering about that as she swung over into the space-skiff, steadied by Pagadan’s gloved hand.

  Then, as the skiff’s lock slammed shut behind her, she made another discovery:

  Her shield-bracelet hung free, attached to her wrist now only by its safety chain. The shield switch flickered, warningly red, on “Open”—

  “Your mind-shield?” The Lannai Agent, measuring a rose-colored liquid carefully from a fat little jug into a cup, absently repeated Jasse’s stunned exclamation. “Probably snagged the bracelet while you were climbing in from the car. It happens.” She glanced around and her eyes caught the light with a wicked crystalline glitter. “Why? Could it matter? Was someone pressuring you?”

  “They were before,” Jasse whispered; and suddenly there wasn’t any question about her being frightened! Panic hammered into her brain and stayed; a dizzy shimmering grew before her eyes. Mixed with that came a queer, growing feeling as if something were surging and pulsing within her skull—a wildly expectant feeling of something about to happen.