“What, they never saw cop shows on TV?”
“That’s what it seemed like. I mean, when I read the line about if you can’t afford an attorney one will be appointed for you, I got these looks you wouldn’t believe-they were all of them astonished, like they’d never heard of such a thing. One of them, I mean, man, his jaw dropped open. And one said, ‘Really? It’s not a trick?’ and Jesus, he sounded sincere.”
The detective shook his head in wonder.
The sergeant slapped a hand on the desk. “It’s weird,” he said. “I mean, I know there are nuts out there, I’ve seen plenty of them. I’ve seen guys dragged in here trying to pick invisible bugs off their skin, and guys hopped up on PCP who needed a dozen men to hold them, and guys that looked like they’d been dead for a week and I was afraid they’d drop dead on the floor for real before we could get a doctor in, and I’ve had guys swear at me and curse me up one side and down the other, I’ve had rich guys screaming at me and street punks being Momma’s little angel, but I have never seen anything like this bunch!”
“Gave you a lot of trouble?”
“Hell, no-that’s what’s so strange! They all of them looked around like this place was something out of a fairy tale, and did just exactly what they were told, and they gave us names and ranks and serial numbers, like they were prisoners of war instead of just busted for trespassing and littering, but they wouldn’t tell us anything else. They didn’t ask for lawyers, didn’t make phone calls, nothing. It’s like they really believe they’re soldiers from another planet!”
“Maybe they do,” the detective suggested.
The sergeant spread his hands wide. “Ten of them? Ten nuts with the same delusion?”
The detective shrugged. “So they were all ten like that?”
“Well, eight of ‘em, anyway. The woman was a little different, I guess. She seemed real upset, where the others were calm as anything. And the captain, as he’s supposed to be-he wanted to talk to someone official, and no, I wouldn’t do, he wanted somebody from the military or the State Department. I told him I couldn’t do that, especially on a weekend.”
“Did he say why?”
“Well, yeah. He’s an envoy, he says, from the Galactic Empire, and he wants to talk to someone about arranging a mutual defense treaty with Earth, or at least the United States. He can’t make a treaty with local cops.”
The detective considered that silently for a moment, then asked, “Think it’s a movie stunt?”
“At first I did,” the sergeant said, “but now… I dunno. Wouldn’t they have called in the reporters by now? Wouldn’t they have made some phone calls? And why would they pick this lady’s back yard way the hell out in Goshen? Her lawyer just called, y’know-the lady’s really pissed about it.”
The detective nodded again. “So they all claim to come from the Galactic Empire?”
“As much as they claim anything, yeah.”
“They’re consistent?”
“Oh, yeah, absolutely. Not one of them has slipped out of character for as much as an instant, I swear.”
The detective sighed. “All right,” he said. “Where should I start?”
“Wherever you like,” the sergeant said, pushing a clipboard over.
The detective picked it up and scanned the list of names. “Prosser-pine Thorpe?” he said. “Is that the woman?”
“Proserpin-AH,” the sergeant corrected him. “Yeah, that’s her.”
“Gave her rank as ‘registered master telepath’?”
“That’s what she said, yeah.”
“She try to read your mind?”
The sergeant just shrugged.
“Not so you could tell, huh?”
“So how am I supposed to know? But she sure didn’t talk about it, if she read anybody’s mind.”
“You said she was nervous?”
“Well, upset about something, anyway. Had a sort of trapped look-like a junkie who suddenly realizes she doesn’t know where to get her next fix. You know what I mean.”
“Sure,” the detective said. “She a looker?”
The sergeant shrugged. “She’s okay,” he said. “Nothing I’d leave home for, but okay.”
“What the hell,” the detective said, dropping the clipboard back on the desk. “I’ll start with her.”
* * * *
Proserpine Thorpe stared at the walls of her cell, baffled and frustrated.
Nothing. She had been straining her every nerve, focusing all her being on her telepathic sense, and there was simply nothing there.
This universe had some characteristics that nobody had mentioned or thought about in any of the briefings-presumably because nobody knew about them. The ship’s main drive didn’t work here. The crew’s blasters didn’t seem to work, either, though she wasn’t sure they’d really been tested.
And, it seemed, telepathy didn’t work here.
They should have expected this, or at least considered the possibility. After all, they had known that at least some of Shadow’s magic didn’t work in Imperial space. That demonstrated that there were differences. Why hadn’t they considered what other differences there might be?
She felt as if her head were packed with wool, shutting out the constant background hum of other people’s thoughts, and it was not a comfortable feeling at all. She had never experienced anything like it before.
What was even worse, though, was that no one had yet contacted her.
The plan had been that once they were through the warp she would send a quick verification that they had arrived safely, and that she then would devote her attention to the usual duties of a ship’s telepath-accompanying Captain Cahn on his diplomatic mission, reading the minds of those around them, advising him when they were lying, and so on and so forth. All of that had obviously become impossible when the ship had crashed twenty miles from their objective and they had all been taken prisoner by the local constabulary, and when most of their equipment wouldn’t work.
And she hadn’t sent any verification because her telepathy didn’t work, either.
Which meant that as far as she could tell, nobody back at Base One had any idea what had happened to them.
So why hadn’t they gotten another telepath and contacted her? Surely, she could still receive as well as the natives here could, and her team had managed to make limited contact with half a dozen of the native psychics. Didn’t they realize something had gone wrong? She had been here, isolated, all night, and there had been no contact.
Surely they knew something had gone wrong. Surely they had had plenty of time to try to get through.
Then, at last, something stirred in her mind, as if a mouse were moving inside that mass of wool. She tried to focus on it, and it became clearer, she could sense a sort of shape to the message.
And then it was through, it was Carrie back at Base One, calling her, calling desperately.
“Here!” she thought. “I’m here, Carrie!”
“Prossie!” Relief flooded through the contact, flowing both ways.
She didn’t reply with words, but with reassuring thoughts roughly equivalent to, “It’s okay, Carrie, I’m fine.”
Carrie’s thoughts caressed hers for a moment, and then a question came through, so clear that for a moment Prossie thought she had heard it spoken aloud.
“Prossie,” it said, “what happened?”
Chapter Five
“No telepathy? No anti-gravity?” The Under-Secretary frowned at the papers on his desk.
“No, sir,” the telepath standing stiffly before him reported. “Neither one. It appears that the laws of physics are totally different there-it’s not just that the telepathic mutation never happened, or AG wasn’t discovered. Not only do they have no telepaths or AG of their own, but ours don’t work there; that’s why the ship crashed, and why Prossie… why Telepath Thorpe didn’t report in. It’s a miracle that there are human beings so much like us in a place so alien, let alone that they speak the same language.”