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

But Willy Gibbs stopped. “Hi, Cliff. Did you see the new movie? You fellows up around Pluto sure got the breaks.” Oddly the words came out in a strange singsong that robbed them of meaning. As Cliff wondered vaguely what was wrong with the man, Mrs. Gibbs turned and tried to hurry her husband with a tug on his arm.

Willy Gibbs went on chanting. “There wasn’t even an extra to play me in this one.” The ecologist absently acknowledged his wife’s repeated nudge with an impatient twitch of his shoulder. The shoulder twitched again, reasonlessly, and kept on twitching as the ecologist’s voice became jerky. “It’s… risks… that… appeal to… them. Maybe I… should… write… an article… about… my… man… eating… molds… or reep beep tatatum la kikikinoo stup.”

Mrs. Gibbs glared icily at her husband, and Willy Gibbs suddenly went deep red. “Be seeing you,” he muttered and hurried on. As the elevator door slid closed Cliff thought he heard a burst of whistling, but the door shut off his view and the elevator started softly downward.

He found Archy in the stage rehearsal room at 1.6 G. As he opened the door a deep wave of sound met him.

Eight teen-age members of the orchestra sat around the room, their eyes fixed glassily on the drummer. Archy Reynolds sat surrounded by drums, using his fingertips with an easy precision, filling the room with a vibrating thunder that modulated through octaves like an impossibly deep and passionate voice.

The sound held him at the door like a thick soft wall.

“Archy,” he said, pitching his voice to carry over the drums. The cold eyes in the bony face flickered up at him. Archy nodded, flipped the score over two pages, and the drumbeat changed subtly. A girl in the orchestra lifted her instrument and a horn picked up the theme in a sad intermittent note, as the drumbeat stopped. Archy unfolded from his chair and came over with the smallest drum still dangling from one bony hand. Behind him the horn note rose up instantly and a cello began to whisper.

He had grown tall enough to talk to Cliff face to face, but his expression was cold and remote.

“What is it, Mr. Baker?”

“Brace yourself Jughead,” Cliff said kindly, wondering how Archy would take the shock. The kid had always wanted to go along on a project. It was funny that now he would go to help instead of watch. He paused, collecting words. “How would you like to go up to Pluto Station and be my partner for a while?”

Archy looked past him without blinking, his bony face so preoccupied that Cliff thought he had not heard. He began again. “I said, how would you like—”

The horn began to whimper down to a silence, and the orchestra stirred restlessly. Archy shifted the small drum under his arm and laid his fingertips against it.

“No,” he said, and walked back to his place, his fingers making a shuffling noise on the drum that reminded Cliff of a heart beating. The music swelled up again, but it was strange. Cliff could see someone striking chords at the piano, a boy with a flute—all the instruments of an orchestra sounding intermittently, but they were unreal. The sound was not music, it was the jumbled voices of a dream, laughing and muttering with a meaning beyond the mind’s grasp.

A dull hunger to understand began to ache in his throat, and he let his eyes half close, rocking on his feet as the dreamlike clamor of voices surged up in his mind.

Instinct saved him. Without remembering having moved he was out in the hall, and the clean slam of the soundproofed door cut off the music and left a ringing silence.



At Pluto Station a field interacted subtly with fields out of its calculated range, minor disturbances resonated and built, and suddenly the field moved. Ten feet to one side, ten feet back.

“Medico here,” said Smitty on a directed beam, tightening the left elbow joint of his spacesuit with his right hand. He was using all the strength he had, trying to stop the jet of blood from where his left hand had been. Numbly he moved back as the field began to swing towards him again. He hummed two code notes that switched his call into general beam, and said loudly and not quite coherently: “Oscillation build up, I think. Something wrong over here. I don’t get it.”



The hall was painted soberly in two shades of brown, with a faint streak of handprints running along the wall and darkening the doorknobs. It looked completely normal. Cliff shook his head to shake the ringing out of his ears, and snorted, “What the Sam Hill!” His voice was reassuringly sane, loud and indignant. Memory came back to him. “He said no. He said no!”

“What now?” He strode furiously toward the public elevator. “Watch your temper,” he cautioned himself. “For Pete’s sake! Stop talking to yourself. Archy will listen when it’s explained to him. Wait till he’s through.” Eight more minutes. They were only going over a flubbed phrase from the concert.

A snatch of the tune played by the flute came back to him, with a familiar ring. He whistled it tentatively, then with more confidence. It sounded like the Reynolds’ automatics running through its frequency selection before giving service. The elevator stopped at the gym level and loaded on some people. They crowded into the elevator, greeted Cliff jerkily, and then stood humming and whistling and twitching with shame-faced grins, avoiding each other’s eyes. They all sounded like the Reynolds’ automatics, and all together they sounded like the bird cage at the zoo.

“What the devil,” muttered Cliff as the elevator loaded and unloaded another horde of grinning imbeciles at every level. “What’s going on!” Cliff muttered, beginning to see the scene through a red haze of temper. “What’s going on!”

At one G he got off and strode down the corridor, cooling himself off. By the time he reached the door marked Baker he had succeeded in putting it out of his mind. With a brief surge of happiness he came into the cool familiar rooms and called, “Mary.”

Bill, his ten-year-old, charged out of the kitchen with a half-eaten sandwich in his hand, shouting.