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it.
In doing even that much, had she allowed it to become acquainted with her? She
wasn t sure. Something or other, at any rate, seemed to have developed an
awareness of her. Otherwise, she d had no problems. The addictive effect
didn t bother her; that could be dampened or screened out, and whatever
lingered after a period of contact was wiped from her mind in seconds.
The something-or-other did bother her.
Telzey turned the aircar into the mouth of a wide valley. It was between
winter and spring in the hills, windy and wet. Snow still lay in the gullies
and along the mountain slopes, but the green things were coming awake
everywhere. The Amberdon house stood forty miles to the north above the banks
of a little lake. . . .
There was this restlessness, a frequent inclination to check the car s view
screens, though there was almost no air traffic here. Simply a feeling of
something around! Something unseen.
When it happened before, she d suspected there might be a psi prowling in her
mental neighborhood, somebody who was taking an interest in her. Since such
uninvited interest wasn t always healthy, she d long since established
automatic sensors which picked up the beginnings of a scanning probe and
simultaneously concealed and alerted her.
The sensors hadn t gone into action.
So it shouldn t be a human psi hanging around. Unless it was a psi with a good
deal defter touch than she d encountered previously. Under the circumstances,
that, too, wasn t impossible.
If it wasn t a human psi, it almost had to be a Siren manifestation.
The feeling faded before she reached the house and brought her Cloudsplitter
down to the carport. Another aircar stood there, the one Trigger had rented
for her stay on Orado.
During the past two evenings, they d established a routine. When Telzey
arrived from college, she and Trigger had dinner, then settled down in the
room Gilas Amberdon used as a study when he was in the house. Its main
attraction was a fine fireplace. They d talk about this and that; meanwhile
the Siren s unshielded container stood on a table in a corner of the room, and
Telzey s thoughts drifted about the alien strangeness, not probing in any way
but picking up whatever was to be learned easily. She soon stopped getting
anything new in that manner; what was to be learned easily about the Siren
remained limited. Some time before midnight, they d restore the psi block, and
Telzey went off to Pehanron.
But before she left, they turned on the lights in the grounds outside for a
while. The very first night, the day
Trigger and the Siren moved in, they d had a rather startling experience. They
were in the study when they began to hear sounds outside. It might have been
tree branches beating against the wall in the wind, except that no tree grew
so close to the house there. It might even have been an unseasonable,
irregular spattering of hail. The study had no window, but the adjoining room
had two, so they went in, opened a window and looked out.
At once, something came up over the sill with a great wet flap of wings and
tail and drove into the room between them, bowling Telzey over. Trigger yelped
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and slammed the window shut as another pair of wings boomed in from the windy
dusk with more shadowy shapes behind it. When she looked around, Telzey was
getting to her feet and the intruder had disappeared into the house. They
could hear it flapping about somewhere.
 Are you hurt, Telzey?
 No.
 What in the world is that thing? There s a whole mess of them outside!
 Eveers. They re on spring migration. A flock was probably settling to the
lake and got in range of the Siren.
 Good Lord, yes! The Siren! We should have realized what ll we do with the one
in the house?
 The first thing we d better do is get the Siren shielded, said Telzey.
Trigger cocked her head, listening.  The, uh, eveer is in the study!
Telzey laughed.  They re not very dangerous. Come on!
The eveer might not have been a vicious creature normally, but it had strong
objections to being evicted from the study and put up a determined fight. They
both collected beak nips and scratches, were knocked about by solid wing
strokes and thoroughly muddied by the eveer s wet hide, before they finally
got it pinned down under a blanket.
Then Trigger crouched on the blanket, panting, while Telzey restored the psi
block. After that, the eveer seemed mainly interested in getting away from
them. They carried it to the front door between them, bundled in the blanket,
and opened the door. There they recoiled.
A sizable collection of Orado s local walking and flying fauna had gathered
along the wall of the house. But the creatures were already beginning to
disperse, now that the Siren s magic had faded; and at the appearance of the
two humans, most of them took off quickly. Trigger and Telzey shook the eveer
out of the blanket, and it went flapping away heavily into the night.
It took them most of an hour to tend to their injuries and clean up behind it.
After that, they ignored unusual sounds outside the house when the container s
psi block was off.
Other things were less easy to ignore.
The night Telzey started back to Pehanron after the weekend was the time she
first got the impression that something unseen was riding along with her. Psi
company, she suspected, though her sensors reported nothing. She waited a
while, relaxed her mind screens gradually, sent a sudden quick, wide
search-thought about, with something less friendly held in readiness, in case
it was company she didn t like. The search-thought should have caught at least
a trace of whoever or whatever was there. It didn t.
She remained behind her screens then, waiting. The feeling grew no stronger;
sometimes it seemed to weaken.
But it was a good five minutes before it faded completely.
It came back twice in the next two days. Once in the house while she was in
the study with Trigger, once on the way to the house. She didn t mention it to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]