"The Diploids" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)

That was before he knew her. His guard was all the way down now. There was no pretending and no caution when he talked with Nadine. “I’m not just being sensitive, Nade, I need jokes like that. I have to use them, and use them carefully. So they’ll get a lift and a laugh every time they notice a detail that’s different. That Mart! Always a character. Everything with him has to be original—if I don’t point it out and make jokes about it, sooner or later people begin to fidget and grow uncomfortable with an instinct of something being wrong. There are too many subtle physical oddities that disturb instinct with a feeling of misproportion. The only thing I can do to stop nervousness and tension from building up in them is to bring out my differences and display them like a collection of card tricks, so whenever they get that wrong feeling again, it’s part of the joke, just Mart being a character again.”


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II
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FOR a time Nadine sat back, something close to pity on her lovely face. Then she grinned and mimicked him from memory, with a proudly bent arm and clenched fist, demonstrating the muscles. “My own invention… ” she quoted words he had said, flexing her arm as she had seen him do, with a precise back and forth motion. “I’m the only genuinely self made man. Self made—self assembled—” a rusty hinge noise began in perfect time with the motion of the flexing arm, and she glanced at the arm with dismay and tried to stop it.

It kept moving stiffly, the rusty squeak growing louder. Hastily she grabbed it and brought it to a halt with her other hand, and then apologetically took an imaginary small object from her pocket. “Of course, I was pretty young at the time… might have slipped and gotten some parts in from the wrong stack… not enough light…” Nadine’s voice faded to an apologetic mumble as she carefully oiled her elbow with an imaginary oil can.

He was laughing. This was the first time he had seen anyone else do his act. He had seen clients laugh, but this was the first time he had seen what they were laughing at from the outside, and, well, it was funny.

She looked up from oiling her elbow, her eyes round and solemn. “You were saying?” she asked innocently, putting the invisible and imaginary oil can carefully back into her pocket, and then smiled. “I wondered about that end-man effect, Mart. It’s amusing and starts a talk off in a good mood, but it isn’t exactly like you, not when a person gets to know you better. Are you sure you need it?”

For an instant a crowd of painful incidents pushed against the unlocked door of memory. The time, when he was twelve, visiting the city and he had wandered into a strange neighborhood where the kids did not know him; the fight he had lost. And other times. “I’ve lived long enough to find out what happens if I don’t.”

“Are you sure that still applies?” she asked, her cool green eyes showing interest and concern.

Breden went on talking as if he hadn’t heard her question. His eyes held a faraway look as he remembered people’s past reactions to his difference.

“Take my face—ears set higher than normal and tipped back more—a difference easy to sense, hard to focus on. It makes my face look foreign, but what race? I can see the reaction to it even in the faces of people who pass on the sidewalk—the usual quick unseeing glance, then a double-take and a puzzled expression. Then they’re past and they forget about it. It doesn’t lead anywhere with adults. No one spits at me anymore or stops me to ask who the hell I am and why don’t I go back to wherever I came from, but the reaction is always the same. None of them can classify me. It must be a genuinely strong feeling of something alien.” He laughed suddenly and harshly, surprising himself with the sound. “By the law of democracy the majority is right. Maybe I am a Martian, if that’s what they think!”

She blew a plume of smoke reflectively, not commenting, then picked up the phone. “Let’s see if the police have our paranoid friend yet.”

“A Martian.” Saying that hateful word to Nadine made it sound like a joke and not like something that had been dreams and nightmares ever since he was a. kid and they had dubbed him “Martian” Breden, and he’d known something secret about himself that the others did not know.

Nadine’s voice, vibrant and soft. “Calling in for Paul Breden about a threat to him we reported… yes, did you? Oh… no… of course. Thank you.” She hung up thoughtfully, “You can switch off now.”

He switched off the scanner that had held connection with Devon’s blown televiewer. “What’d they say?”

“They didn’t get him. When they got there there was nothing but a smashed televiewer and the neighbor in the next room complaining about the racket— that must have been his gun.”

“Anything else?”

“They want you to drop down to the local station house today or tomorrow and swear out a complaint. I said yes.”

“Check.”

She smiled. “Let’s hope he sticks to trying to kill you by television.”

Then when he thought she had let it pass, Nadine looked at her long, gold-tinted nails, and asked, “What did you mean about being a Martian?”

She had known it was more than a gag.

He glanced at his appointment pad. “Could you spare me fifteen more minutes?”

She settled back and crossed her legs. “I’m listening.”