rattle_”_A_ter
gimmick. I never expected to show it to anyone, but let’s see if you can work it. It takes plenty of coordination. Screens tight, both sides. You scan. If I spot you, you get jolted so hard your teeth rattle!”After a few seconds, she said, “I’m there.”
Sams nodded.
“Good! I can’t tell it. Now I’ll leave you an opening, just a flash. You’re to try to catch it and slam me at the same instant.”
“Well, wait a moment!” Telzey said. “Supposing I don’t just try—I do it?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll block. Watch out for the counter!”
Sams’s screen opening flicked through her awareness five seconds later. She slammed. But, squeamishly perhaps, she held back somewhat on the bolt.
It took her an hour to bring Sams around. He sat up groggily at last.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Never mind. Goodbye! Go home. You’ve graduated. I’m a little sorry for the Service.”
Telzey knew she hadn’t given the Service much to work on, but there were a few possible lines of general investigation. Since the Melna Park psis apparently had set Robane the task of developing psi machines for them, they should be interested in psi machines generally. They might, or might not, be connected with the criminal ring with which he’d had contacts; if they were, they presumably controlled it. And, of course, they definitely did make use of a teleporting creature, of which there seemed to be no record otherwise, to kill people.
She’d been able to add one other thing about them which could be significant. They might be a mutant strain of humanity. The impressions of the thought forms she’d retained seemed to have a distinctive quality she’d never sensed in human minds before.
A machine copied the impressions from her memory. They were analyzed, checked against Service files. They did have a distinctive