"Can we go over and pet them or somethin'?" Mary Margaret wondered.
Irish shook her head. "Don't think so. I bet there's some kinda wall we can't see around. Remember, just 'cause they kinda look like us don't mean that they wouldn't like to beat the livin' shit out of us. We all know more human animals that'd do that, don't we?"
The other two nodded seriously and made no attempt to get closer to the pool and its colony of large chimpanzees.
Murphy looked at the apes, both the chimps on the ground and the orangutans in the trees, and wondered if they weren't a lot smarter than they were supposed to be.
You're gettin' paranoid, Murphy, he chided himself. But who wouldn't be after a week or two like he'd just had with those three?
Truth was, he wondered if they could possibly be as airheaded as they let on. Could they really match wits against those apes over there? And which group would win the intellectual battle?
He also wondered why anybody bothered to keep great apes around and preserved in their natural habitats like this. What good were they? Kind of like keeping a prehistoric virus around because it was the ancestor of pneumonia. Just because people and apes shared a family tree didn't seem to him sufficient reason for some folks, some civilizations, to actually pay not only for their preservation but also for real live pairs or colonies of them for some distant colonial worlds who would find better use for those resources making sure that they came through the upcoming economic and social train wreck everybody knew had to be coming.
He thought he heard someone come up in back of him. Turning while not getting up, he found himself staring down an enormous black-pelted gorilla not three meters from the back of his head.
That made him move faster than he dreamed he was still capable of moving.
The gorilla didn't try and lunge, and seemed almost amused by his reaction, like it had deliberately crept up behind him just to spook him and see what he would do.
"So, you big muscle-bound beast," Murphy called to him, "think you could catch Murphy in a panic, eh? Well, here I am!"
The gorilla, on all fours but seeming more massive for all that, looked up at him, seemed almost to smile, snorted loudly in the captain's direction, then turned and vanished back into the forest.
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" Murphy swore aloud. "Why the hell would anyone want to make sure a brute like that survived and prospered is beyond me!"
He turned to see how the girls were taking his sneak attack and suddenly realized that he was alone in the glen. Alone as far as humans went, anyway. The chimps and orangs were still watching and they seemed highly amused.
"Girls! Where are you?" he shouted out as loud as he could, causing the chimps at least to start jumping up and down and screeching at him in obvious mockery of his genuine concern.
He walked slowly towards them, almost ready to grab one and make it tell him where the girls were hiding, but just beyond the edge of the track he felt the solidity and crackle of an energy barrier.
He tested it out, and it seemed to go the length of the track as far as he could see in either direction. Okay, so they didn't go that way, at least not unless they were using that infernal power stuff again.
He walked back to the bench, then around it, and immediately hit the same sort of barrier on the bench side as well.
Thinking that they might have gone towards the exit, he walked back up the track for a hundred meters or so, all exhaustion forgotten, until he could actually see almost to the north gate. People, yes, in increasing numbers, but no sign of the girls.
He quickly whirled and walked back down past the chimps and around the curve where, he found, he had almost as good practical visibility to the next area. A young couple seemed to be walking slowly and close together, hand in hand, enjoying the day, and there was a maintenance robot moving towards him to his right, apparently collecting trash and checking the status of the energy barrier as well.
He doubted that the girls were trying that invisibility or not notice trick; that seemed to require a long period of time chanting together to get themselves in synch. And while they did have some level of hypnotic abilities, they weren't all that clever and no good at all at preplanning, so he doubted if they were biding their time and then controlling his mind so that he wouldn't notice them going. Not that they'd have to. He'd been having enough concerns with that gorilla.
He went back over to the bench and sank back down onto it. Most likely simple diversion. They might have put the gorilla up to it somehow, but he doubted it. Easier to just wait until his attention was fully somewhere else and then move. If it hadn't been the gorilla, it would have been something or, eventually, somebody.
After a half hour he was convinced that it wasn't any trick of the girls that had caused it, either. They would have come back and lorded it over him by now.
He felt kind of empty, almost, and it surprised him. As much as he wanted to be rid of them, they'd been the closest thing to family he'd had in fifty years.
Slowly, suddenly feeling the weight of his years, he walked back up to the nearest entrance to the park and looked for a taxi, settling instead for the maglev about two blocks farther down. It was cheaper, and he wasn't in any hurry any more.
When he got back to the room he half expected them to be there, but when the door opened, it revealed a suite so immaculate it seemed as if nobody had ever stayed in it. Everything had been made up, and it seemed sterile, empty. It was another minute or so before he realized that the packages the three had brought in last night were also nowhere to be seen, nor was the mess in cosmetics, bath oils, and the like they'd littered the bathroom with even that morning.
He looked over and saw that the holographic plate was pulsing, indicating that there was some sort of message for him. He went over, sat down, and said, "Communications, replay message for Murphy, Patrick."
"Message is nonverbal," the comm reported.
"Really? Well, put it up on the screen."
It was from his local bank. It showed a massive infusion of real cash into that account. Convertible cash, useful for transfer as well as just sitting there.
More than enough for passage first class almost anywhere he wanted to go, for buying another junker of a freighter, plus sufficient funds for several weeks of one damned huge and wondrous bender.
It was more than enough, and it wasn't nearly anything he particularly wanted right now. It was more than a credit statement, it was a message from the Order of Saint Phineas and those behind it.
Payment due on acceptance of the delivery of the ordered merchandise.
Damn their dark souls!
VII: THE DISLOYAL OPPOSITION
The street might have been out of some idealized old history film or photo save for some of the exotic trees and flowers that could be seen both in front of the stately line of cleaner-than-nature brick brownstones and in the small flower boxes set outside oversized upper-floor windows. The places were larger than they looked at first glance, but still might have been dismissed as middle-class housing but for the gilding around the windows, doors, and immaculate edgework, and the fact that few middle-class townhouses sported upper-story gargoyles and such intricate wrought-iron works placed almost purely for decoration. More Embassy Row than Accountant's Row, although there was no sign of any more formal function on any of the houses than as homes. The exception was a single city block stuck almost incongruously in the middle of the double rows of brownstones, a block that contained not houses but something more like a compound.
High wrought-iron gates, or gates of some material that seemed like it, blocked vehicle-sized entrances at both ends of the block, and between was a long and quite tall brick wall of the same complexion as the facing houses. Looking in through either gate's lattice work revealed a semicircular driveway around a formal garden leading to a single large brick structure two stories high but fully a third of the block in area. It might have been an old-style mansion house or the headquarters of the local historical society.