"Incommunicado" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)

The man, a small friendly Amerind, leaped to his feet and took the hand in a wiry nervous clasp, smiling widely. He answered in Glot with a Spanish accent.

“Happy to meet you, sir. My name is McCrea. I am the new librarian to replace Dr. Reynolds.”

“It’s a good job,” said Cliff. “Is Archy around?”

The new librarian gulped nervously. “Oh, yes, Dr. Reynolds’ son. He withdrew his application for the position. Something about music I hear. I don’t want to bother him. I am not used to the Reynolds’ system, of course. It is hard to understand. It is sad that Dr. Reynolds left no diagrams. But I work hard, and soon I will understand.” The little man gestured at his scattered tools and half-drawn tentative diagrams and gulped again. “I am not a real, a genuine station research person, of course. The commission they have honored me with is a temporary appointment while they—”

Cliff had listened to the flow of words, stunned. “For the luvva Pete!” he exploded. “Do you mean to say that Archy Reynolds has left you stewing here trying to figure out the library system, and never raised a hand to help you? What’s wrong with the kid?”

He smiled reassuringly at the anxious little workman. “Listen,” he said gently. “He can spare you ten minutes. I’ll get Archy up here if I have to break his neck.”



He strode back into the deserted library, where one square stubborn man sat glowering at the visoplate on his desk. It was Dr. Brandias, the station medico.

“Ahoy, Brandy,” said Cliff. “Where’s Archy? Where is everybody anyhow!”

Brandy looked up with a start. “Cliff. They’re all down in the gym, heavy level, listening to Archy give a jazz concert.” He seemed younger and more alert, yet paradoxically more tense and worried than normal. He assessed Cliff’s impatience and glanced smiling at his watch. “Hold your horses, it will be over any minute now. Spare me a second and show me what to do with this contraption.” He indicated the reading desk. “It’s driving me bats!” The intonations of his voice were slightly strange, and he tensed up self-consciously as if startled by their echo.

Cliff considered the desk. It sat there looking expensive and useful, its ground glass reading screen glowing mildly. It looked like an ordinary desk with a private microtape file and projector inside to run the microfilm books on the reading screen, but Cliff knew that it was one of Reynolds’ special working desks, linked through the floor with the reference files of the library that held in a few cubic meters the incalculable store of all the Earth’s libraries, linked by Doc Reynolds to the service automatics and the station computer with an elaborate control panel. It was comforting to Cliff that a desk should be equipped to do his calculating for him, record the results and photograph and play back any tentative notes he could make on any subject. Reynolds had made other connections and equipped his desks to do other things which Cliff had never bothered to figure out, but there was an irreverent rumor around that if your fingers slipped on the controls it would give you a ham sandwich.

“Cliff,” Brandy was saying, “if you fix it, you’re a life saver. I’ve just got the glimmering of a completely different way to control the sympathetic system and take negative tension cycles out of decision and judgment sets, and—”

Cliff interrupted with a laugh, “You’re talking out of my frequency. What’s wrong with the desk?”

“It won’t give me the films I want,” Brandy said indignantly. “Look, I’ll show you.” The doctor consulted a list of decimal index numbers on a note pad, and rapidly punched them into the keyboard. As he did so the board gave out a trill of flutelike notes that ran up and down the scale like musical morse. “And all that noise—” Brandy grumbled. “Doc kept turning it up louder and louder as he got deafer and deafer before he died. Why doesn’t somebody turn it down?” He finished and pushed the total key to the accompaniment of a sudden simultaneous jangle of notes. The jangle moved into a high twittering, broke into chords and trailed off in a single high faint note that somehow seemed as positive and final as the last note of a tune.

Cliff ignored it. All of Reynolds’ automatics ran on a frequency discrimination system, and Doc Reynolds had liked to hetrodyne them down to audible range so as to keep track of their workings. Every telephone and servo in the station worked to the tune of sounds like a chorus of canaries, and the people of the station had grown so used to the sound that they no longer heard it. He looked the panel over again.

“You have the triangulation key in,” he told Brandias, and laughed shortly. “The computer is taking the numbers as a question, and it’s trying to give you an answer.”

“Sounds like a Frankenstein,” Brandy grinned. “Everything always works right for engineers. It’s a conspiracy.”

“Sure,” Cliff said vaguely, consulting his chrono. “Say, what’s the matter with your voice?”

The reaction to that simple question was shocking; Dr. Brandias turned white. Brandy, who had taught Cliff to control his adrenals and pulse against shock reaction, was showing one himself, an uncontrolled shock reaction triggered to a random word. Brandy had taught that this was a good sign of an urgent problem suppressed from rational calculation, hidden, and so only able to react childishly in irrational identifications, fear sets triggered to symbols.

The square, practical looking doctor was stammering, looking strangely helpless. “Why… uh… uh… nothing.” He turned hastily back to his desk.

The news service clicked into life. “The concert is over,” it announced.

Cliff hesitated for a second, considering Brandias’ broad stooped back, and remembering what he had learned from the doctor’s useful lesson on fear. What could be bad enough to frighten Brandy? Why was he hiding it from himself?

He didn’t have time to figure it out. He had to get hold of Archy. “See you later.” Poor Brandy. Physician, heal thyself.

People were streaming up from the concert.

He strode out into the corridor and headed for the elevator, answering the hails of friends with a muttered greeting. At the door of the elevator Mrs. Gibbs stepped out, trailing her husband. She passed him with a gracious “Good evening, Cliff.”