Timothy Zahn - A Coming Of Age

"What is that thing?" Lisa asked, afraid of disturbing him but fascinated by what he was doing.

"A spy-scope," he said distractedly. "Sends light along the glass filaments to what I'm looking at and then back to me."

"What are you—?" She broke off, startled, at the click that came from the doorknob.

"Opening the lock, of course," Weylin said with an air of nervous satisfaction as he scrambled to his feet, yanking the spy-scope out from under the door. Sending quick glances both ways down the hall, he teeked the door open and all but pushed Lisa through into the darkened office. A second later he crowded in beside her, teeking the door shut and the lights on.

"Don't touch anything with your fingers," he warned her as she blinked in the sudden brightness. "That stuff they do with fingerprints in detective movies really works."

Her eyes adapted, Lisa looked around the office. Two chairs, a cluttered desk, a combination bookcase/file cabinet, and a large piece of paper she finally identified as a map taped to one wall were all the room contained. "What am I supposed to do?" she whispered.

"Whatever the Prophet told you to," he said. "I was just supposed to get you in."

Swallowing, Lisa moved to the desk and began studying the papers lying there. Everything that talks about Matthew Jarvis's cabin, the Prophet had said; but everything on the desk seemed to be about that. She'd be here all night if she tried to read all of it. Gritting her teeth, she read a few lines from each of the papers, hoping to find the most useful information quickly. One pile seemed to be from companies that had sold things to Jarvis several years ago; another sheet was covered with some kind of writing she couldn't read. Near the center of the desk was a large booklike folder with the words Soil Types of the Barona-Banat Region written on the cover. Teeking quickly through the pages, she found a section that consisted of short entries, each with several words and phrases followed by letters and numbers. Some of the entries were circled in red, and she stared at one for a long minute, sounding out the unfamiliar words and trying to figure out the letters and numbers that followed them. "Do you know what these mean?" she asked Weylin hopefully, teeking the folder up for him to see.

His ear pressed to the door, the righthand shook his head impatiently. "What're you asking me for?" he snapped. "You're supposed to be the one who knows what to do. And you'd better hurry—someone's bound to check on us eventually."

Lisa's heart was pounding. Calm down, she told herself. Don't panic. The numbers have to mean something. Her eyes swept the room again... and fell on the wall map. The words at the top—Barona University Geological Survey Map Number One—were largely meaningless to her; but as she looked closer she saw for the first time that a series of faint lines in both directions divided the whole map into small boxes. A string of numbers ran down the left side, a row of letters and double letters across the top, both in the same light brown as the lines. Lisa stared at them for several seconds, feeling she was on the edge of understanding something... and suddenly it clicked. Glancing back to the desk, she teeked the folder over to her and turned to one of the circled entries. The word location was near the top, followed by four letter-number combinations. With growing excitement, she found the points on the map where the lettered and numbered lines of each set met, and discovered they formed a sort of squashed square just a little ways from a blob labeled BANAT. Oh, of course—Banat, she realized as she sounded out the word. The second entry had five letter-number sets, which formed a shape near the first.

"Lisa—"

"Shh!" she cut Weylin off.

BARONA was easy to find: a good-sized blot in the lower center of the map. He was on the road to Rand that night, she remembered, her eyes searching the paper and sounding out the words there. Rand... Rand... there it was, finally, way off to the left. If the circled folder entries were indeed the places the police thought Jarvis might be, then all she needed to do now was find all those with—she glanced at the top and side—letters A through N and numbers thirty to fifty. Turning her attention back to the folder, she began to flip through the pages. There was one, and another—

And without warning Weylin flew back from the door. "Someone coming!" he hissed, darting to the ceiling and teeking off the light. Lisa had just enough time to make a grab for the folder in the sudden darkness before the door swung open and a silhouetted figure stepped into the room. He was reaching for the light switch when his head was slammed violently against the door jamb.

Lisa gasped in sympathetic pain as the figure collapsed to the floor. "Weylin! You—?"

"Shut up!" the other snapped. The limp figure of the policeman floated into the room and the door again swung shut; and as the last bit of hallway light was cut off the room's lights came back on.

"Is he dead?" Lisa whispered in horror, her eyes glued to the crumpled body. Her stomach wanted badly to be sick.

"I don't think so," Weylin answered tightly, making no move to find out. "We've got to get out of here—if no one heard that thump, they'll still come looking for him soon. Hurry and finish up, will you?"

Lisa ignored him. Gingerly, she knelt by the policeman, wondering what to do. In the movies someone always felt the person's neck, but she had no idea what that was supposed to prove. The side of his head where he'd been hit was becoming matted with oozing blood; she wondered if she should try and stop the bleeding.

"Forget him, Lisa," Weylin growled. "He's all right. Can't you see he's breathing?"

He was right; she'd been so rattled she hadn't even noticed. "Thank heaven," she breathed.

"Never mind that—we're still in trouble. You'd better get out of here right now."

"But I haven't finished yet—"

"I can't help that. Get out of here and go tell the Prophet what happened." He looked over at the window and frowned in concentration.

"What about you?"

"I'll stay and cover for you. Don't worry; the Prophet told me how to handle something like this." There was a loud click and the window slid halfway open. "Go. And don't get caught."

Swallowing, Lisa nodded and slid out through the narrow gap. The night air was a quiet splash of reality, like the feel of her pillow when she woke up after a bad dream. But this nightmare wasn't going to go away. Dropping to just above streetlight level, she flew swiftly toward the building across the street, heading for its protective shadows. As she rounded the corner a sudden impulse made her glance behind her—

Just in time to see three righthands lift from the city building entrance and head in her direction.

There was no time for thought, no time for Lisa to consider the possibly lethal consequences of her actions. The guilty fear exploding inside her mind drowned out everything else... and a second later she was shooting down the alleyway between buildings at top speed, the nearest wall barely thirty centimeters from her shoulder. Emerging, she flashed over the next street and dodged between two more buildings. A flicker of teekay brushed at her legs as she disappeared into the relative darkness, and with a surge of panic she pushed her speed even higher.

She very nearly piled herself into a streetlight two blocks later, and the shock of that finally jolted her conscious mind into realizing the incredible danger she was in. Gasping for breath, her eyes swimming with tears from the eighty-kilometer-per-hour wind in her face, she was avoiding obstacles by sheer luck. Blinking furiously, she managed to locate the darker shades of another alley ahead and to her right; ducking into it, she came to a stop, pressing herself against the darker of the two buildings. The air felt almost hot in her throat as she gulped it in. Rubbing her aching eyes with the heels of her hands, she looked back the way she had come, wondering if she had lost the righthands.