"Kuttner, Henry - Piggy Bank UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

The white-gowned physician brought in a tray and deftly fed the prisoner. After he had vanished, Gunther looked at his watch again. A worried frown showed on his forehead.
He grew steadily more nervous.
The watch read ~:i~ when another meal was served. This time Gunther waited till the physician had left, and then recovered the fork he had managed to secrete in his sleeve. He hoped its absence wouldn’t be noticed immediately. A few minutes was all he wanted, for Gunther knew the construction of these electromagnetic prison chairs. If he could short circuit the current— It wasn’t too difficult, even though Gunther’s arms were prisoned by
metal clamps. He knew where the wires were. After a bit, there was a crackling flash, and Gunther swore at the pain in his seared fingertips. But the clamps slid free from his arms and legs.
He stood up, looking again at his wrist watch. Scowling, he prowled around the room till he found what he wanted—the window buttons. As he pressed these, panels in the blank walls slid aside, revealing the lighted towers of New York.
Gunther glanced at the door warily. He opened a window and peered down. The height was dizzying, but a ledge provided easy egress. Gunther eased himself over the sill and slid along to his right till he reached another window.
It was locked. He looked down, hesitating. There was another ledge below, but he wasn’t sure he could make it. Instead, he went on to the next window.
Locked.
But the one after that was open. Gunther peered into the dimness. He
could make out a bulky desk, and the glimmer of a telepanel. Sighing with relief, he crawled into the office, with another glance at his watch.
He went directly to the televisor and fingered a number. When a man’s face appeared on the panel, Gunther merely said, “Reporting. O.K.,” and broke the connection. His consciousness recorded a tiny click.
He called Ballard then, but the castle’s secretary answered. “Where’s Ballard?”
“Not here, sir. Can I—”
Gunther went white, remembering the click he had heard. He broke the connection experimentally, and heard it again. Ballard— “Hell!” Gunther said under his breath. He returned to the window,
crawled out, hung by his hands, and let himself drop. He almost missed the ledge one story below. Skin ripped from his fingertips as he fought for a grip.
But he got it at last. He kicked his way through the window before him and dived in, glass showering. No televisor here. But there was a door dimly defined in the wall.
Gunther opened it, finding what he wanted on the other side. He switched on a lamp, riffling through the drawers till he was certain that this office wasn’t another plant. After that, he used the televisor, fingering the same number he had called before.
There was no answer.
“Uh-hьh,” Gunther said, and made another call.
He had just broken the connection when a man in a surgeon’s gown came in and shot him through the head.

The man who looked like Ffoulkes scrubbed make-up from his face. He glanced up when the physician entered.
“O.K.?”
“Yeah. Let’s go.”
“Did they trace Gunther’s call?”
“That’s not our pie. Come on.”

A gray-haired man, tied securely in his chair, swore as the hypodermic pierced his skin. Ballard waited a minute and then jerked his head at the two guards behind him.
“Get out.”
They obeyed. Ballard turned to the prisoner.
“Gunther was supposed to report to you every day. If he failed, you were told to release a certain message he gave you. Where’s the message?”
“Where’s Gunther?” the gray-haired man said. His voice was thick, the words slurring as the scopolamin began its work.
“Gunther’s dead. I arranged matters so that he’d telecall you on a tapped beam. I traced the call. Now where’s the message?”
It took a little while, but at last Ballard unscrewed a hollow table leg and took out a thin roll of recording wire tape, carefully sealed.
“Know what’s in this?”
“No. No. No—”
Ballard went to the door. “Kill him,” he said to the guards, and waited till he heard the muffled shot. Then he sighed with heartfelt relief.
He was, at last, impregnable.

Barney Ffoulkes called his chief of staff. “I hear Ballard’s robot is finished. Clamp down. Put the squeeze on him. Force him to liquidate. Tell the Donner boys about the robot.”
Dangerfield’s face showed no expression as he made thumb and forefinger into a circle.

What Gunther had called Cain’s thermodynamic patent was in reality something different, as the wire tape showed. Actually it was “McNamara, Torsion Process, Patent No. R-735-V-2z.” Ballard recorded that in his capacious memory and looked up the patent himself. This time he wished to share the secret with no one. He was enough of a scientist, he thought, to be able to work out the details himself. Besides, Gunther’s machines for diamond-making were already set up in the castle laboratory.
Ballard immediately ran into an annoying, though not serious, hitch. The original McNamara process was not designed to create artificial diamonds. It was a method of developing certain electronic alterations in matter, and through torsion changing the physical structure involved. Gunther had taken McNamara’s system, applied it to carbon, and made diamonds.
Ballard felt certain he could do the same, but it would take time. As a matter of fact, it took exactly two weeks. Once the new application was discovered, the rest was incredibly easy. Ballard started to make diamonds.
There was one other difficulty. The annealing process took nearly a month. If the carbon was removed from the chamber before that time, it would be merely carbon. In the past, Gunther had kept a supply of diamonds on hand for emergencies; that supply was depleted now, most of the gems having gone to cover the golden robot. Ballard sat back and shrugged. In a month— Long before that Ffoulkes struck. He clamped down with both hands.
Propaganda, whispering campaigns, releasing of new patents that rendered Ballard’s worthless—all the weapons of economic warfare were unleashed against the diamond king. Holdings depreciated. There were strikes in Ballard’s mines and factories. An unexpected civil war knocked the bottom out of certain African stocks he held. Word began to go around that the Ballard empire was collapsing.
Margin was the answer—that, and security. Diamonds were excellent collateral. Ballard used up his small hoard lavishly, trying to plug the leaks in the dike, buying on margin, using the tactics that had always succeeded for him in the past. His obvious confidence stemmed the tide for a while. Not for long. Ffoulkes kept hitting, hard and fast.
By the end of the month, Ballard knew, he would have all the diamonds he needed, and could re-establish his credit. In the meantime—
The Donner gang tried to steal Argus. They didn’t know the robot’s capabilities. Argus fled from room to room, clanging an alarm, ignoring bullets, until the Donners decided to give it up as a bad job and escape. But by that time the police had arrived, and they failed.