Hot Sleep Read Free

get back before his mother had Mother's Little Boys out looking for him. So he got on the tube, wondering all the time if this wasn't a wild goose chase. And then in the part of his mind that always took over when he was worried, he free associated, and tried to calculate what in the world the phrase wild goose chase meant.
    Radamand Worthing had his name on the outer door of the office complex, and no name at all on his private door. Jas was aware enough of status symbols to be impressed.
    The secretary was also impressed — by Radamand, not by Jas.
    "Do you have an appointment, little boy?"
    "I don't need one," Jas said, putting on his most irritating voice.
    "Everyone needs one," she said, getting just as irritated as he wanted her to get.
    "Tell him his blue–eyed cousin Jason is here to see him," Jas said, sneering — a facial expression he had long since learned infuriated adults.
    "I have instructions not to bother him."
    "Tell him or you'll have new instructions to be out of here with your desk left empty behind you."
    "Listen, little boy, if you've disturbed me unnecessarily —"
    "The noise of the disturbance opened Radamand Worthing's door. "What's going on out there?" the portly, middle–aged man with bright blue eyes demanded. Bright blue eyes, Jas noted. His grandfather's holo had blue eyes. His mother's memory of his father had those same bright blue eyes. "Uncle Radamand," Jas said affectionately. At the same moment he focused on the spot just behind Radamand's eyes.
    What he read there was Radamand's immediate fear — and the fact that Radamand was also seeing Jas's fear. Their bright blue eyes locked.
    "You're impossible," the older man said. "You can't be."
    "Apparently you're hallucinating," Jas said.
    "He just broke in here and demanded —" the secretary said, righteously indignant.
    "Shut up." Radamand was sweating.
    So was Jas. Because he could hear in the man's mind the decision that Jas had to die.
    "Is that the way to greet a long–lost relative?" Jas asked.
    "Get out of my —" Radamand stopped, but Jas knew he had been about to say —
    "Mind?" Jas asked.
    "Office." Radamand bit the word, and then Jas heard/saw/felt Radamand's panic, his rage —
    "Why are you afraid, Uncle Radamand?" Jas asked in his sweetest voice.
    In the older man's mind he found the answer: Because you have it too, and if they catch you, they might catch on, they might realize it's hereditary on the male line, and they'll trace the genealogies and find me —
    And as Jas heard Radamand's thoughts, he realized that Radamand had heard what leaped into Jas's thoughts: that assistant professor Hartman Tork already suspected he was a Swipe, was laying traps for him.
    "I'm afraid for you," Radamand said sweetly, through gritted teeth. "I'm afraid you might fall into a trap somewhere."
    "I'm smarter than they are," Jas said.
    But not smarter than me, Radamand thought loudly, fearfully, angrily.
    Jas saw the laser in Radamand's mind before Radamand could find it in his pocket. Jas dropped to the floor, rolled. The laser seared the floor behind him. A moment while the weapon recharged, and in that moment Jas was out the door, running down the corridor.
    An alarm sounded somewhere in the complex.
    The door ahead of him slammed shut. A guard stood in front of it. Jas stopped and frantically searched the man's thoughts for another way out, another exit. Where were the doors? He found them just behind the guard's eyes, even as the guard noticed Jas's fugitive appearance. The gun raised — Jas was already gone.
    Through this? No, this door. Out and down the stairs. And through this last door and into corridors branching off into the endless underground city of Capitol
    , which stretched in an unplanned and unplannable labyrinth from pole to pole to — Home? Not home, Jas thought, because the plan already forming in Radamand's mind was to arrest Jas on some charge or other — breaking and entering? Resisting inquiry? For someone at