Pegasus in Flight Read Free

Tirla’s unyielding expression. She spit in her palm and engulfed Tirla’s delicate hand in her own to seal the arrangement.
    “You are a clever one. You must hurry now.”
    The girl was already slipping through the half-opened door and down the hall to spread the warning.
     
    Despite her speed, Tirla barely finished her route before the PH officers began to penetrate the levels, checking the IDs of each squat’s occupants and herding them out and down to line up for their hypospray. She soon learned that the health threat was not a ‘mune plague but a virulent intestinal disease that had started in Linear B with devastating results. All Linears were being vaccinated in an attempt to stem the spread of the ailment. The PH public-address system droned on constantly giving a short explanation in all the languages registered in Linear G; Tirla did some rapid translations of her own when requested by nervous mothers.
    “It’s only another food contamination,” she assured the skeptical. “They’ve isolated the source, who have been heavily fined and lost their license.”
    “Huh!” Mirda Khan said, her dark eyes glistening with skepticism. “That will be gone as long as it takes to send in enough credit to reissue it. How long will the protection last us?”
    “Oh, this one’ll do us for a year!”
    “A year? They are improving.”
    Trudging forward step by step in the long line, Tirla and Mama Bobchik finally reached the PH, dropped their wrists across the reader, and received their shots. Immediately Mama pretended to become faint and staggered against the table. While the PH woman was coping with that, Tirla swept an entire tray of the vaccine ampoules into the shopping sack Mirda Khan had ready as she, too, came to Mama’s assistance.
    “Okh, kak bolit golova!”
Mama said in an appropriately wispy tone, the back of her fat hand against her head. The pain in her voice was not entirely faked, considering the hangover headache.
    “What’s she saying?” the PH officer asked, hovering between concern and annoyance.
    “Her head hurts,” Tirla replied.
    “Not from this injection,” was the callous response of the PHer. “Now move along!”
    Solicitously Mirda Khan and Tirla propped up Mama Bobchik as she made her way slowly toward the nearest side aisle. Once safely out of sight, Mama immediately reached for Mirda’s sack and peered inside it.
    “One whole tray? Miraculous, Tirla, truly miraculous. There are more than enough. Run ahead and tell them to come in small groups. The PHOs have already checked our three levels. It will be safe.”
    In the course of her errands, Tirla tried her ID bracelet on as many public dispensers as she passed, no matter what commodity emerged from the slot. She tucked each purloined item into the extra material at the back of her coverall, or into a sleeve or a trouser leg. It became harder to move quickly, but she managed. By evening, she had enough small floaters and illegally acquired items to keep her well fed and content for the next month. If she stretched a bit, it might even be six weeks before she need bother about working again.

 
    CHAPTER 2
     
    “There was no aura of menace or threat,” Rhyssa Owen told Sascha Roznine as he stood glaring down at her. To reduce his threatening glower to a more productive, thoughtful mood, she touched his arm, reinforcing her statement with a mental
See? Curiosity. An impingement, not a threat.
    Sascha subsided, but he continued to glare at the graph recording of Rhyssa’s early-morning sleep pattern, where the wide black mark of the spoke showed that she had been roused from an REM dream sequence to full alertness by a mental intruder.
    As the director of the Center for Parapsychic Talents on the North American East Coast, Rhyssa Owen lived on what had been the Henner estate, a reserve of trees, lawn, and mature gardens above the Hudson River on the Palisades. This archaic remainder of the twentieth-century residential