Dusk was settling when Frank, Vic, and Ole hauled themselves over the headwall, out of Salt Canyon. Jerry and Carol saw them come out of the canyon into the draw, and met them halfway to the pickup. They were three thousand feet higher than the canyon bottom, and the temperature was plunging, a normal accompaniment of twilight in the high desert.
Ole and Vic were physically bushed, and crashed in the camper shell in two old sleeping bags, on bunk mattresses Frank had thrown there. Once on the highway, Frank answered Jerry's and Carol's questions, leaving them quiet and thoughtful. It was eleven o'clock when they reached the ranch house.
There they debriefed each other over sandwiches and hot chocolate. Nothing had happened on the road, and the others were surprised when Tory told them about the antelopes. Other people had been involved, she said. The animals had been driven by a command to run over the edge—she could feel it—and several other people were trying to turn them back. The antelopes had been running back and forth confusedly, so she had taken over. It had seemed that somehow a plunge by the animals would endanger the men in the canyon.
That, Vic explained to his novices, was the advantage of having people of power and awareness off the action site. They could often pick up and act on dangers before the targets did, especially tired targets. The advantage was greatest when the targets were under duress.
Tory had one other item for them. Later that afternoon, someone had tried psychically to "question" Sharon Van Wyk by stimulating a chain of recalls in her. Sharon, with her new awareness, had spotted the intrusion and called for help. The two of them had scorched whoever it was, and Sharon wouldn't need help in handling future psychic intrusions, even though she had probably cloaked the affair from herself afterward.
When the debriefing was done, they made their plans. It didn't take long because the plans were sketchy; they were in bed before one.
Tory didn't go to sleep at once. She wanted to know who their friends had been, and who their enemies were. She lay in the dimly moonlit bedroom with her eyes open, but it wasn't the shadowed ceiling she looked at. She saw instead the sunlit plateau above the Little Colorado, and the panicked antelopes. There had been six other attentions seeking to turn the animals away from the rim. Four of them she recognized now: Jerry and Carol, Sharon and Bill. The other two she could not identify, although she'd know if she felt them again. Both seemed female, both powerful enough to do what they had done. One of them felt—older, and light. The other, she sensed, had more power and less experience. Probably neither would consciously recall what had happened.
Only one being had been driving the animals, an entity with a great deal of power and control. She got no particular sense of any other personal attributes—sex or age—but it was the same entity who had intruded on Sharon.
With the knowledge from Vic's debriefing, she knew who the entity must be, or rather, the group of which it must be a member. It was one of the four lower-echelon people whom Gandy said took over when the Terrible Seven had been hauled away: four in whom the cosmic fuzz had had no interest—who were outside their jurisdiction.
She had a rough sense of their operating style. They would be low-profile manipulators, operating mainly through money, position, and connections, with their advanced psychic power used mainly to lever, nudge, spy, and assassinate safely.
It'll be interesting, she thought, to see if we can head them off. Six months, that's what the fortuneteller had told Ole—six months, more or less, to save reality as they knew it.
But she felt no terrible urgency. To Tory Merlin, the reality behind reality was too real for her to feel threatened by the situation. This was simply an interesting challenge. If they blew it, there'd be a new reality soon after, and new games, as there'd been before. This was the reality cycle to carry it off in if they could, but the next would do if it had to: Sooner or later they'd get rid of or defuse the surprise generator, and with The Seven gone, they could create—who knew what?
It occurred to her that there might be something to that effect already in a master script somewhere. But even so, it was up to them to create the roles, scenes, and actions—to make it happen.