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your controlled psi proxies. You ve been letting others take chances for you
for quite a while.
She added, All things considered, I understand they re letting you off rather
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lightly. You were thinking of experimenting with djeel oil, and you ll get the
chance, in one of the Service s high-risk space projects. You know too much
about it to be turned loose anyway.
Alicar glowered at her.
What about yourself? he demanded. You know at least as much as I do!
Telzey stood up. True, she said. But the Service found out a while ago that
I m good at keeping secrets. I ll be starting back to Orado in a few minutes.
I just stopped in to say good-bye.
He didn t reply. She went to the door, looked back at him.
Cheer up, Alicar! she told him. It s still better than working for Soad
until he decided to make a meal of you
which is what you would have been doing if things had turned out just a little
differently!
TI S TOYS
1
An auburn-haired, petal-cheeked young woman who belonged in another reality
came walking with feline grace along a restaurant terrace in Orado City where
Telzey had stopped for lunch during a shopping excursion.
Telzey watched her approach. This, she decided, was quite strange. Going by
her appearance and way of moving, the woman seemed to be someone she d met
before. But she knew they hadn t met before. She knew also, in a curiously
definite manner, that the woman simply couldn t be on this terrace in Orado
City. She existed in other dimensions, not here, not now.
The woman who didn t exist here glanced at Telzey in passing. There was no
recognition in the look. Telzey shifted her chair slightly, watched the
familiar-unfamiliar phantom take another table not far away, pick up an order
disk. A very good-looking young woman with a smooth unsmiling face,
fashionably and expensively dressed and nobody else around seemed to find
anything at all unreasonable in her presence.
So perhaps, Telzey reflected, it was her psi senses that found it
unreasonable. She slipped out a thought probe, held it a moment. It produced
no telepathic touch response, no suggestion of shielding. If the woman was
psi, she was an atypical variety. She d taken a snack glass from the table
dispenser by now, was sipping at it
Comprehension came suddenly. No mystery after all, Telzey told herself, half
amused, half disappointed. A year ago, she d gone with some acquaintances to
take in a Martridrama. The woman looked and walked exactly like one of the
puppets they d seen that evening, one who played a minor role but appeared
enough of an individual to have left an impression in memory. No wonder it had
seemed a slightly uncanny encounter Martri puppets didn t go strolling around
the city by themselves.
Another thought drifted up then, quite idly.
Or did they?
Telzey studied the pale profile again. Her skin began prickling. It was a most
improper notion, but there might be a quick way of checking it. Some minds
could be tapped easily, some with varying degrees of difficulty, some not at
all. If this woman happened to be one of the easy ones, a few minutes of
probing could establish what she was or wasn t.
It took longer than that. Telzey had contact presently, but it remained
tenuous and indistinct; she lost it repeatedly.
Then, as she re-established it again, a little more definitely now, the woman
finished her snack drink and stood up.
Telzey slipped a pay chit for her lunch into the table s receptacle, waited
till her quarry turned away, then followed her toward a terrace exit.
A Martri puppet was a biological organism superficially indistinguishable from
a human being. It had a brain which could be programmed, and which responded
to cues with human speech and human behavior. Whether something resembling the
human mind could be associated with that kind of brain was a point Telzey
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hadn t found occasion to consider before. She was no Martriphile, didn t, in
fact, particularly care for that form of entertainment.
There was mind here, and the blurred patterns she d touched seemed human. But
she hadn t picked up enough to say it couldn t be the mind of a Martri puppet.
. . .
The woman took an airtaxi on another terrace of the shopping complex. As it
rose from the platform, Telzey got into the next taxi in line and told the
driver to follow the one that had just left. The driver spun his colleague s
car into his screen.
Don t know if I can, he said then. He s heading up into heavy traffic.
Telzey smiled at him. Double fare for trying!
They set off promptly in pursuit. Telzey clung to her contact, began
assembling additional data. Some minutes later, the driver announced, Looks
like we ve lost them!
She already knew it. Distance wasn t necessarily a factor in developing mind
contact. In this case it had been a factor. The crosstown traffic stream was
dense, close to the automatic reroute point. The impressions she d been
receiving, weak at best, had begun to be flooded out increasingly by intruding
impressions from other minds. The car they d been pursuing must be several
miles away by now. She let contact fade, told the driver to return to the
shopping complex, and settled back very thoughtfully in her seat.
Few Martriphiles saw anything objectionable in having puppets killed literally
on stage when a drama called for it. It was an essential part of Martri
realism. The puppets were biological machines; the emotions and reactions they
displayed were programmed ones. They had no self-awareness that was the
theory.
What she d found in the mind of the auburn-haired woman seemed less important
than what she hadn t found there, though she d been specifically searching for
it.
That woman knew where she was, what she was doing. There d been scraps of
recent memory, some moment-to-
moment observations, an intimation of underlying purpose. But she appeared to
have no personal sense of herself.
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