"James P Hogan - Leapfrog UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

“Speaking.”
“This is Ed Halloran.”
“Ah, Mr. Halloran! Excellent!” The voice sounded genial and exuberant. “So, you are arrived now, yes?”
“We docked about fifteen minutes ago. I’ve just cleared the reception formalities.”
“And did you have a pleasant voyage, I trust?”
“It dragged a bit at times, but it was fine.”
“Of course. So you are still liking the idea of working with us at MCM? No second regrets, yes?”
A reception agent murmured, “Make it brief, if you wouldn’t mind, Mr. Halloran. There is a line waiting.”
“None,” Halloran said. “Er, I am holding up the line here. Maybe if I could come on through?”
“Yes, of course. What you do is ask directions to a transit elevator that will bring you out here to Red Square, which is a ring—a joke, you see, yes? This is where I am. It is the part of MARSMOS that rotates. First we have a drink of welcome to celebrate, which is the Russian tradition. You go to the south elevator point in Red Square, then find the Diplomatic Lounge. Our gentlemen’s club here, comfortable by Martian standards—no hard hats or oily coverups. There, soon, I will be meeting you.”
With no gravity to define a preferred direction, the geometry inside the free-fall section of MARSMOS was an Escherean nightmare of walls, planes, passages, and connecting shafts intersecting and going off in all directions, with figures floating between the various spaces and levels like fish drifting through a three-dimensional undersea labyrinth. Despite the map included in the information package, Halloran was hopelessly lost within minutes and had to ask directions three times to the elevator that would take him to the south terminal of Red Square. To reach it, he passed through a spin-decoupling gate, which took him into the slowly turning hub structure of the rotating section.
The elevator capsule ran along the outside of one of the structural supporting booms and was glass-walled on two sides. A panorama of the entire structure of MARSMOS changed perspective outside as the capsule moved outward, with the full disk of Mars sweeping by beyond, against its background of stars. It was his first close-up view of the planet that was real, seen directly with his own eyes, and not an electronically generated reproduction.
As the capsule descended outward and Halloran felt his body acquiring weight once again, he replayed in his mind the voice he had heard over the phone: the guttural, heavily accented tone, the hearty, wheezing joviality, the tortured English. It had sounded like the Vusilov, all right. Perhaps he had upset somebody higher up in the heap, Halloran thought—which Vusilov had had a tendency to do from time to time—and despite all the other changes, the old Russian
penchant for sending troublemakers to faraway places hadn’t gone away.
Direction had reestablished itself when he emerged at the rim. Halloran consulted his map again and found the Diplomatic Lounge located two levels farther down, in a complex of dining areas and social rooms collectively lumped together in a prize piece of technocratese as a “Communal Facilities Zone.” But as he made his way down, austere painted metal walls and pressed aluminum floors gave way to patterned designs and carpeting, with mural decorations to add to the decor, and even some ornaments and potted plants. Finally he went through double doors into a vestibule with closets and hanging space, where he left his bags, and entered a spacious, comfortably furnished room with bookshelves and a bar tended by a white-jacketed steward on one side. On the other, vast windows looked out into space, showing Phobos as a lumpy, deformed crescent. Leather armchairs and couches were grouped around low tables with people scattered around, some talking, others alone, reading. The atmosphere was calm and restful, all very comfortable and far better than anything Halloran had expected.
And then one of the figures rose and advanced with a hand extended. He was short and stocky, with broad, solid shoulders, and dressed casually in a loose orange sweater and tan slacks. As he approached, a toothy grin broadened to split the familiar craggy, heavyjowled face, with its bulbous, purple-veined nose—a face that had always made Halloran think of an old-time prizefighter—from one misshapen, cauliflower ear to the other.
Vusilov chuckled delightedly at the expression on Halloran’s face. “Ah-hah! But why the so-surprised look, Edmund Halloran? You think you could get rid of me so easy, surely not? It has been some years now, yes? It’s often I am wondering how they figure out what to do with you, Halloran. . . . So, to Mars, welcome I say to you, and to Moscow-Manhattan.”
They shook hands firmly. It was the first time they had done so, even though they had met on numerous occasions as adversaries. “I wondered if it was you, Sergei . . . from the name,” Halloran said.
“As I knew you would.”
“You knew who I was, of course.”
“Of course. I’ve seen your file. It wouldn’t have been customary for them to show you mine.”
“Who’d have guessed we’d wind up like this?” Halloran said. “Times sure change. It all seems such a long time ago, now. But then, I guess, it was literally another world.”
“The axes are buried under the bridge,” Vusilov pronounced. “And now, as the first thing, we must drink some toast. Come.” He took Halloran’s elbow lightly and steered him across to the bar. The bartender, young, swarthy, with dark eyes and flat-combed hair, looked up inquiringly. “This is Aifredo,” Vusilov said, gesturing with a sweep of his hand. “The best bartender on Mars.”
“The only one, too,” Aifredo said.
“Well, what of it? That also makes you the best.”
“I thought there was a bar down in the main surface base,” Halloran said.
“Pah!” Vusilov waved a hand. “That is just a workman’s club. Dishwashing beer from serve-yourself machines. This is the only bar. Alfredo is the source of all that’s worth knowing up here. If you want to know what goes on, ask Aifredo. Alfredo, I want you to meet Ed Halloran, a good friend of mine who is very old. He has now come here to work with us.”
“Pleased to meet you, Ed,” Aifredo said.
“Hi,” Halloran responded.
“Now, you see, from the old days I remember the files we keep on everybody. Your favorite choice to be poisoned with is a scotch, yes?”
“That would do fine.”
“I refuse absolutely. Today you are joining us here, so it must first be vodka. We have the best.”
“Okay. Make it on ice, with a splash of lime.”
“And my usual, Alfredo,” Vusilov said. “Put them on MCM’s account.”
Aifredo turned away and began pouring the drinks. After a few seconds, Halloran asked Vusilov idly, “When was the last time?”
Vusilov’s beady bright eyes darted restlessly as he thought back~ “In 2015, wasn’t it? Vienna. Hah-hah! Yes, I remember.” The Russian guffawed loudly and slapped the bar with the palm of his hand. “You paid a hundred thousand dollars to buy back the coding cartridge. But the truth, you never knew! It was worthless to us, anyway. We didn’t have the key.”
Halloran raised a restraining hand. “Now wait a minute. You may be the boss here, but I’m not gonna let you get away with that. We knew about the code. It was worth about as much as those hundreddollar bills I passed you. Didn’t your people ever check them out?”
“Hmph.” The smile left Vusilov’s face abruptly. “I know nothing about that. My department, it was not.” Halloran got the impression that it was more a slight detail that Vusilov had conveniently forgotten. Aifredo placed two glasses on the bar. Vusilov picked them up.
“Come,” he said. “There are two quiet chairs over there, by the window. Never before do you see so many stars, and so flammable, yes?”
“Don’t change the subject,” Halloran said as they began crossing the lounge. “You have to admit that we undid your whole operation in Bonn. When we exposed Skater and he got sent back to Moscow, it pulled the linchpin out of it.”
Vusilov stopped and threw his head back to roar with mirth, causing heads to look up all around the room. “What, you still believe that? He was the decoy you were supposed to find out about. We were intercepting your communications.”
“Hell, we knew that. We were feeding you garbage through that channel. That was how we kept Reuthen’s cover. He was the one you should have been worrying about.”
Vusilov blanched and stopped in midstride. “Reuthen? The interpreter? He was with you?”
“Sure. He was our key man. You never suspected?”
“You are being serious, I suppose?”
Halloran smiled in a satisfied kind of way. “Well, I guess you’ll never know, will you?” It was a pretty tactless way to begin a relationship with his future boss, he admitted to himself, but he hadn’t been able to resist it. Anyhow, what did career prospects matter at his age? Hell, it had been worth it.
Vusilov resumed walking, and after a few paces stopped by a chair where a lean, balding man with spectacles and a clipped mustache was reading what looked like a technical report of some kind, in French. “This is Leon, who you should know.” Vusilov spoke stiffly, his joviality of a moment ago now gone. “Leon is with the European group here, who will build the launch base and make spaceships here.”
“‘Allo?” Leon said, looking up.
“Please meet Ed Halloran,” Vusilov said. “He comes here to work with us at MCM.”
“A pleasure, Monsieur ‘alloran.” LCon half-rose from his chair to shake hands.