If that was what he had felt, then his subconscious was being silly and unreasonable.
If he’d felt something else, something out there in the network somewhere, it could wait. Bringing back his family took priority over anything else.
“Sure,” he said. “Go to it.”
* * * *
Major Johnston took a final look around the yard, his gaze lingering on the silly-looking purple spaceship. “You’re sure no one could be hiding in that thing?” he called.
“Sure as we can be, sir,” a lieutenant replied.
Johnston nodded, glanced up at where the rope ladder had disappeared into thin air, then headed back around the side of the house, toward the waiting cars.
There were four of them, lined up by the roadside; he hesitated for an instant, then marched up to the last one in line, an Air Force-blue sedan.
Amy Jewell looked up at him through the closed window. She showed no sign of rolling it down, so he spoke loudly.
“I’m sorry about this, Ms. Jewell,” he said. “I’m going to see if we can get you listed as a civilian consultant, and get you some compensation for your time-you and Ms. Thorpe both. We’ll provide alternate accommodations for you, if you’d rather not stay here for now. And I’m afraid we may want to buy your house, if these people are going to keep coming.”
Amy shrugged, then nodded. “Thanks,” she called, her voice barely audible through the glass.
He patted the side of the car, then straightened up.
More cars were arriving, bringing more men-Air Police, so far; Johnston hoped they’d be enough.
After all, next time the Galactic Empire might send an attack force, rather than scouts or diplomats. If he had had his way, he’d have had a fully-armed squad of Marines here, ready for anything-but he was Air Force, and didn’t have the authority to call in the jarheads. A request like that would have to work its way up through channels. He’d started the paperwork, but it would take time.
APs he could do now.
He no longer doubted the existence of the Galactic Empire; he had arrived just in time to see the rope ladder vanish into thin air. He wished he’d been able to reach the place in less than forty minutes; maybe he could have sent someone back up.
But that might not have been safe. The Imperials had arrived in space suits, after all-genuine Buck Rogers space suits, bulky purple things with fishbowl helmets, straight out of “Destination Moon.” Maybe they’d needed them at the top of the ladder.
They weren’t saying, though.
He glanced at the two civilian cop cars that had been the first things he’d been able to get to the site. Each one had two men in back, space suits and equipment removed, but still in their silly-looking Imperial uniforms.
He marched over to the closer one and peered in the open window. “Care to tell me anything?” he asked.
“Lieutenant James Austin, Imperial Service, H-657-R-233-B-708,” the purple-uniformed man said, staring straight ahead without so much as glancing at Johnston.
Johnston sighed. He slapped the car roof.
“Take ’em away,” he said.
* * * *
Prossie sat motionless in the back of the groundcar, wishing she could know what the people around her were thinking. Sometimes her mental silence was a blessing, sometimes a curse; right now it was horrible.
The Empire had sent more men-not an envoy this time, no telepaths, but a scouting team, probably, from their actions, Imperial Intelligence.
She wasn’t as frightened of the Smarts as most of the people she had known; over the years she had read the minds of several of the dreaded Intelligence agents, and while they generally weren’t nice people, they were just people, not the fearsome, emotionless supermen they were reputed to be. She had even worked directly for Intelligence once or twice herself; all the telepaths, the entire Special Branch, were nominally under the joint jurisdiction of Intelligence and the Imperial Messenger Service, always available if the Smarts needed them.
But still, any time Intelligence was involved, matters were serious. The situation was serious now.
Especially since she didn’t know why they were here.
Especially since one possibility was that they had been sent after her.
She knew that the Empire would take a rogue telepath very seriously indeed. If they knew she was here, if they knew she had really, genuinely gone rogue…
Otherwise it seemed like quite a coincidence, an Imperial team arriving directly behind the very house she was staying in.
She knew that it wasn’t really as much of a coincidence as it first appeared; she had read from the minds of Imperial scientists that something about the shape of space itself made it easier to open a space-warp in the same place every time. If the Empire was going to open a warp to Earth anywhere, this would be the natural place; she was here herself because this was where the warp had come out before.
Still, even if it wasn’t a coincidence, why were they here? What did they want? She knew, beyond question, that when she had left Base One with Colonel Carson and Raven and the rest, no one at Base One had had any plans for further contact with Earth, with the possible exception of sending Pel and Amy and the rest home someday. John Bascombe had written Earth off as worthless; General Hart had considered it irrelevant.
Why had they changed their minds?
There was one way she might be able to find out; Carrie had tried to contact her several times. Carrie would know what was going on; she wouldn’t be able to help it. Maybe Prossie could coax an explanation out of her.
And maybe not. She and Carrie hadn’t exactly parted as friends. Prossie had betrayed her family, betrayed all the telepaths in the Empire, by lying to Imperial officers, disobeying orders, and in general breaking any rule she found inconvenient once she was outside Imperial space and cut off from the mental network she had grown up in.
That she had done so because she could now see that she had been oppressed and abused all her life would not matter much to Carrie or the others; they were still there, under the Empire’s thumb, subject to summary execution for the slightest infraction of the telepathy laws. Prossie’s rebellion could conceivably endanger them all.
And maybe that was why Carrie hadn’t done a thing, hadn’t lifted a finger or transmitted a thought when Prossie had been utterly at Shadow’s mercy and convinced she was about to die.
Prossie was the one who had broken contact, who had been unspeakably rude, who had been refusing to communicate; maybe Carrie would listen, maybe they could make up. They were cousins, bound together by blood and background-surely a little internecine squabble could be patched up.
But Carrie would have to try again before they could talk. Telepathy was impossible in Earth’s universe. Prossie couldn’t send unless Carrie was listening, couldn’t receive unless Carrie was sending.
Carrie or someone, anyway. There were four hundred and fourteen other telepaths in the Empire, at last count.
And until one of them tried to reach her, Prossie couldn’t talk to any of them.
All she could do was to sit in the groundcar, in the thick silence of her own isolated mind, and wonder whether the Empire wanted her, or wanted Earth.
And whether it really made any difference.
* * * *
Best brushed aside leaves and peered down at the ground below.
For the most part the earth was thick with dead leaves and moss-nobody lived here, that was obvious.
In one direction, though, the view was different. There was a clearing ahead, and a very strange clearing indeed. It appeared to have been created or enlarged by breaking limbs off trees, where any normal clearing would simply be a place where no trees grew. Most of the clearing was covered by a black mound of something Best couldn’t identify; here and there things showed through the black, some of them bones, some of them unidentifiable. At one side, at the very edge of what he could see, something large and purple protruded from beneath the mound, something that Best thought might be I.S.S. Christopher.