And Kathryn, still watching intently, smiled. Her Dad was a pretty smart old duck, but he wasn't using his noggin now—he was cockeyed as Trenco's ether in thinking that they might come back. If anything at all erupted from that hypercircle, it would be something against which the stuff he was mustering would be precisely as effective as so much thin air. And she still had no concrete idea of what she so feared. It would not be essentially physical, she was pretty sure. It would almost have to be mental. But who or what could possibly put it across? And how? And above all, what could she do about it if they did?
Eyes narrowed, brow furrowed in concentration, she thought as she had never thought before; and the harder she thought the more clouded the picture became. For the first time in her triumphant life she felt small—weak—impotent. It was in that hour that Kathryn Kinnison really grew up.
The tube vanished; she heaved a tremendous sigh of relief. They, whoever they were, having failed to bring Kinnison to them—this time—were not coming after him—this time. Not an important enough game to play to the end? No, that wasn't it. Maybe they weren't ready. But the next time—
Mentor the Arisian had told her bluntly, the last time she had seen him, to come to him again when she had found out that she did not know everything there was to be known. Deep down, she had believed that that day would never come. Now, however, it had. This escape—if it had been an escape—had taught her much.
"Mother!" She shot a call to distant Klovia. "I'm on Radelix. Everything's on the green. Dad has just knocked a flock of Boskonians into an outside loop and come through QX. I've got to do a little flit, though, before I come home. 'Bye."
Kinnison stood intermittent guard over Base for four days after the hyperspatial tube had disappeared before he gave up; before he did any very serious thinking upon what he should do next.
Could he and should he keep on as Sybly Whyte? He could and he should, he decided. He hadn't been gone long enough for Whyte's absence to have been noticed; nothing whatever connected Whyte with Kinnison. If he really knew what he was doing, a more specific alias might be better; but as long as he was merely smelling around, Whyte's was the best identity to use. He could go anywhere, do anything, ask anything of anybody, and all with a perfectly good excuse.
And as Sybly Whyte, then, for days that stretched into weeks, he roamed—finding, as he had been afraid that he would find, nothing whatever. It seemed as though all Boskonian activity of the type in which he was most interested had ceased with his return from the hyperspatial tube. Just what that meant he did not know. It was unthinkable that they had given up on him—much more probably they were hatching something brand new. And the frustration of inaction and the trying to figure out what was coming next was driving him not-so-slowly nuts.
Then, striking through the doldrums, came a call from Maitland.