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uncertain devices in that respect. In any case, there was nothing to link
Telzey to him. Nor was there really any reason why she couldn't go quietly
back to Melna Park at any time to conclude her investigation. She wouldn't
need to come within half a mile of the house for that.
She kept putting it off. She wasn't quite sure why. When the weekend came
around, she simply found herself unwilling to make the trip. Robane was
unfinished business. It wasn't usually her way at all to leave unfinished
business lying around. But she told herself she'd take care of it the
following week.
One night then she had a dream. It was an uncomfortable, sweaty, nightmarish
sort of dream, though nothing much really happened. It seemed to go on for
some time. She appeared to be floating in the air near Robane's house,
watching it from various angles, aware that Robane watched her in turn, hating
her for what she'd done to him and waiting for a chance to destroy her. In the
dream, Telzey reminded herself quite reasonably that it wasn't possible Robane
couldn't remember what she'd done or anything about her; he wouldn't recognize
her if she were standing before him. Then she realized suddenly that it wasn't
Robane but the house itself which watched her with such spiteful malice, and
that something was about to happen to her. She woke up with a start of fright.
file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Bureaubla...tz,%20James%20-%20Telz
ey%20Amberdon/0671578510_11.htm (1 of 11)10-1-2007 15:03:46
- Chapter 11
That settled it. She lay awake a while, considering. A weekend was coming up
again. She could fly to
Melna Park after her last scheduled lecture in the afternoon, and register at
a park hotel. She'd have two full days if necessary to wind up matters at
Robane's house. That certainly would be time enough. She'd extract the
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remaining information she wanted from him, then see to it that somebody among
the park authorities discovered a good reason to pay the recluse a visit at
his home. When they saw the condition he was in, they'd transfer him to an
institution; and Robane shouldn't be disturbing her sleep again.
* * *
He did, however, that night in her room at the park hotel. Or something did.
She'd retired soon after dinner, wanting to get off to an early start, found
then that she wasn't at all sleepy, tuned in somnomusic, switched on the
window screen, and went over to it in the darkened room. She stood there a
while, looking out. In the cluster light, Melna Park sloped away, dim and
vast, toward the northern mountains.
Robane's house lay behind a fold of the mountains. At the restricted pace
possible in the park, it would take her almost four hours to get to the house
from the hotel tomorrow twice the time she'd spent crossing half a continent
from Pehanron College in the evening.
The music was producing drowsiness in her, but tensions seemed to fight it. It
was almost an hour before she got to bed and fell asleep, and it turned then
into an uncomfortable night. There were periods of disagreeable dreaming, of
which she could recall only scraps when she woke up. For the most part, she
napped fitfully; kept coming awake. Something in her simply didn't want to
relax; and as she began to go to sleep and her mental screens loosened
normally, it drew them abruptly tight, bringing her back to weary alertness.
She was up at daybreak at last, heavy-lidded and irritable. But a cold shower
opened her eyes, and after she'd had breakfast, she seemed reasonably
refreshed.
Ten minutes later, she was on her way to Robane's house through a breezy
late-autumn morning. Melna
Park was famed for varied and spectacular color changes in its vegetation as
winter approached, and the tourist traffic was much heavier now than three
weeks ago. Almost everywhere Telzey looked, aircars floated past, following
the rolling contours of the ground. The Cloudsplitter moved along at the
steady thirty miles an hour to which it was restricted. She'd slipped the
canopy down; sun warmth seeped through her, while a chilled wind
intermittently whipped her hair about her cheeks. Nighttime tensions grew
vague and unreal. The relaxation which had eluded Telzey at the hotel came to
her, and she was tempted to ground the car and settle down for an hour's nap
in the sunshine before going on. But she wanted to reach the house early
enough to be finished with Robane before evening.
Near noon, she reached the series of mile-wide plateaus dropping from the
point where Cil Canyon cut through the mountains to the southern forests where
Robane's house stood. She circled in toward the house, brought it presently
into the car's viewscreen. It looked precisely as she remembered seeing it in
the cluster light, neat, trim, quiet. A maintenance robot moved slowly about
in the garden.
She considered relaxing her screens and directing a probing thought to
Robane's mind from where she was. But she had most of the day left, and a
remnant of uneasiness made her wary. She dropped the car
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