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

“Let’s get back to the subject,” Cliff said grimly. “What about your duty to Pluto Station?”

“I’m on my vacation,” said Pierce. “Send to Earth for a psychiatrist.”

“I thought you were supposed to be sympathetic! Over a hundred per cent you said.”

“Eye sympathy only,” Pierce replied, a grin in his voice. “Besides, I’m still identified with the case in the stereo I’m watching, a very hard efficient character, not sympathetic at all.”



Cliff was silent a moment, then he said, “Your voice is coming through scrambled. Your beam must be out of alignment. Set the signal beam dial for control by the computer panel, and I’ll direct you.” Enigmatic scrapings and whirrings came over the thousands of mile beam to Pierce.

With a sigh he switched off the movie projector and moved to the control panel, where Cliff’s voice directed him to manipulate various dials.

“0. K. You’re all set now,” Cliff said. “Let’s check. You have the dome at translucent. Switch it to complete reflection on the sun side and transparency on the shadow side, turn on your overhead light and stand against the dark side.”

“What’s all this rigmarole?” Pierce grumbled. With the blind faith of a layman before the mysteries of machinery, he cut off the steady diffused glow of sunlight, and stood back against the dark side, watching the opposite wall. The last shreds of opacity faded and vanished like fog, and there was only black space flecked with the steady hot brightness of the distant stars. The bright shimmer of the parabolic signal-beam mirror took up most of the view. It was held out and up to the fullest extension of its metallic arm, so that it blocked out a six-foot circle of sky. Pierce looked at it with interest, wondering if he had adjusted it correctly. Its angle certainly looked peculiar.

As he looked, the irregular shimmering light began to confuse his eyes. He suddenly felt that there were cobwebs forming between himself and the reflector. Instinctively Pierce reached out a groping hand, squinting with the effort to see.

His eyes found the focus, and he saw his hand almost touching a human being!

The violence with which he yanked his hand back threw him momentarily off balance. He fought for equilibrium while his eyes and mind went through a wrenching series of adjustments to the sight of Cliff Baker, only three feet high, floating in the air within reach of his hand. The effort was too great. At the last split second he saved himself from an emotional shock wave by switching everything off. A blank unnatural calm descended, and he said:

“Hi, Cliff.”

The figure moved, extending a hand in a reluctant pleading gesture. Under a brilliant overhead light its expression looked strained and grim. “Pierce, Pierce, listen. This is trouble. You have to help.” There was no mistaking the sincerity of the appeal. To the trained perception of the psychologist the relative tension of every visible muscle was characteristic of tightly controlled desperation, but to the intensified responsiveness of his feelings the personality and attitude of Cliff Baker burned in like hot iron, shaping Pierce’s personality to its own image. Instinctively Pierce tried to escape the intolerable inpour of tension by crowding back against the wall, but the figure followed, expanding nightmarishly.

Then abruptly it vanished. It had been some sort of a stereo, of course. For a long moment the psychologist leaned against the curved wall with one hand guarding his face, waiting for his heart to find a steady beat again, and his thoughts to untangle.

“Over a hundred… a hundred per cent. Cliff, you don’t—What kind of a—”

“The projection?” The engineer’s voice spoke cheerfully from the radio. “Just one of the things you can do with a tight-beam parabolic reflector. Some of the boys thought it up to scare novices with, but I never thought it would be useful for anything!”

“Useful! Cliff!” Pierce protested. “You don’t know what you did!”

The engineer chuckled again. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said kindly. “I was trying something else. Eye sympathy you said— How do you feel about finding out what’s wrong at Station A?”

“How do you expect me to feel?” Pierce groaned. “Go on, tell me what to do!”

“Come find out what it is, and cure them. And work on Archy Reynolds first.”

There was a long pause, and when Pierce spoke, his feelings had changed again. “No, blast it! You can’t have me like that. I can’t just do what you want without thinking! It’s phony. No station full of people goes crazy together. I don’t believe it.”

“I saw it,” Cliff answered grimly.

“You say you saw it. And you force me to go to cure them —without explanation, without saying why it is important. What has it to do with Pluto Station? It isn’t like you to force anybody to do anything, Cliff. It’s not in your normal pattern! It isn’t like you to cover and avoid explanations.”

“What are you driving at?” Cliff said uneasily. “Let me tell you how to set the controls to head for Station A. You have to get here fast!”