"The Diploids" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)
She interrupted, restraining a knife-edge of impatient logic. “No other known species of mankind surviving. But paleontologists have already dug up almost a hundred extinct species. Apparently the conditions were so favorable back in the early days that every species of tarsier, monkey, lemur, baboon and gorilla existing started evolving an offshoot branch of man, and homo sap got there firstus with the mostus and wiped the others out. But perhaps he hasn’t wiped all the others out. There may be a few small tribes of a different kind still surviving in the hills and jungles.”
He had wanted to meet and know people like himself, but this presented only a depressing vision of a patent lawyer foolishly out of place on some distant mountainside, trying to communicate in six-fingered sign language to a bunch of frightened six-fingered savages.
“If there are any people like myself around,” he said emphatically, “they’ll be running things.”
“Like that, eh?” she looked him up and down, measuring him for a straight-jacket. “The diploid conspiracy?”
“Like that,” he snapped, uneasily defiant.
She stood up and touched her fingers to the top of his desk, looking at him with irritated affection. “Let’s bring it down to common sense, Mart, If there’s any group running things, it’s obviously a group of low grade imbeciles. The world has never been in such a mess. We’ve been walking the plank towards an atomic blow-up for fifty years, and the longer we take to get there, the bigger the blow. Or put it this way… granted your I.Q. is high, and maybe high I.Q. goes with six fingers—are you running things? There are a million people every bit as intelligent as ourselves. We meet them every day in this line of work. Are they controlling the world?” Her vehemence grew, adding force to her words and brightness to her eyes. “Now add them up. If all the political experts, intellectuals, economists, sociologists and general geniuses who ought to know how to run things better, plus all their brains, success, money and power can’t get control of what’s going on—then a hypothetical handful of conspiring three-eyes has about as much chance of seizing power as a package of Jello has of stiffening up the English Channel for dessert!”
He grinned and cowered down behind his desk. “Cease fire! You’re right, kamerad.”
She smiled, holding out her hand. “All right, Mart. The war’s over. Now I have to get back to work.”
He took her hand, standing up. “Sorry you can’t stay.”
“I’m sorry too. We had a nice lunch.” She looked at him slantwise from under her long dark lashes, suddenly provocatively helpless and appealing. “Remember, any time you want someone to talk to while you’re being used for a target, or any time you feel confessional and want to tell someone about a few extra things like a third arm, or how you walk through walls…”
“I’ll call on you.” He finished the sentence as she let it trail off wistfully, and he hustled her toward the door, grinning. She had taken it the way he had hoped she would, as something casual. There was no discernible difference in the easy relationship they had established.
She poked her lovely head back in a moment after he had closed the door after her. “If you find out that there really is a Martian conspiracy, tell me so I can help. I like conspiracies.”
Suddenly fear and loneliness came again. “I like conspiracies,” she had said. His spirits sank. But what of Martians, of freaks. How could she like a freak? Perhaps it was all pretense. The old wave of doubts assailed him. A spasm clenched somewhere in his chest and he rose trying to think of something to say—some question that would somehow bring an answer he could trust.
Nadine stood in the doorway in her green suit, looking at him, seeing something in his expression. She came back into the office and put her hand on his arm, looking up into his face with an intent and puzzled gaze. Something changed in the air between them. He felt the warmth of her hand on his arm as if it were fusing into his body, as if in some subtle way their bloodstreams had grown into one. For a long joined moment they stood in silence, their gazes locked together, and then she said in an oddly quiet voice, “Well, there’s work.”
With an effort they stepped away from each other. “I’ll see you, Nade,” he said as she walked away.
“Yes,” she said, for he had stated something that had to happen. They could not help but see each other. The thought of remaining apart had become an impossible, ridiculous thought.
He had been given his answer, and it was magnificently more than he had hoped for..
He postponed thinking on the subject, letting it remain in the back of his mind as a source of warmth and happiness, and got down to his delayed stack of work. An interview with a client was due in five minutes and he had to brief up on the legal twists he was planning to use to get the man’s patent through.
Concentration shut out from his universe everything but patents and technical details for the time that was necessary. But before the man came in, Mart lifted his head and let his mind range back over the discussion, just once. Maybe there was some explanation for his differences, some pleasant explanation that he could tell Nadine with pride. Mart Breden wants to know where he came from, what his real name is, and why he has an extra finger on each hand and an extra eye in the back of his head. Put that way, it hardly seemed too much to ask.
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III
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ON THE way over to the police station at four thirty he heard a shot. It came from God knows where, and it missed, but there was no telling how close it had come. He didn’t stop to investigate; he merely hurried his stride down into the nearest belt entrance and merged himself into the crowd. No one turned to see what the sound was. There was enough noise in the quiet city in the first home-going rush to partially muffle it and make it seem like a normal street sound, and there was no reason for anyone else to think of a possibility of shots. Violence was too unusual to be expected.
Stepping on a belt the crowd dispersed over the local and express strips, and for a moment Mart was exposed again before the belt carried him out of shot range of the platform. There was no shot, but he was sweating as he found a chair and sat down. It would be easy to be killed that way. The unwary passers-by of the city could not defend him; they simply provided an innocent camouflage and ambush from which Devon could take easy aim without being noticed.
The rest of the way over he was wary and alert, but there were no more shots.
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