"Lumley, Brian - Psychomech 02 - Psychosphere UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

The Castle's master knew that the Russians had their own telepaths, as did the Americans. They had a certain raw talent, these ESPers, but they were amateurs compared with Qubwa. Fifty percent of what they learned was guesswork, none of it could ever be trusted. Polaris submarines were almost impossible to detect through technology, so it could have been a Russian mind Qubwa had come up against— even an American for that matter. And because it had been unexpected, Qubwa had panicked.
He snorted. Obviously the USA and USSR—one of them, at least—was making some progress in the training and use of ESP-endowed surveillance agents, telepathic spies. It was something which would bear looking into.
But meanwhile, there was the other problem, the fact that Foster had broken free of Qubwa's control, had refused to press the NUCAC button. Oh, in a genuine crisis he would respond to training, of course he would—but even then he would have to be absolutely certain of the nature of the situation. This u?as his training, had to be; the world could not afford that kind of mistake. Given the smallest loophole or blind spot in even the most perfect scenario, Foster would reject it. Qubwa couldn't win!
The Castle's master cursed vividly. It was a problem. If he could not control Foster's single
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mind, how could he hope to control both his and his 2IC's simultaneously? Trust Great Britain to build these sort of dual-control, failsafe systems into its hardware!
Well, facts must be faced up to. Moth was out of the question. The other Polaris subs, too—
— Unless.
Slowly a poisonous transformation took place in Qubwa's gross features. Suddenly smiling, he cursed again—cursed himself for a fool. The easy way is always the simplest way. Why even attempt to control two minds simultaneously— or four/or six—when you can control the mind which controls those minds?
After all, Moth got her orders by radio, didn't she? And the operator who sent them was only one man, wasn't he? One mind! And if there was trouble there, why, Qubwa could always take it higher! He laughed out loud. Of course he could ...
. . . Right to the Admiralty itself!
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Chapter
3
VICKI MALER, RED-HAIRED AND MARVELLOUSLY golden-eyed (her eyes had once been green and blind), her slim elfin face cocked a little to one side—Vicki Maler, once-dead and cryogeni-cally suspended at Schloss Zonigen in the Swiss Alps, returned to life through the will of her lover, Richard Allan Garrison—stood now beside the bed where Garrison tossed and turned in the throes of nightmare. She did not wish to wake him, despite the occasional spastic twitching of his limbs and the starting of salty droplets from his neck and the hollow between his shoulder blades; no, for one could never be certain of his mood when first roused from sleep. Not these days. Hot any longer.
Vicki's thoughts were her own; they were as private, vital and original as any she had conjured in her previous life (or, as she thought of
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it now, in that "earlier" time), before the final, hideous acceleration of the creeping cancer which had ravaged her body to its painful death. And because she was intelligent, because she knew Garrison to be the instrument of her revival, her reincarnation, the fact that her mind retained its individuality vaguely surprised her. For not only had Garrison replenished her body and driven out the killing cancer, but also her mind; he had revitalized it intact, inquiring and unique as any mind, and not at all a product or substructure of his own expanded muitimind.
She was, in short, her own person. Mo, she corrected herself, she was Garrison's person; for he had left her in no doubt as to her fate should any accident befall him, when she must surely return to her previous state, whose clay shell, however vital now, must crumble as a centuried mummy exposed to air and light. Oh, yes, for if Vicki seemed bright and unflickering, an electrical glow in life's filament, then Garrison himself was the light switch. And if he were switched off...
As a girl in her teens Vicki had read Poe, Love-craft and Wilde. She well remembered the horrific demise of M. Valdemar and that of Dr. Munoz: her fate, too, should Garrison die. But she was more inclined to associate Garrison himself with the terrible fate of Dorian Gray. Not that Garrison had ever been a man of great vices, he had not. But. . . things had happened to him. Things ...
Vicki supposed she should be grateful for those things, but still she preferred to remem-
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ber Garrison as he had been in that "earlier" time. Then he had been, well, just Garrison. But that had been before the changes, before her rebirth.
Odd, but despite the fact that she was the same girl she had been "earlier," Vicki nevertheless felt . . . yes, reincarnated. After all, eight years had gone by without her active, physical presence in the world, when she had lain—dormant?—in her cryogenic crypt at Schloss Zonigen; but for Garrison they had been real, waking years. And strange ones. Moreover, Vicki's body had all the vitality and strength of her pre-cancer years, or at least of those years before the disease had commenced to drain her. So that in a sense she had been born again into a younger body than the one she last remembered.
She shuddered at the thought: the body she remembered.
The husk. The pain-riven shell. The bewildered flesh whose contamination had bloated and burned and filled her veins with the fire of stricken cells in ravenous, monstrous mutation. A body full of cancer. Livid with pain. No, with agony!
Vicki shuddered again. She not only remembered the cause of her death (for she had died) but Death Itself—or Himself. She had actually known His touch, the cruelly constricting fingers of the Grim Reaper; and not merely His touch but His iron grasp. And in her case those bony fingers had been of fire—or of acid.
Death. The Old Man. The oldest man in the
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world, who could not die Himself until He had snuffed out the very last life.
Immortal, therefore. Immortal, and . . . cruel.
Certainly in the worst of her pain-racked days Vicki had felt that someone enjoyed her agony, else why should she suffer it? If all were to balance, then there must be an enjoyment equal to her suffering. Well, finally she had the last laugh, for Death the One Immortal now had a second immortal to contend with. The Old Man must now wait on the demise of one Richard Allan Garrison, and Garrison did not intend to die— not ever.
Garrison stirred and mumbled something in his sleep, then flopped over on to his back. He was through the worst of his nightmare and the sweat was drying on him. Vicki listened to his near-inarticulate mouthings. He mentioned Schroeder, she thought, and Roenig, the sounds coming out in a jumble. Vicki allowed herself a third, this time quite deliberate shudder and peered intently into his face. It seemed calm now, resigned almost. But beneath those closed eyelids . . .
She straightened and stepped silently to the room's gilt-framed mirror. The gold of her eyes matched the yellow glow of the frame, burning in the reflected fire of the day's last ray of sunlight. She marvelled at her own eyes—those golden eyes which had been blind in that earlier time, blind for many years—their sight now restored through the will of Garrison. His own eyes, too, blinded by fire and blast, repaired miraculously in glowing, uniformly golden orbs.
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Eyes which saw more, much more, than those of other men.
Miraculous, yes. Garrison performed miracles. His powers were very nearly . . . infinite? They had seemed so at one time, but ... he himself did not know—had never fully explored—the extent or limitations of his powers. In fact of late he had kept an uneasy silence on the subject.
She turned to him again where he lay, her movements edgy, nervous. And silently she repeated to herself. Miracles . . .
But wasn't that a God-given gift? The power to work miracles? And if there really was a God (Vicki had always doubted it) why should He so reward Garrison? Or any human being for that matter. Or perhaps there actually was a God-now.
Had there been others with Garrisons's powers, Vicki wondered? What of the old legends? What of Merlin and the great wizards of immemorial myth? Her thoughts became blasphemous. What of Jesus Christ? He too had restored sight to the blind, raised up the dead, walked on the water. Hadn't He?
But no, cases were different. His miracles were generally accepted as having been all to the good. Garrison's were sometimes . . . other than that.
Her thoughts turned abruptly to their whereabouts . . .
The decision to go to the Aegean had been made, as were most of Garrison's decisions, on the spur of the moment. His pilot (he owned an executive jet aircraft) had been on holiday and
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