James H. Schmitz - Agents of Vega

VIP免费

2024-12-05 0 0 1.42MB 235 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Agents of Vega

James A Schmitz

"That was an epiphany. . . ."

Mercedes Lackey

There's a commercial on cable stations lately that talks about moments of epiphany—moments when you understand

something that changes your life.

I've had at least one of those moments—and when it was over, my life had been changed forever.

It was when, when I was eleven or thereabouts, I went looking in the living room for something to read.

Now, in my house, books were everywhere and there was very little my brother and I were forbidden to read. We

both had library cards as soon as we got past "Run, Spot, run," and by the time I was nine I was coming home with

armloads of books every week and still running out of things to read before the week was over. By the time I was

ten, I had special permission to take books out of the adult section—yes, in those dark days, you needed a

permission slip from your parents to read things that weren't in the children's section.

Now, the peculiar thing here is that although I read anything that looked like a fairy-tale and every piece of historical

fiction I could find, I hadn't discovered classic juvenile science fiction. I can't think why—unless it was because my

library didn't have any. It was a very small branch library, and I hadn't yet learned that you could request anything

that was in the card-catalog for the whole county-wide system. It might also have been because my branch library

had helpfully segregated the juvenile section into "Boys" and "Girls," and I wasn't brave enough to cross the

invisible line-of-death dividing the two. I do recall reading two little books called Space Cat and Space Cat Meets

Mars and loving them—and also something called City Under the Back Steps about a kid who gets shrunk and joins

an ant colony—but that was in a different library, before we moved, and perhaps the books hadn't been so helpfully

segregated there. Be that as it may, although I was knee-deep in the historical novels of Anya Seton and Rosemary

Sutcliff by then, I hadn't ventured into the adult Science Fiction section. I hadn't fallen headfirst into Andre Norton's

myriad worlds, I hadn't joined Heinlein's resourceful heroes, I hadn't discovered Anderson, Asimov, Clarke, Nourse,

Simak. . . .

All that was about to change. Because my father had.

My father was a science fiction reader; in our house, where library books were everywhere, it was my father who

bought the paperbacks. They were divided pretty equally in thirds—suspense (including spy-novels), war, and

science fiction.

It was the start of summer vacation, I had already bored through my stack of nine books, and we weren't going back

to the library for another two days. I was desperate. I ventured into the living room, and picked up James Schmidt's

Agent of Vega.

I'm not sure why. It certainly wasn't the cover—in those days, science fiction books were sporting rather odd

abstract paintings—possibly trying to divorce themselves from the Bug Eyed Monsters of the pulp covers so that

they could be taken Seriously. That wasn't going to happen, not in the Sixties, but you couldn't fault the editors for

trying. It wasn't the title—I hadn't a clue what, or who, Vega was, and I wasn't interested in the James Bond books

(yet) that featured the only other "agent" I knew of. Perhaps it was just desperation. I asked politely if I could read it,

was granted permission, and trotted away to my room with my prize.

Five minutes later, it was true love.

It was an epiphany.

Here was everything I had been looking for—exotic settings, thrills, adventure, heroines who were just as

resourceful and brave as the heroes, and something more. There was a magic in the words, but there was more than

that. It was imagination.

No one, no one, since my fairy-tales, had written like this. This James Schmitz fellow seemed as familiar with

androids and alien planets as I was with the ice-cream man and the streets of my home town.

And here, for the first time, I encountered psionics.

Psi! There was even an abbreviation for it! Telepathy! Telekinesis! Teleportation! Empathy! Precognition!

Oh, these were words to conjure with! Better than the magic of the fairy-tales, these were scientific which meant that

someone, somewhere (oh let it be me! Me!) might find a way to get one of these powers for himself!

Much has been made of the "sense of wonder" that science fiction evokes, and believe me, there was nothing to

evoke that sense quite like the worlds of James Schmitz. Especially for someone who had never read anything like

this before. The man had the right stuff; no doubt of it. By the time that I was done with that book, I was well and

truly hooked.

And my life had just taken that irrevocable, epiphanal change.

There was no going back; when we got to the library, I flew to the science fiction section, and (once I had cleaned

out the Schmitz) proceeded to work my way down the alphabet. I did the same in the school library (earning some

peculiar looks from the librarian, I can tell you, since girls weren't supposed to like science fiction). Shortly after

that, I discovered that there were whole stores devoted just to books—I had always lived in suburbs, and back in

those days, there weren't Malls. There were a few—a very few—strip-malls, few of which devoted any space to

anything other than stores with "Boutique" in the name, and there were no real chain bookstores. But we went to

Chicago for dental and optometrist appointments, and there in Chicago were bookstores.

And after that, thanks to the helpful little bits in the back of the books (oh, Ace Doubles! two books—all right,

novellas—for the price of one!) I learned that you could actually order books from the company.

Bliss limited only by my allowance!

But my allowance didn't allow me to buy all the books I craved, nor did the librarian oblige by ordering nothing but

science fiction with the meager budget allocated to her. So, there was nothing for it.

I had to write my own.

Now, I never would have come to this moment, if not (again) for James Schmitz. The novels arranged in their

imposing hard covers on the library shelves could not possibly have been written by mere human beings, right? I

couldn't aspire to that. (Even if the dust jackets had actually featured any information about the authors, thus

removing them to the realms of mortals, the librarian had helpfully taken them off because "they always got torn and

dirty.") But there was lots of information on the paperback covers—and more, much more about those authors in the

science fiction magazines I had discovered in the local drugstore! Why, they even argued with each other in the

letter columns, sounding exactly like myself and my little brother in the midst of a squabble! Yes indeed, these

books were written by human beings just like me. If they could write books, so could I.

So, thanks to James Schmitz, I became an author—first an under-the-bed author (who hid my notebooks full of

illustrated stories under the bed where my brother wouldn't find them), then turning in my stories to high-school

literary contests, then writing as a hobby in college—then writing fanfic and actually getting published (!!!).

And then, finally, actually, making the big leap into Professional Status.

Through it all, the memory of that book, that moment, has stayed with me. The sense of wonder and excitement has

never faded, and never will.

Thank you, James Schmitz, wherever you are.

And thank you, Eric Flint and Jim Baen, for bringing his Right Stuff back again. Maybe some other kid, desperate

for something to read, will have an epiphany of his or her own.

h1 {page-break-before:left}

Back | NextContents

THE CONFEDERACY OF VEGA

Agent of Vega

"It just happens," the Third Co-ordinator of the Vegan Confederacy explained patiently, "that the local Agent—it's

Zone Seventeen Eighty-two—isn't available at the moment. In fact, he isn't expected to contact this HQ for at least

another week. And since the matter really needs prompt attention, and you happened to be passing within convenient

range of the spot, I thought of you."

"I like these little extra jobs I get whenever you think of me," commented the figure in the telepath transmitter

before him. It was that of a small, wiry man with rather cold yellow eyes—sitting against an undefined dark

background, he might have been a minor criminal or the skipper of an aging space-tramp.

"After the last two of them, as I recall it," he continued pointedly, "I turned in my final mission report from the

emergency treatment tank of my ship—And if you'll remember, I'd have been back in my own Zone by now if you

hadn't sent me chasing a wild-eyed rumor in this direction!"

He leaned forward with an obviously false air of hopeful anticipation. "Now this wouldn't just possibly be another

hot lead on U-1, would it?"

"No, no! Nothing like that!" the Co-ordinator said soothingly. In his mental file the little man was listed as "Zone

Agent Iliff, Zone Thirty-six Oh-six; unrestricted utility; try not to irritate—" There was a good deal more of it,

including the notation:

"U-1: The Agent's failure-shock regarding this subject has been developed over the past twelve-year period into a

settled fear-fix of prime-motive proportions. The Agent may now be entrusted with the conclusion of this case,

whenever the opportunity is presented."

That was no paradox to the Co-ordinator who, as Chief of the Department of Galactic Zones, was Iliff's immediate

superior. He knew the peculiar qualities of his agents—and how to make the most economical use of them, while

they lasted.

"It's my own opinion," he offered cheerily, "that U-1 has been dead for years. Though I'll admit Correlation doesn't

agree with me there."

"Correlation's often right," Iliff remarked, still watchfully. He added, "U-1 appeared excessively healthy the last

time I got near him."

"Well, that was twelve standard years ago," the Co-ordinator murmured. "If he were still around, he'd have taken a

bite out of us before this—a big bite! Just to tell us he doesn't think the Galaxy is quite wide enough for him and the

Confederacy both. He's not the type to lie low longer than he has to." He paused. "Or do you think you might have

shaken some of his supremacy ideas out of him that last time?"

"Not likely," said Iliff. The voice that came from the transmitter, the thought that carried it, were equally impassive.

"He booby-trapped me good. To him it wouldn't even have seemed like a fight."

The Co-ordinator shrugged. "Well, there you are! Anyway, this isn't that kind of job at all. It's actually a rather

simple assignment."

Iliff winced.

"No, I mean it! What this job takes is mostly tact—always one of your strongest points, Iliff."

The statement was not entirely true; but the Agent ignored it and the Co-ordinator went on serenely:

" . . . so I've homed you full information on the case. Your ship should pick it up in an hour, but you might have

questions; so here it is, in brief:

"Two weeks ago, the Bureau of Interstellar Crime sends an operative to a planet called Gull in Seventeen Eighty-

two—that's a mono-planet system near Lycanno, just a bit off your present route. You been through that

neighborhood before?"

Iliff blinked yellow eyes and produced a memory. "We went through Lycanno once. Seventeen or eighteen

Habitables; population A-Class Human; Class D politics—How far is Gull from there?"

"Eighteen hours' cruising speed, or a little less—but you're closer to it than that right now. This operative was to

make positive identification of some ex-spacer called Tahmey, who'd been reported there, and dispose of him.

Routine interstellar stuff, but—twenty-four hours ago, the operative sends back a message that she finds positive

identification impossible . . . and that she wants a Zone Agent."

He looked expectantly at Iliff. Both of them knew perfectly well that the execution of a retired piratical spacer was

no part of a Zone Agent's job—furthermore, that every Interstellar operative was aware of the fact; and finally, that

such a request should have induced the Bureau to recall its operative for an immediate mental overhaul and several

months' vacation before he or she could be risked on another job.

"Give," Iliff suggested patiently.

"The difference," the Co-ordinator explained, "is that the operative is one of our Lannai trainees."

"I see," said the Agent.

* * *

He did. The Lannai were high type humanoids and the first people of their classification to be invited to join the

Vegan Confederacy—till then open only to Homo sapiens and the interesting variety of mutant branches of that old

Terrestrial stock.

The invitation had been sponsored, against formidable opposition, by the Department of Galactic Zones, with the

obvious intention of having the same privilege extended later to as many humanoids and other nonhuman races as

could meet the Confederacy's general standards.

As usual, the Department's motive was practical enough. Its king-sized job was to keep the eighteen thousand

individual civilizations so far registered in its Zones out of as much dangerous trouble as it could, while nudging

them unobtrusively, whenever the occasion was offered, just a little farther into the path of righteousness and order.

It was slow, dangerous, carefully unspectacular work, since it violated, in fact and in spirit, every galactic treaty of

nonintervention the Confederacy had ever signed. Worst of all, it was work for which the Department was, of

necessity, monstrously understaffed.

The more political systems, races and civilizations it could draw directly into the Confederacy, the fewer it would

have to keep under that desperately sketchy kind of supervision. Regulations of membership in Vega's super-system

were interpreted broadly, but even so they pretty well precluded any dangerous degree of deviation from the ideals

that Vega championed.

And if, as a further consequence, Galactic Zones could then draw freely on the often startling abilities and talents of

nonhuman peoples to aid in its titanic project—

The Department figuratively licked its chops.

* * *

The opposition was sufficiently rooted in old racial emotions to be extremely bitter and strong. The Traditionalists,

working chiefly through the Confederacy's Department of Cultures, wanted no dealings with any race which could

not trace its lineage back through the long centuries to Terra itself. Nonhumans had played a significant part in the

century-long savage struggles that weakened and finally shattered the first human Galactic Empire.

That mankind, as usual, had asked for it and that its grimmest and most powerful enemies were to be found

nowadays among those who could and did claim the same distant Earth-parentage did not noticeably weaken the old

argument, which to date had automatically excluded any other stock from membership. In the High Council of the

Confederacy, the Department of Cultures, backed by a conservative majority of the Confederacy's members, had,

naturally enough, tremendous influence.

Galactic Zones, however—though not one citizen in fifty thousand knew of its existence, and though its arguments

could not be openly advanced—had a trifle more.

So the Lannai were in—on probation.

"As you may have surmised," the Third Co-ordinator said glumly, "the Lannai haven't exactly been breaking their

necks trying to get in with us, either. In fact, their government's had to work for the alliance against almost the same

degree of popular disapproval; though on the whole they seem to be a rather more reasonable sort of people than we

are. Highly developed natural telepaths, you know—that always seems to make folks a little easier to get along

with."

"What's this one doing in Interstellar?" Iliff inquired.

"We've placed a few Lannai in almost every department of the government by now—not, of course, in Galactic

Zones! The idea is to prove, to our people and theirs, that Lannai and humans can work for the same goal, share

responsibilities, and so on. To prove generally that we're natural allies."

"Has it been proved?"

"Too early to say. They're bright enough and, of course, the ones they sent us were hand-picked and anxious to make

good. This Interstellar operative looked like one of the best. She's a kind of relative of the fifth ranking Lannai ruler.

That's what would make it bad if it turned out she'd blown up under stress. For one thing, their pride could be hurt

enough to make them bolt the alliance. But our Traditionalists certainly would be bound to hear about it, and," the

Co-ordinator concluded heatedly, "the Co-ordinator of Cultures would be rising to his big feet again on the subject

in Council!"

"An awkward situation, sir," Iliff sympathized, "demanding a great deal of tact. But then you have that."

"I've got it," agreed the Co-ordinator, "but I'd prefer not to have to use it so much. So if you can find some way of

handling that little affair on Gull discreetly—Incidentally, since you'll be just a short run then from Lycanno, there's

an undesirable political trend reported building up there. They've dropped from D to H-Class politics inside of a

decade. You'll find the local Agent's notes on the matter waiting for you on Gull. Perhaps you might as well skip

over and fix it."

"All right," said Iliff coldly. "I won't be needed back in my own Zone for another hundred hours. Not urgently."

"Lab's got a new mind-lock for you to test," the Co-ordinator went on briskly. "You'll find that on Gull, too."

There was a slight pause.

"You remember, don't you," the Agent inquired gently then, as if speaking to an erring child, "what happened the

last time I gave one of those gadgets a field test on a highpowered brain?"

"Yes, of course! But if this one works," the Co-ordinator pointed out, almost wistfully, "we've got something we

really do need. And until I know it does work, under ultimate stresses, I can't give it general distribution. I've picked

a hundred of you to try it out." He sighed. "Theoretically, it will hold a mind of any conceivable potential within that

mind's own shields, under any conceivable stress, and still permit almost normal investigation. It's been checked to

the limit," he concluded encouragingly, "under lab conditions—"

"They all were," Iliff recollected, without noticeable enthusiasm. "Well, I'll see what turns up."

"That's fine!" The Co-ordinator brightened visibly. He added, "We wouldn't, of course, want you to take any

unnecessary risks—"

* * *

For perhaps half a minute after the visualization tank of his telepath transmitter had faded back to its normal

translucent and faintly luminous green, Iliff continued to stare into it.

Back on Jeltad, the capitol planet of the Confederacy, fourteen thousand light-years away, the Co-ordinator's

attention was turning to some other infinitesimal-seeming but significant crisis in the Department's monstrous

periphery. The chances were he would not think of Iliff again, or of Zone Seventeen Eighty-two, until Iliff's final

mission report came in—or failed to come in within the period already allotted it by the Department's automatic

monitors.

In either event, the brain screened by the Co-ordinator's conversational inanities would revert once more to that

specific problem then, for as many unhurried seconds, minutes or, it might be, hours as it required. It was one of the

three or four human brains in the galaxy for which Zone Agent Iliff had ever felt anything remotely approaching

genuine respect.

"How far are we from Gull now?" he said without turning his head.

A voice seemed to form itself in the air a trifle above and behind him.

"A little over eight hours, cruising speed—"

"As soon as I get the reports off the pigeon from Jeltad, step it up so we get there in four," Iliff said. "I think I'll be

ready about that time."

"The pigeon just arrived," the voice replied. It was not loud, but it was a curiously big voice with something of the

overtones of an enormous bronze gong in it. It was also oddly like a cavernous amplification of Iliff's own type of

speech.

The agent turned to a screen on his left, in which a torpedo-like twenty-foot tube of metal had appeared, seemingly

suspended in space and spinning slowly about its axis. Actually, it was some five miles from the ship—which was as

close as it was healthy to get to a homing pigeon at the end of its voyage—and following it at the ship's exact rate of

speed, though it was driven by nothing except an irresistible urge to get to its "roost," the pattern of which had been

stamped in its molecules. The roost was on Iliff's ship, but the pigeon would never get there. No one knew just what

sort of subdimensions it flashed through on its way to its objective or what changes were wrought on it before it

reappeared, but early experiments with the gadget had involved some highly destructive explosions at its first

contact with any solid matter in normal space.

So now it was held by barrier at a safe distance while its contents were duplicated within the ship. Then something

lethal flickered from the ship to the pigeon and touched it; and it vanished with no outward indication of violence.

For a time, Iliff became immersed in the dossiers provided both by Interstellar and his own department. The ship

approached and presently drove through the boundaries of Zone Seventeen Eighty-two, and the big voice murmured:

"Three hours to Gull."

"All right," Iliff said, still absently. "Let's eat."

Nearly another hour passed before he spoke again. "Send her this. Narrow-beam telepath—Gull itself should be

close enough, I think. If you can get it through—"

He stood up, yawned, stretched and bent, and straightened again.

"You know," he remarked suddenly, "I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the old girl wasn't so wacky, after all. What I

mean is," he explained, "she really might need a Zone Agent."

"Is it going to be another unpredictable mission?" the voice inquired.

"Aren't they always—when the man picks them for us? What was that?"

There was a moment's silence. Then the voice told him, "She's got your message. She'll be expecting you."

"Fast!" Iliff said approvingly. "Now listen. On Gull, we shall be old Trader Casselmath with his stock of exotic and

expensive perfumes. So get yourself messed up for the part—but don't spill any of the stuff, this time."

* * *

The suspect's name was Deel. For the past ten years he had been a respected—and respectable—citizen and

merchant of the mono-planet System of Gull. He was supposed to have come there from his birthplace, Number

Four of the neighboring System of Lycanno.

But the microstructural plates the operative made of him proved he was the pirate Tahmey who, very probably, had

once been a middling big shot among the ill-famed Ghant Spacers. The Bureau of Interstellar Crime had him on

record; and it was a dogma of criminology that microstructural identification was final and absolute—that the

telltale patterns could not be duplicated, concealed, or altered to any major degree without killing the organism.

The operative's people, however, were telepaths, and she was an adept, trained in the widest and most intensive use

of the faculty. For a Lannai it was natural to check skeptically, in her own manner, the mechanical devices of

another race.

If she had not been an expert she would have been caught then, on her first approach. The mind she attempted to tap

was guarded.

By whom or what was a question she did not attempt to answer immediately. There were several of these watch-

dogs, of varying degrees of ability. Her thought faded away from the edge of their watchfulness before their

attention was drawn to it. It slid past them and insinuated itself deftly through the crude electronic thought-shields

used by Tahmey. Such shields were a popular commercial article, designed to protect men with only an average

degree of mental training against the ordinary telepathic prowler and entirely effective for that purpose. Against her

manner of intrusion they were of no use at all.

But it was a shock to discover then that she was in no way within the mind of Tahmey! This was, in literal fact, the

mind of the man named Deel—for the past ten years a citizen of Gull, before that of the neighboring System of

Lycanno.

The fact was, to her at least, quite as indisputable as the microstructural evidence that contradicted it. This was not

some clumsily linked mass of artificial memory tracts and habit traces, but a living, matured mental personality. It

showed few signs of even as much psychosurgery as would be normal in a man of Deel's age and circumstances.

But if it was Deel, why should anyone keep a prosperous, reasonably honest and totally insignificant planeteer under

telepathic surveillance? She considered investigating the unknown watchers, but the aura of cold, implacable

alertness she had sensed in her accidental near-contact with them warned her not to force her luck too far.

"After all," she explained apologetically, "I had no way of estimating their potential."

"No," Iliff agreed, "you hadn't. But I don't think that was what stopped you."

The Lannai operative looked at him steadily for a moment. Her name was Pagadan and, though no more human than

a jellyfish, she was to human eyes an exquisitely designed creature. It was rather startling to realize that her

Interstellar dossier described her as a combat-type mind—which implied a certain ruthlessness, at the very least—

and also that she had been sent to Gull to act, among other things, as an executioner.

"Now what did you mean by that?" she inquired, on a note of friendly wonder.

"I meant," Iliff said carefully, "that I'd now like to hear all the little details you didn't choose to tell Interstellar. Let's

start with your trip to Lycanno."

"Oh, I see!" Pagadan said. "Yes, I went to Lycanno, of course—" She smiled suddenly and became with that, he

thought, extraordinarily beautiful, though the huge silvery eyes with their squared black irises, which widened or

narrowed flickeringly with every change of mood or shift of light, did not conform exactly to any standard human

ideal. No more did her hair, a silver-shimmering fluffy crest of something like feathers—but the general effect, Iliff

decided, remained somehow that of a remarkably attractive human woman in permanent fancy dress. According to

the reports he'd studied recently, it had pleased much more conservative tastes than his own.

"You're a clever little man, Zone Agent," she said thoughtfully. "I believe I might as well be frank with you. If I'd

reported everything I know about this case—though for reasons I shall tell you I really found out very little—the

Bureau would almost certainly have recalled me. They show a maddening determination to see that I shall come to

no harm while working for them." She looked at him doubtfully. "You understand that, simply because I'm a Lannai,

I'm an object of political importance just now?"

Iliff nodded.

"Very well. I discovered in Lycanno that the case was a little more than I could handle alone." She shivered slightly,

the black irises flaring wide with what was probably reminiscent fright.

"But I did not want to be recalled. My people," she said a little coldly, "will accept the proposed alliance only if they

are to share in your enterprises and responsibilities. They do not wish to be shielded or protected, and it would have

a poor effect on them if they learned that we, their first representatives among you, had been relieved of our duties

whenever they threatened to involve us in personal danger."

"I see," Iliff said seriously, remembering that she was royalty of a sort, or the Lannai equivalent of it. He shook his

head. "The Bureau," he said, "must have quite a time with you."

Pagadan stared and laughed. "No doubt they find me a little difficult at times. Still, I do know how to take orders.

But in this case it seemed more important to make sure I was not going to be protected again than to appear

reasonable and co-operative. So I made use, for the first time, of my special status in the Bureau and insisted that a

Zone Agent be sent here. However, I can assure you that the case has developed into an undertaking that actually

will require a Zone Agent's peculiar abilities and equipment."

"Well," Iliff shrugged, "it worked and here I am, abilities, equipment and all. What was it you found on Lycanno?"

There was considerable evidence to show that, during the years Tahmey was on record as having been about his

criminal activities in space, the man named Deel was living quietly on the fourth planet of the Lycanno System,

rarely even venturing beyond its atmospheric limits because of a pronounced and distressing liability to the

psychosis of space-fear.

Pagadan gathered this evidence partly from official records, partly and in much greater detail from the unconscious

memories of some two hundred people who had been more or less intimately connected with Deel. The investigation

appeared to establish his previous existence in Lycanno beyond all reasonable doubt. It did nothing to explain why it

should have become merged fantastically with the physical appearance of the pirate Tahmey.

This Deel was remembered as a big, blond, healthy man, good-natured and shrewd, the various details of his

features and personality blurred or exaggerated by the untrained perceptions of those who remembered him. The

description, particularly after this lapse of time, could have fitted Tahmey just as well—or just as loosely.

It was as far as she could go along that line. Officialdom was lax in Lycanno, and the precise identification of

individual citizens by microstructural images or the like was not practiced. Deel had been born there, matured there,

become reasonably successful. Then his business was destroyed by an offended competitor, and it was indicated to

him that he would not be permitted to re-establish himself in the System.

He had business connections on Gull; and after undergoing a lengthy and expensive conditioning period against the

effects of space-fear, he ventured to make the short trip, and was presently working himself back to a position

comfortably near the top on Gull.

That was all. Except that—somewhere along the line—his overall physical resemblance to Tahmey had shifted into

absolute physical identity. . . .

"I realize, of course, that the duplication of a living personality in another body is considered almost as impossible

as the existence of a microstructural double. But it does seem that Tahmey-Deel has to be one or the other."

"Or," Iliff grunted, "something we haven't thought of yet. This is beginning to look more and more like one of those

cases I'd like to forget. Well, what did you do?"

"If there was a biopsychologist in the Lycanno System who had secretly developed a method of personality transfer

in some form or other, he was very probably a man of considerable eminence in that line of work. I began to screen

the minds of persons likely to know of such a man."

"Did you find him?"

She shook her head and grimaced uncomfortably. "He found me—at least, I think we can assume it was he. I

assembled some promising leads, a half dozen names in all, and then—I find this difficult to describe—from one

moment to another I knew I was being . . . sought . . . by another mind. By a mind of quite extraordinary power,

which seemed fully aware of my purpose, of the means I was employing—in fact, of everything except my exact

whereabouts at the moment. It was intended to shock me into revealing that—simply by showing me, with that

jolting abruptness, how very close I stood to being caught."

"And you didn't reveal yourself?"

"No," she laughed nervously. "But I went `akaba' instead. I was under it for three days and well on my way back to

Gull when I came out of it—as a passenger on a commercial ship! Apparently, I had abandoned my own ship on

Lycanno and conducted my escape faultlessly and without hesitation. Successfully, at any rate—But I remember

nothing, of course."

"That was quite a brain chasing you then." Iliff nodded slowly. The akaba condition was a disconcerting defensive

trick which had been played on him on occasion by members of other telepathic races. The faculty was common to

most of them, completely involuntary, and affected the pursuer more or less as if he had been closing in on a glow of

mental light and suddenly saw that light vanish without a trace.

The Departmental Lab's theory was that under the stress of a psychic attack which was about to overwhelm the

individual telepath, a kind of racial Overmind took over automatically and conducted its member-mind's escape

from the emergency, if that was at all possible, with complete mechanical efficiency before restoring it to awareness

of itself. It was only a theory since the Overmind, if it existed, left no slightest traces of its work—except the brief

void of one of the very few forms of complete and irreparable amnesia known. For some reason, as mysterious as

the rest of it, the Overmind never intervened if the threatened telepath had been physically located by the pursuer.

* * *

They stared at each other thoughtfully for a moment, then smiled at the same instant.

"Do you believe now," Pagadan challenged, "that this task is worthy of the efforts of a Vegan Zone Agent and his

shipload of specialists?"

"I've been afraid of that right along," Iliff said without enthusiasm. "But look, you seem to know a lot more about

Galactic Zones than you're really supposed to. Like that business about our shipload of specialists—that kind of

information is to be distributed only `at or above Zone Agent levels.' Where did you pick it up?"

"On Jeltad—above Zone Agent levels," Pagadan replied undisturbed. "Quite a bit above, as a matter of fact! The

occasion was social. And now that I've put you in your place, when do you intend to investigate Deel? I've become

casually acquainted with him and could arrange a meeting at almost any time."

Iliff rubbed his chin. "Well, as to that," he said, "Trader Casselmath dropped in to see a few of Deel's business

associates immediately after landing today. They were quite fascinated by the samples of perfume he offered them—

he does carry an excellent line of the stuff, you know, though rather high-priced. So Deel turned up too, finally.

You'll be interested to hear he's using a new kind of mind-shield now."

She was not surprised. "They were warned, naturally, from Lycanno. The mentality there knew I had been

investigating Deel."

"Well, it shows the Brain wasn't able to identify you too closely, because they're waiting for you to pick up your

research at this end again. The shield was hair-triggered to give off some kind of alarm. Old Casselmath couldn't be

expected to recognize that, of course. He took a poke at it, innocently enough—just trying to find out how far Deel

and company could be swindled."

She leaned forward, eyes gleaming black with excitement. "What happened?"

Iliff shrugged. "Nothing at all obvious. But somebody did come around almost immediately to look Casselmath

over. In fact, they pulled his simple mind pretty well wide open, though the old boy never noticed it. Then they

knew he was harmless and went away."

Pagadan frowned faintly.

"No," Iliff said, "it wasn't the Brain. These were stooges, though clever ones—probably the same that were on guard

when you probed Tahmey-Deel the first time. But they've been alerted now, and I don't think we could do any more

investigating around Deel without being spotted. After your experience on Lycanno, it seems pretty likely that the

answers are all there, anyway."

She nodded slowly. "That's what I think. So we go to Lycanno!"

* * *

Iliff shook his head. "Just one of us goes," he corrected her. And before her flash of resentment could be voiced he

added smoothly, "That's for my own safety as much as for yours. The Brain must have worked out a fairly exact

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

AgentsofVegaJamesASchmitz"Thatwasanepiphany...."MercedesLackeyThere'sacommercialoncablestationslatelythattalksaboutmomentsofepiphany—momentswhenyouunderstandsomethingthatchangesyourlife.I'vehadatleastoneofthosemoments—andwhenitwasover,mylifehadbeenchangedforever.Itwaswhen,whenIwaselevenorthereabouts...

展开>> 收起<<

James H. Schmitz - Agents of Vega.pdf

共235页,预览10页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

James H. Schmitz - Agents of Vega

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: