"Frank Herbert - Whipping Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

The reception room was no more than fifteen meters wide, perhaps thirty-five
long. It had tan walls with pitted marks in them as though they had been soft
once and someone had thrown a small ball at them according to some random
whim. Along the right side across from where Furuneo stood with his enforcers
was a high bench. It occupied three-fourths of the long wall. Multi-faceted
rotating lights above it cast patterned shadows onto the face of the bench and
the Taprisiot standing atop it.

Taprisiots came in odd shapes like sawed-off lengths of burned conifers, with
stub limbs jutting every which way, needlelike speech appendages fluttering
even when they remained silent. This one's skidfeet beat a nervous rhythm on
the surface where it stood.

For the third time since entering, Furuneo asked, "Are you the transmitter?"

No answer.

Taprisiots were like that. No sense getting angry. It did no good. Furuneo
allowed himself to be annoyed, though. Damned Taprisiots!

One of the enforcers behind Furuneo cleared his throat.

Damn this delay! Furuneo thought.

The whole Bureau had been in a state of jitters ever since the max-alert
message on the Abnethe case. This call he was preparing to make might be
their first real break. He sensed the fragile urgency of it. It could be the
most important call he had ever made. And directly to McKie, at that.

The sun, barely over the Billy Mountains, spread an orange fan of light around
him from the windowed doorway through which they had entered.

'"Looks like it's gonna be a long wait for this Tappy," one of his enforcers
muttered.

Furuneo nodded curtly. He had learned several degrees of patience in sixty-
seven years, especially on his way up the ladder to his present position as
planetary agent for the Bureau. There was only one thing to do here: wait it
out quietly. Taprisiots took their own time for whatever mysterious reasons.
There was no other store, though, where he could buy the service he needed
now. Without a Taprisiot transmitter, you didn't make real-time calls across
interstellar space.

Strange, this Taprisiot talent -- used by so many sentients without
understanding. The sensational press abounded with theories on how it was
accomplished. For all anyone knew, one of the theories could be right.
Perhaps Taprisiots did make these calls in a way akin to the data linkage
among PanSpechi creche mates -- not that this was understood, either.

It was Furuneo's belief that Taprisiots distorted space in a way similar to