The Reign of the Brown Magician. Lawrence Watt-Evans

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      He knew how the location was determined; telepaths on a dozen planets had been asked to report which direction Prossie Thorpe had been in, and those were then adjusted by the astronomers to allow for planetary rotation and used as approximate vectors. Where the resulting lines—or rather, cones, since none were narrow enough to be lines—intersected, that was where Thorpe had been.

      Meteor had been sent to explore the resulting volume of space; the charts didn’t show any inhabited systems there, but the charts could be wrong.

      This time, according to Dixon, they weren’t. And he’d checked back with five other stinking mutants to see if his distance felt right.

      So Thorpe hadn’t appeared on an inhabited planet, or even just a habitable one.

      That meant a ship.

      And that might explain why her stay there had been so brief, only about a minute—she had delivered something to a ship, and then returned to Shadow’s world.

      But if she were just a courier, why would Shadow, or Raven, or whoever was behind it, use a telepath? A telepath would stand out like a beacon—Thorpe had stood out like a beacon.

      Someone had wanted the Empire to know something was going on; someone had wanted to get the Empire’s attention—but who? And why?

      Was it a distraction, a feint? Or was someone trying to tell them something, a message they weren’t receiving?

      What about Thorpe’s other appearance? That one had been narrowed down to two possible systems, one of them, Upsilon Ceti, home to the Imperial colony of Beckett; I.S.S. Wasp was scheduled to arrive at Beckett Spaceport in a matter of hours.

      If there had been a telepath on Beckett in the first place, maybe life would have been a bit simpler—but four hundred telepaths couldn’t cover three thousand Imperial planets, and Thorpe had only appeared in the Beckett area briefly. It wasn’t quite as fast as the other, about five minutes instead of one, but it was brief.

      Was that a message of some kind? Why Beckett, which was a quiet little backwater?

      And now Thorpe was supposed to be on Earth, the only human-inhabited planet in the Third Universe, and this time she was staying there. What did that mean?

      Did it mean anything?

      Or were all the telepaths lying? Had Thorpe ever really been in any of those places? Carrie Hall’s reports hadn’t started arriving yet, but he was fairly certain that when they did, they’d be useless.

      Something was definitely going on, but whether the enemy was Shadow, or Raven’s band of revolutionaries, or some faction within the Empire, or the telepaths themselves, Bascombe didn’t know.

      But he intended to find out.

      He almost called for a telepath, but then he caught himself; he rose and stepped to the door, and called to his receptionist, “Miss Miller, have a messenger sent to Special Branch; I want orders sent to Meteor to stay where they are and search carefully for any signs of activity—ships, gravity fields, lights, whatever.”

      “Yes, Mr. Bascombe.”

      He nodded, and retreated back into his office.

      The message would be sent by telepath, of course; there was no other way to reach Meteor except through Dixon. Sending it downstairs to Special Branch on paper, though, would mean that no telepath would be reading his mind directly.

      At least, not legally.

      And if telepaths were reading minds illegally, he couldn’t stop them in any case—but that way lay madness. Telepaths could be listening to any thought, at any moment.

      He just hoped they weren’t.

      * * * *

      “Am I under arrest?” Amy demanded, folding her arms across her chest and glaring up at the man in the blue uniform who seemed to be in charge of the whole business.

      They hadn’t let her change her clothes, and the gesture was as much for the sake of decency as out of annoyance. Her T-shirt was torn on both sides, and she wasn’t wearing anything under it.

      She tried not to think about that.

      Major Johnston sighed. He turned a chair around, sat down, and leaned on the back.

      “No, ma’am,” he said, “you aren’t. However, if that’s what it takes to get you to cooperate, it can be arranged.”

      “On what charge?” Amy protested. “I haven’t done anything!”

      “I don’t know just what charge, ma’am,” Johnston said. “I’m not a lawyer; I work for Air Force intelligence, so I know something about the laws, but I’m not a lawyer, and in a complicated case like this…” He didn’t finish the sentence; instead he shrugged and said, “But there’s no question we could find something. You were one of sixteen people who disappeared all at once without any rational explanation, and now three of you—only three—have turned up again, one of you apparently gone at least temporarily nuts. I think we could get you booked on suspicion of something, kidnapping or assault or something. Withholding evidence, if nothing else.”

      It was Amy’s turn to sigh. At least the officer hadn’t included indecent exposure in his list. She wished Susan were there—but Susan was dead. Amy had seen her body lying on the floor of Shadow’s throne room, back in Faerie.

      Amy supposed that she could have called on the surviving members of Dutton, Powell, and Hough—Bob Hough must be back from his vacation long since—but how could she explain to them what had happened, how Susan Nguyen had died? So she had passed up the chance to call her lawyer when this Johnston had offered it.

      She had managed to stall her removal until her friend Donna had arrived, so at least someone knew where she was and more or less what was happening, but Donna wasn’t going to get her out of jail if these security people, whoever they were, did decide to arrest her.

      “Is Ted okay?” she asked. “He was pretty upset.”

      “Mr. Deranian is, indeed, upset,” Johnston admitted. “While I won’t tell you any of the details, he seems to be very unsure of his own grasp on reality. He has asked repeatedly to go home, and we may oblige him in that—we’re waiting for an opinion from a psychologist on whether it’s safe for him to be alone. We’ve tried to call his sister to look after him, but she doesn’t seem to be available.”

      “But you won’t let me go home!” Amy protested.

      “You, Ms. Jewell, are not screaming and crying and irrational.”

      Amy glared at him. Johnston glared back.

      “What about Prossie?” Amy asked.

      Major Johnston sighed again.

      “Your other companion,” he said, “tells us that her name is Registered Telepath Proserpine Thorpe, formerly of the Special Branch of the Imperial Intelligence Service. Beyond that, I’d prefer not to say at this time.” He hesitated. “Is that her name?”

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