[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

After dinner, she retired early to her cabin. It was possible, as Dasinger had
suggested, that the attorneys would still come up with a practical solution.
But one clearly couldn't depend on it.
She sent out a thread of thought for Chomir, located him in the cruiser's
lounge with Gonwil and Gilas, and slipped back into his mind. It was as easy
now as walking into a house to which one owned the key. When ship-night was
sounded an hour or so later, she was with him as he followed Gonwil to her
cabin. And quite a little later again, she knew Gonwil finally had found
troubled sleep.
Telzey withdrew from Chomir and put out the drifting telepathic probe which by
and by would touch one of Gonwil's sleeping thoughts and through it establish
the first insubstantial bridge between their minds. Then, in a day or two, she
would be in control of Gonwil's mental activities, in the same unsuspected and
untraceable way and as completely, as she was of Chomir's.
She felt uncomfortable about it. It hadn't disturbed her at all to tap the
minds of strangers, just to see what was in there and to experiment a little.
Intruding on the private thoughts of a friend, secretly and uninvited, somehow
seemed a very different matter.
But the way things appeared to be going made it necessary now.
It was a week before the subject of registering for a private war came up
again; and now it wasn't Dasinger's suggestion. The bank's attorneys
recommended the move, though with obvious reluctance, to Gilas and Gonwil, as
an apparently necessary one if Mrs. Parlin's designs on Gonwil's share in
Lodis Associates were to be checked.
By then, nobody, including Gonwil, was really surprised to hear of it. It had
been a frustrating week for the legal staff. While they felt they weren't at
the end of their resources, it was clear that Malrue Parlin had been prepared
Page 57
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
for years to face a day of reckoning. The investigators on Tayun reported many
suspicious circumstances about her activities, but produced no scrap of
evidence to connect the Parlins to them. Malrue had few allies with whom she
had worked directly; and all of them had protected themselves as carefully as
she did.
Other approaches had brought equally negative results. The rule barring
members of Lodis Associates from selling shares to outsiders before their
fellows were given an opportunity to purchase them at a prohibitively low
price was found to be backed in full by Tayun law. While Gonwil was still a
child, the rule could have been set aside with relative ease, but there
appeared to be no way around it now that she would be a legally responsible
adult within a few months. The minor shareholders in the concern had declined
offers of her stock at something approximating its present value, and
indicated they would have no interest in it at any price. They clearly didn't
intend to get into Malrue Parlin's game.
The Parlins were still on Orado, equipped with a formidable bodyguard and an
equally formidable corps of lawyers, both imports from Tayun who evidently had
preceded Malrue and her husband here, to be brought into action if needed. But
Malrue had made no immediate moves. She might be satisfied to let Gonwil's
supporters find out for themselves that her legal position was unassailable.
Telzey had remained a detached observer of these developments, realizing they
were running uncomfortably close to Dasinger's predictions. She was giving
most of her time to Gonwil. Her previous investigations of human minds had
been brief and directed as a rule to specific details, but she felt there was
reason to be very careful here.
What was going on inside Gonwil's blond head nowadays wasn't good. Harm had
been done, and Telzey was afraid to tamper with the results, to attempt the
role of healer. It wasn't a simple matter of patching up a few memories as
with Chomir; there was too much she didn't understand. Gonwil would have to do
her own healing, at least at the start, and to an extent she was doing it.
During the first day or two, her thoughts had a numbed quality to them.
Outwardly she acquiesced in everything, was polite, smiled occasionally. But
something had been shattered; and she was waiting to see what the people about
her would do, how they intended to put all the pieces together again. When she
thought of Cousin Malrue's treachery, it was in a puzzled, childish manner.
Then, gradually, she began to understand that the pieces weren't simply going
to be put together again now. This ugliness could go on indefinitely,
excluding her meanwhile from normal human life.
The realization woke Gonwil up. Until then, most of the details of the
situation about her had been blurred and without much meaning. Now she started
to look them over carefully, and they became obvious enough.
The efforts of Rienne's lawyers to find a satisfactory solution had begun to
bog down because this was a matter which the Federation's laws did not
adequately cover. She had been one of the Hub's favored and pampered children,
but in part that was now the reason she was being forced towards the edge of a
no man's land where survival depended on oneself and one's friends. Unless
something quite unexpected happened, she would soon have to decide what the
future would be like.
The thought startled her, but she accepted it. There was a boy in the
Federation Navy, a cadet she'd met the previous summer, who played a part in
her considerations. So did Telzey, and Dasinger and his agency, and Malrue and
her husband and Junior, and the group of professional gunmen they'd brought in
from Tayun to be their bodyguards. All of them would be affected in one way or
another by what she agreed to. She must be very careful to make no mistakes.
Gonwil, seen directly in her reflections and shifts of feeling now that she'd
snapped out of the numbed shock, seemed more likeable than ever to Telzey. But
she didn't like at all what was almost surely coming.
It came. Mainly perhaps for the purpose of having it on record, Rienne's legal
department had notified the Parlins' lawyers in Orado City that Miss Lodis [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]