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as overgrown primitive villages. They, or some seventy percent of them, lived
and worked in the enclosed portal systems called circuits. For most it was a
comfortable existence; for many a luxurious one.
A portal, for practical purposes, was two points in space clamped together to
form one. It was a method of moving in a step from here to there, within a
limited but considerable range. Portal circuits could be found on many Hub
worlds. On Tinokti they were everywhere. Varying widely in extent and
complexity, serving many purposes, they formed the framework of the planet's
culture.
On disembarking at the spaceport, Telzey had checked in at a great commercial
circuit called the Luerral
Hotel. It had been selected for her because it was free of the psi blocks in
rather general use here otherwise. The Luerral catered to the interstellar
trade; and the force patterns which created the blocks were likely to give
people unaccustomed to them a mildly oppressive feeling of being enclosed. For
Telzey's purpose, of course, they were more serious obstacles.
While registering, she was equipped with a guest key. The Luerral Hotel was
exclusive; its portals passed only those who carried a Luerral key or were in
the immediate company of somebody who did.
The keys were accessories of the Luerral's central computer and on request
gave verbal directions and other information. The one Telzey selected had the
form of a slender ring. She let it guide her to her room, found her luggage
had preceded her there, and made a call to the Tongi Phon Institute. Tinokti
ran on Institute time; the official workday wouldn't begin for another three
hours. But she was connected with someone who knew of her application to do
legal research, and was told a guide would come to take her to the Institute
when it opened.
She set out then on a stroll about the hotel and circled Tinokti twice in an
hour's unhurried walk, passing through portals which might open on shopping
malls, tropical parks or snowy mountain resorts, as the circuit dipped in and
out of the more attractive parts of the planet. She was already at work for
Klayung, playing the role of a psi operator who was playing the role of an
innocent student tourist. She wore a tracer which pinpointed her for a net of
spacecraft deployed about the planet. The bracelet on her left wrist was a
Service communicator; and she was in wispy but uninterrupted mind contact with
a Service telepath whose specialty it was to keep such contacts undetectable
for other minds. She also had armed company unobtrusively preceding and
following her. They were probing Tinokti carefully in many
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- Chapter 14
ways; she was now one of the probes.
Her thoughts searched through each circuit section and the open areas
surrounding it as she moved along. She picked up no conscious impressions of
the Service's quarry. But twice during that hour's walk, the screens enclosing
her mind like a flexing bubble tightened abruptly into a solid shield. Her
automatic detectors, more sensitive than conscious probes, had responded to a
passing touch of the type of mental patterns they'd been designed to warn her
against. The psis were here and evidently less cautious than they'd been on
Orado after her first encounter with them.
* * *
When she'd come back to the hotel's Great Lobby, Gudast, her Service contact,
inquired mentally, "Mind doing a little more walking?"
Telzey checked her watch. "Just so I'm not late for the Phons."
"We'll get you back in time."
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"All right. Where do I go?"
Gudast said, "Those mind touches you reported came at points where the Luerral
Hotel passes through major city complexes. We'd like you to go back to them,
leave the circuit and see if you can pick up something outside."
She got short-cut directions from the Luerral computer, set out again. The
larger sections had assorted transportation aids, but, on the whole, circuit
dwellers seemed to do a healthy amount of walking.
Almost all of the traffic she saw was pedestrian.
She took an exit presently, found herself in one of the city complexes
mentioned by Gudast. Her Luerral ring key informed her the hotel had turned
her over to the guidance of an area computer and that the key remained at her
service if she needed information. Directed by Gudast, she took a seat on a
slideway, let it carry her along a main street. Superficially, the appearance
of things here was not unlike that of some large city on Orado. The
differences were functional. Psi blocks were all about, sensed as a gradually
shifting pattern of barriers to probes as the slideway moved on with her.
Probably less than a fifth of the space of the great buildings was locally
open; everything else was taken up by circuit sections connected to other
points of the planet, ranging in size from a few residential or storage rooms
to several building levels. Milkily gleaming horizontal streaks along the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]