* * * * *
There was, Telzey Amberdon thought, someone besides TT and herself in
the garden. Not, of course, Aunt Halet, who was in the house waiting
for an early visitor to arrive, and not one of the servants. Someone
or something else must be concealed among the thickets of
magnificently flowering native Jontarou shrubs about Telzey.
She could think of no other way to account for Tick-Tock's spooked
behavior--nor, to be honest about it, for the manner her own nerves
were acting up without visible cause this morning.
Telzey plucked a blade of grass, slipped the end between her lips and
chewed it gently, her face puzzled and concerned. She wasn't
ordinarily afflicted with nervousness. Fifteen years old, genius
level, brown as a berry and not at all bad looking in her sunbriefs,
she was the youngest member of one of Orado's most prominent families
and a second-year law student at one of the most exclusive schools in
the Federation of the Hub. Her physical, mental, and emotional health,
she'd always been informed, was excellent. Aunt Halet's frequent
cracks about the inherent instability of the genius level could be
ignored; Halet's own stability seemed questionable at best.
But none of that made the present odd situation any less
disagreeable....
The trouble might have begun, Telzey decided, during the night, within
an hour after they arrived from the spaceport at the guest house
Halet had rented in Port Nichay for their vacation on Jontarou. Telzey
had retired at once to her second-story bedroom with Tick-Tock; but
she barely got to sleep before something awakened her again. Turning
over, she discovered TT reared up before the window, her forepaws on
the sill, big cat-head outlined against the star-hazed night sky,
staring fixedly down into the garden.
Telzey, only curious at that point, climbed out of bed and joined TT
at the window. There was nothing in particular to be seen, and if the
scents and minor night-sounds which came from the garden weren't
exactly what they were used to, Jontarou was after all an unfamiliar
planet. What else would one expect here?
But Tick-Tock's muscular back felt tense and rigid when Telzey laid
her arm across it, and except for an absent-minded dig with her
forehead against Telzey's shoulder, TT refused to let her attention be
distracted from whatever had absorbed it. Now and then, a low, ominous
rumble came from her furry throat, a half-angry, half-questioning
sound. Telzey began to feel a little uncomfortable. She managed
finally to coax Tick-Tock away from the window, but neither of them
slept well the rest of the night. At breakfast, Aunt Halet made one of
her typical nasty-sweet remarks.
"You look so fatigued, dear--as if you were under some severe mental
strain ... which, of course, you might be," Halet added musingly. With
her gold-blond hair piled high on her head and her peaches and cream
complexion, Halet looked fresh as a daisy herself ... a malicious
daisy. "Now wasn't I right in insisting to Jessamine that you needed a
vacation away from that terribly intellectual school?" She smiled
gently.
"Absolutely," Telzey agreed, restraining the impulse to fling a
spoonful of egg yolk at her father's younger sister. Aunt Halet often
inspired such impulses, but Telzey had promised her mother to avoid
actual battles on the Jontarou trip, if possible. After breakfast, she
went out into the back garden with Tick-Tock, who immediately walked
into a thicket, camouflaged herself and vanished from sight. It seemed
to add up to something. But what?
Telzey strolled about the garden a while, maintaining a pretense of
nonchalant interest in Jontarou's flowers and colorful bug life. She
experienced the most curious little chills of alarm from time to time,
but discovered no signs of a lurking intruder, or of TT either. Then,
for half an hour or more, she'd just sat cross-legged in the grass,
waiting quietly for Tick-Tock to show up of her own accord. And the
big lunk-head hadn't obliged.
Telzey scratched a tanned knee-cap, scowling at Port Nichay's park
trees beyond the garden wall. It seemed idiotic to feel scared when
she couldn't even tell whether there was anything to be scared about!
And, aside from that, another unreasonable feeling kept growing
stronger by the minute now. This was to the effect that she should be
doing some unstated but specific thing....
In fact, that Tick-Tock _wanted_ her to do some specific thing!
Completely idiotic!
Abruptly, Telzey closed her eyes, thought sharply, "Tick-Tock?" and
waited--suddenly very angry at herself for having given in to her
fancies to this extent--for whatever might happen.
* * * * *
She had never really established that she was able to tell, by a kind
of symbolic mind-picture method, like a short waking dream,
approximately what TT was thinking and feeling. Five years before,
when she'd discovered Tick-Tock--an odd-looking and odder-behaved
stray kitten then--in the woods near the Amberdons' summer home on
Orado, Telzey had thought so. But it might never have been more than a
colorful play of her imagination; and after she got into law school
and grew increasingly absorbed in her studies, she almost forgot the
matter again.
Today, perhaps because she was disturbed about Tick-Tock's behavior,
the customary response was extraordinarily prompt. The warm glow of
sunlight shining through her closed eyelids faded out quickly and was
replaced by some inner darkness. In the darkness there appeared then
an image of Tick-Tock sitting a little way off beside an open door in
an old stone wall, green eyes fixed on Telzey. Telzey got the
impression that TT was inviting her to go through the door, and, for
some reason, the thought frightened her.
Again, there was an immediate reaction. The scene with Tick-Tock and
the door vanished; and Telzey felt she was standing in a pitch-black
room, knowing that if she moved even one step forwards, something that
was waiting there silently would reach out and grab her.
Naturally, she recoiled ... and at once found herself sitting, eyes
still closed and the sunlight bathing her lids, in the grass of the
guest house garden.
She opened her eyes, looked around. Her heart was thumping rapidly.
The experience couldn't have lasted more than four or five seconds,
but it had been extremely vivid, a whole, compact little nightmare.
None of her earlier experiments at getting into mental communication
with TT had been like that.
It served her right, Telzey thought, for trying such a childish stunt
at the moment! What she should have done at once was to make a
methodical search for the foolish beast--TT was bound to be
_somewhere_ nearby--locate her behind her camouflage, and hang on to
her then until this nonsense in the garden was explained! Talented as
Tick-Tock was at blotting herself out, it usually was possible to spot
her if one directed one's attention to shadow patterns. Telzey began a
surreptitious study of the flowering bushes about her.
Three minutes later, off to her right, where the ground was banked
beneath a six-foot step in the garden's terraces, Tick-Tock's outline
suddenly caught her eye. Flat on her belly, head lifted above her
paws, quite motionless, TT seemed like a transparent wraith stretched
out along the terrace, barely discernible even when stared at
directly. It was a convincing illusion; but what seemed to be rocks,
plant leaves, and sun-splotched earth seen through the wraith-outline
was simply the camouflage pattern TT had printed for the moment on her
hide. She could have changed it completely in an instant to conform to
a different background.
Telzey pointed an accusing finger.
"See you!" she announced, feeling a surge of relief which seemed as
unaccountable as the rest of it.
The wraith twitched one ear in acknowledgment, the head outlines
shifting as the camouflaged face turned towards Telzey. Then the
inwardly uncamouflaged, very substantial looking mouth opened slowly,
showing Tick-Tock's red tongue and curved white tusks. The mouth
stretched in a wide yawn, snapped shut with a click of meshing teeth,
became indistinguishable again. Next, a pair of camouflaged lids drew
back from TT's round, brilliant-green eyes. The eyes stared across the
lawn at Telzey.