"The Diploids" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)
At the station the police informed him that they had not managed to locate Devon in his usual haunts, but they had alerted hotels and airlines to watch for him.
“If you set someone to follow me,” Mart said, “You’ll probably follow Devon too. He’s probably waiting for me somewhere along my usual route home. He tried to get me again today.” He began to have the futile feeling that the police were not particularly interested. The reply confirmed that feeling.
“We don’t do much body guarding anymore Mr. Dev—Mr. ah—Breden. We’re pretty busy, and there aren’t as many cops as there used to be. Automatic alarms take care of protection against burglary and housebreaking. Hypno-questioning has made it pretty difficult for professional crooks, because they find themselves on the suspects’ line-up every time there’s a crime in the city, and if they did it, they find themselves saying so. There’s no profit in the business, and there aren’t so many crooks as there used to be. We have things to do, but most cops are college trained specialists. We route the traffic of the city on all levels, on different loads and flow directions at different times of day; we calculate the maximum load limit of each route and how to reroute from it if it breaks down. We keep things moving and keep jams from piling up. We keep people from getting hurt around fires and power failures and broken water mains, things like that. The city is a big machine and we have to know where all the controls and keypoints are, and keep the wheels turning. You see—” he spread his hands—“we just don’t have any dumb lug with nothing better to do than guard one single man.”
It sounded like a speech he had made often to plaintive citizens. “You see our position?”
Doggedly Mart asked, “But you have some department to investigate shootings, don’t you?”
“Of course. We have Homicide and Crimes of Violence sections—mostly plainclothes investigation.” The officer smiled. “No matter how unprofitable it is, people still get mad enough to try to kill each other.”
“How do I attract its attention?” Mart asked, “By getting myself killed?”
The officer was amused and patronizing. “Don’t worry. If he’s as far gone as he sounds from your story we’ll probably pick him up tomorrow for taking off his clothes and sitting in the middle of Times Square blowing bubbles. He won’t be around long enough to bother you.”
Breden remembered Devon’s trim appearance, and his pride when apparently he had been sane. He had probably been close to paranoia for a long time, and vanity and surface self-esteem held him back from any conspicuous oddity. Probably he’d be witty and poised to the end, and go to the mental hospital with his sandals shined, his stickpin fastening his tossed-back rain-cape dashingly at the shoulder, his Phi Beta Kappa key impeccably in place and his wristwatch wound, the picture of a sane man being led away by lunatics.
EXCEPT for a small obstacle like trying to kill long range by television, Devon was his choice for the murderer-most-likely-to-succeed. If the police wouldn’t protect him, he would have to protect himself.
“I guess I’ll buy a gun.” He said it with malicious pleasure, knowing it was legal, but almost unheard of, for a man to carry a weapon for self-defense. Let them have their attention attracted by a gun battle in the streets, if nothing else would do it.
Mart was suddenly interested, remembering the spectacular police weapons in the hands of the screen heroes. He’d been watching them enviously for years. “How about a fizz pistol? I’ve always wondered if they really work like they do on teevee shows—”
“No! Those aren’t for civilians. You’d gas crowds at every shot. You know the penalty for unauthorized use of hypno-drugs—sixty-years-to-life, or even death. If I loaned a hypno-loaded pistol out to a civilian we’d both be behind bars before you were out the door. We can’t use them ourselves for questioning without being under bond and having three witnesses and a tape recording of every word.” He seemed genuinely upset. Apparently someone in the department had been rated down for misuse of hypno recently, for he paused and wiped his forehead with a paper handkerchief, and then tried a feeble smile. “No, all I’ve got for unauthorized types like yourself is a curare automatic. It won’t hurt anybody if you handle it carefully. Just aim low; try not to shoot anyone in the eye, huh?”
Mart walked out feeling better able to defend himself. In one pocket was a button push that would put a directional call for help on the radios of patrol wings, and in the other a small flat automatic that threw a hollow bullet filled with a harmless drug of the curare type that made its victim instantaneously limp and unable to move. Two shots would cause unconsciousness, and three, death. He had been warned to shoot for the legs where a puncture would cause little damage, and to stop when one bullet had penetrated.
Back on the subsurface belt conveyers he kept alert for the sight of a slim old man in an iridescent pearl grey suit. He would have to see Devon first or no weapon would help him…
In his apartment he called his parents, or the people whom he had always loved and thought of as his parents. They were retired on one of the Florida Keys. He asked, as tactfully as he could, about his birth.
“I’m sorry you found out about that, Marty,” said his father over the televiewer. He stood on the screen, tanned and healthy with wrinkles weathered deep into his face. A flaming orange shirt with fluorescent green seagulls flying across his chest put a strain on the screen’s color system, and the seagulls wavered from bluer to yellower green as the scanner struggled to approximate its shade. Through a window behind him was visible a view of deep blue sky and white sand. “We thought it might hurt your feelings, if you found out. But I guess you’re old enough to know that it doesn’t matter.”
“Could you tell me who were my real parents?”
“I don’t know, Marty—it never seemed important to us. The only one who knew was my brother Ralph—he helped arrange the adoption—but he wouldn’t say, except to say that they were good people. He’d promised not to tell I guess. He was a doctor, and doctors have to keep their secrets.”
“No reflection on you, Dad, but I’m curious. I’d like to find out. Could you tell me how to get in touch with Uncle Ralph?”
“Why, he died about two years ago. We mentioned it to you in a letter, but I guess you forgot.”
They talked pleasantly about other things for a while, and then he switched off thoughtfully, his problem coming up in his mind. Doctor Ralph Breden had known who his parents were, but he had been dead for two years.
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