"Dick, Philip K - Ubik" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

"We wouldn't know how many inertials to bring in. Or what kind. Or where to station them. Defusing a psi operation has to be done on a systematic basis; we can't wave a magic wand or spray toxic fumes into corners. We have to balance Hollis' people individual by individual, an anti-talent for every talent. If Hollis has gotten into your operation he's done it the same way: Psi by Psi. One gets into the personnel department, hires another; that person sets up a department or takes charge of a department and requisitions a couple more... sometimes it takes them months. We can't undo in twenty-four hours what they've constructed over a long period of time. Big-time Psi activity is like a mosaic; they can't afford to be impatient, and neither can we."
"My employer," Miss Wirt said cheerfully, "is impatient."
"I'll talk to him." Runciter reached for the vidphone. "Who is he and what's his number?"
"You'll deal through me."
"Maybe I won't deal at all. Why won't you tell me who you represent?" He pressed a covert button mounted under the rim of his desk; it would bring his resident telepath, Nina Freede, into the next office, where she could monitor Miss Wirt's thought processes. I can't work with these people, he said to himself, if I don't know who they are. For all I know, Ray Hollis is trying to hire me.
"You're hidebound," Miss Wirt said. "All we're asking for is speed. And we're only asking for that because we have to have it. I call tell you this much: Our operation which they've infested isn't on Earth. From the standpoint of potential yield, as well as from an investment standpoint, it's our primary project. My principal has put all his negotiable assets into it. Nobody is supposed to know about it. The greatest shock to us, in finding telepaths on the site-"
"Excuse me," Runciter said; he rose, walked to the office door. "I'll find out how many people we have about the place who're available for use in this connection." Shutting his office door behind him, he looked into each of the adjoining offices until he spied Nina Freede; she sat alone in a minor sideroom, smoking a cigarette and concentrating. "Find out who she represents," he said to her. "And then find out how high they'll go." We've got thirty-eight idle inertials, he reflected. Maybe we can dump all of them or most of them into this. I may finally have found where Hollis' smart-assed talents have sneaked off to. The whole goddam bunch of them.
He returned to his own office, reseated himself behind his desk.
"If telepaths have gotten into your operation," he said to Miss Wirt, his hands folded before him, "then you have to face up to and accept the realization that the operation per se is no longer secret. Independent of any specific technical info they've picked up. So why not tell me what the project is?"
Hesitating, Miss Wirt said, "I don't know what the project is.
"Or where it is?"
"No." She shook her head.
Runciter said, "Do you know who your employer is?"
"I work for a subsidiary firm which he financially controls; I know who my immediate employer is - that's a Mr. Shepard Howard - but I've never been told whom Mr. Howard represents."
"If we supply you with the inertials you need, will we know where they are being sent?"
"Probably not."
"Suppose we never get them back?"
"Why wouldn't you get them back? After they've decontaminated our operation."
"Hollis' men," Runciter said, "have been known to kill inertials sent out to negate them. It's my responsibility to see that my people are protected; I can't do that if I don't know where they are."
The concealed microspeaker in his left ear buzzed and he beard the faint, measured voice of Nina Freede, audible to him alone. "Miss Wirt represents Stanton Mick. She is his confidential assistant. There is no one named Shepard Howard. The project under discussion exists primarily on Luna; it has to do with Techprise, Mick's research facilities, the controlling stock of which Miss Wirt keeps in her name. She does not know any technical details; no scientific evaluations or memos or progress reports are ever made available to her by Mr. Mick, and she resents this enormously. From Mick's staff, however, she has picked up a general idea of the nature of the project. Assuming that her secondhand knowledge is accurate, the Lunar project involves a radical, new, low-cost interstellar drive system, approaching the velocity of light, which could be leased to every moderately affluent political or ethnological group. Mick's idea seems to be that the drive system will make colonization feasible on a mass basic understructure. And hence no longer a monopoly of specific governments."
Nina Freede clicked off, and Runciter leaned back in his leather and walnut swivel chair to ponder.
"What are you thinking?" Miss Wirt asked brightly.
"I'm wondering," Runciter said, "if you can afford our services. Since I have no test data to go on, I can only estimate how many inertials you'll need... but it may run as high as forty." He said this knowing that Stanton Mick could afford - or could figure out how to get someone else to underwrite - an unlimited number of inertials.
"'Forty,'" Miss Wirt echoed. "Hmm. That is quite a few."
"The more we make use of, the sooner we can get the job done. Since you're in a hurry, we'll move them all in at one time. If you are authorized to sign a work contract in the name of your employer" - he pointed a steady, unyielding finger at her; she did not blink - "and you can come up with a retainer now, we could probably accomplish this within seventy-two hours." He eyed her then, waiting.
The microspeaker in his ear rasped, "As owner of Techprise she is fully bonded. She can legally obligate her firm up to and including its total worth. Right now she is calculating how much this would be, if converted on today's market." A pause. "Several billion poscreds, she has decided. But she doesn't want to do this; she doesn't like the idea of committing herself to both a contract and retainer. She would prefer to have Mick's attorneys do that, even if it means several days' delay."
But they're in a hurry, Runciter reflected. Or so they say. The microspeaker said, "She has an intuition that you know - or have guessed - whom she represents. And she's afraid you'll up your fee accordingly. Mick knows his reputation. He considers himself the world's greatest mark. So he negotiates in this manner: through someone or some firm as a front. On the other hand, they want as many inertials as they can get. And they're resigned to that being enormously expensive."
"Forty inertials," Runciter said idly; he scratched with his pen at a small sheet of blank paper, on his desk for just such purposes. "Let's see. Six times fifty times three. Times forty."
Miss Wirt, still smiling her glazed, happy smile, waited with visible tension.
"I wonder," he murmured, "who paid Hollis to put his employees in the middle of your project."
"That doesn't really matter, does it?" Miss Wirt said. "What matters is that they're there."
Runciter said, "Sometimes one never finds out. But as you say - it's the same as when ants find their way into your kitchen. You don't ask why they're there; you just begin the job of getting them back out." He had arrived at a cost figure.
It was enormous.
"I'll - have to think it over," Miss Wirt said, she raised her eyes from the shocking sight of his estimate and half rose to her feet. "Is there somewhere, an office, where I can be alone? And possibly phone Mr. Howard?"
Runciter, also rising, said, "It's rare for any prudence organization to have that many inertials available at one time. If you wait, the situation will change. So if you want them you'd better act."
"And you think it would really take that many inertials?"
Taking Miss Wirt by the arm, he led her from his office and down the hall. To the firm's map room. "This shows," he told her, "the location of our inertials plus the inertials of other prudence organizations. In addition to that it shows - or tries to show - the location of all of Hollis' Psis." He systematically counted the psi ident-flags which, one by one, had been removed from the map; he wound up holding the final one: that of S. Dole Melipone. "I know now where they are," he said to Miss Wirt, who had lost her mechanical smile as she comprehended the significance of the unpositioned ident-flags. Taking hold of her damp hand, he deposited Melipone's flag among her damp fingers and closed them around it. "You can stay here and meditate," he said. "There's a vidphone over there -" He pointed. "No one will bother you. I'll be in my office." He left the map room, thinking, I really don't know that this is where they are, all those missing Psis. But it's possible. And - Stanton Mick had waived the routine procedure of making an objective test.
Therefore, if he wound up hiring inertials which he did not need it would be his own fault.
Legalistically speaking, Runciter Associates was required to notify the Society that some of the missing Psis - if not all - had been found. But he had five days in which to file the notification... and he decided to wait until the last day. This kind of business opportunity, he reflected, happens once in a lifetime.
"Mrs. Frick," he said, entering her outer office. "Type up a work contract specifying forty -" He broke off.
Across the room sat two persons. The man, Joe Chip, looked haggard and hungover and more than usually glum... looked, in fact, about as always, the glumness excepted. But beside him lounged a long-legged girl with brilliant, tumbling black hair and eyes; her intense, distilled beauty illuminated that part of the room, igniting it with heavy, sullen fire. It was, he thought, as if the girl resisted being attractive, disliked the smoothness of her skin and the sensual, swollen, dark quality of her lips.
She looks, he thought, as if she just now got out of bed. Still disordered. Resentful of the day - in fact, of every day.
Walking over to the two of them, Runciter said, "I gather G. G. is back from Topeka."
"This is Pat," Joe Chip said. "No last name." He indicated Runciter, then sighed. He had a peculiar defeated quality hanging over him, and yet, underneath, he did not seem to have given up. A vague and ragged hint of vitality lurked behind the resignation; it seemed to Runciter that Joe most nearly could be accused of feigning spiritual downfall... the real article, however, was not there.
"Anti what?" Runciter asked the girl, who still sat sprawling in her chair, legs extended.
The girl murmured, "Anti-ketogenesis."
"What's that mean?"
"The prevention of ketosis," the girl said remotely. "As by the administration of glucose."
To Joe, Runciter said, "Explain."
"Give Mr. Runciter your test sheet," Joe said to the girl.