Flinx's Folly by Alan Dean Foster Read Free Book Online

put the repeller into a sharp dive, hoping to confront the famously shy flier before it could spot him and flee.
    Abruptly, two of the circling shapes whirled upward to meet him. They were not hakuh-heth, he saw quickly, but rather humans lying atop and driving repellers like his own. Fliers from another hoverer, he decided, since none of those he had dropped with had traveled in this direction.
    Fortunately, and probably thanks to the steepness of his dive, the first shot missed him. Banking sharply to his left, he headed for the cover of the nearest cloud.
    Both pursuers followed. A second shot grazed the left wing of his repeller as he entered the concealing whiteness. Secured around his right forearm, an alarmed Pip stuck her head out and began searching anxiously for the source of her master’s sudden distress.
    In response to her movement, he drew his arm closer against his body. One of many signals he had developed in working with her over the years, the increased pressure indicated that he wanted the minidrag to stay where she was. Although infinitely more agile than any repeller, she would quickly tire of trying to chase them down. He could not hope to use her against his unknown assailants unless they came very close. And he intended to keep as much distance between him and them as possible.
    In the more turbulent depths of the cloud, the lightweight repeller bucked and weaved. Unless they had come equipped with more sophisticated instrumentation than his brief glimpse of them had shown, his pursuers should be flying blind. He was not.
    Reaching out with his increasingly maturing ability, he sensed them still following. The excitement of the hunt and the eagerness with which they sought to eradicate their quarry appeared to him as an emotional beacon. In the last few years he had learned how to use his ability to detect and interpret such beacons and also to manipulate them. Knowing, feeling that they planned to kill him the instant the opportunity presented itself allowed him to respond to the threat without hesitation.
    Extending himself, he reached out toward them, projecting the fear of death into their minds, striving to overwhelm all other emotions. Having been forced to do it before, he knew the effect such a projection could have. Against his arm, Pip abruptly went motionless, acting like a lens for her master’s singular talent.
    When he burst out of the opposite side of the cloud, both pursuers were still behind him.
    Pushing forward on the controls, he sent the repeller plummeting surfaceward. Landing would not save him. Before he could free himself from the repeller’s harness, his pursuers would be on top of him. It wasn’t so much that something had gone wrong with his effort as that something was not right about those he sought to influence. He knew now when his talent was working and when it wasn’t. He’d pushed confidently against those chasing him, striving hard to upset their emotional balance. It had not worked.
    While fighting to take evasive action with the repeller, he struggled once more to read the feelings of his pursuers. What he found both surprised and unsettled him. He knew now why his effort had failed: The people chasing him had absolutely no fear of death. None. Insofar as he could read them, they were totally indifferent to the prospect as a true artist was to boorish criticism.
    How could he emotionally affect people who were not afraid of dying?
    As another disrupter bolt passed much too close to his head, this became more than an academic question. He couldn’t keep this up forever. Sooner or later, a good shot or a lucky one would damage either the repeller or him. Either way, he was too high to risk an uncontrolled fall. And he did have strong feelings about dying.
    Mightn’t he try infusing them with strong feelings about something else? Concentrating harder than ever, he pushed outward with the first thing that seemed to offer some hope.
    He didn’t know if either of