"Russell, Eric Frank - Mindwarpers-V1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russell Eric Frank)

"I'm not aware of it," said Berg, defensively.
"You're aware of it now because I've just told you. Sure you feel all right?"
"There's nothing the matter with me," Berg asserted. "A fellow doesn't have to yap his head off all the time."
"Not saying he does."
"Okay, then. I'll talk when I feel like it and keep shut when I feel like it."
After that the silence increased. On his last day at the plant Berg uttered not a word other than those strictly necessary. The next day he failed to appear. In the mid afternoon Bransome was summoned to Laidler's office. Laidler greeted him with a frown, pointed to a chair.
"Sit down. You work along with Arnold Berg, don't you?"
"That's right."
"Are you particularly friendly with him?"
"Friendly enough but I wouldn't say especially so."
"What d'you mean by that?"
"Bransome and Berg Incorporated is what the others jokingly call us," Bransome explained. "We get on very well together at our work. I understand him and he understands me. Each knows he can depend upon the other. As partners in work we suit each other topnotch-but that's all it amounts to."
"Purely an industrial relationship?"
"Yes."
"You have never extended it into private life?"
"No. Outside of our work we had little in common."
"Humph!" Laidler was disappointed. "He hasn't reported today. He hasn't applied for official leave. Have you any idea why he's not here?"
"Sorry, I haven't. Yesterday he said nothing to indicate that he might not turn up. Maybe he's ill."
"Doesn't seem so," said Laidler. "We've had no medical certificate from him."
"There hasn't been much time for that. If one has been mailed today you wouldn't get it until tomorrow."
"He could have phoned," Laidler insisted. "He knows how to use a telephone. He's grown up now and has the right to wash his own neck. Or if he's bedbound somewhere he could have got someone to phone for him."
"Perhaps he's been rushed to the hospital in no condition to give orders or make requests," Bransome suggested. "That does happen to some people occasionally. Anyway, the telephone operates both ways. If you were to call him-"
"A most ingenious idea. It does you credit." Laidler sniffed disdainfully. "We called his number a couple of hours ago. No answer. We called a neighbor who went upstairs and hammered on the door of his apartment. No reply. The neighbor got the super to open up with his master key. They had a look inside. Nobody there. The apartment is undisturbed and nothing looks wrong. The super doesn't know what time Berg went out or, for the matter of that, whether he came home last night." He rubbed his chin, mused a bit. "Berg's a divorcee. Do you know if he has a girl friend currently?"
Bransome thought back. "A few times he's mentioned meeting some girl he liked. About four or five in all. But his interest didn't seem to be more than casual. As far as I know he didn't pursue them or go steady with any of them. He was rather a cold fish in his attitude toward women; most of them sensed it and reciprocated."
"In that case it doesn't seem likely that he s overslept in a love-nest." Laidler thought again and added, "Unless he has resumed relations with his former wife."
"I doubt it."
"Has he mentioned her of late?"
"No. I don't think he has given her a thought for several years. According to him they were hopelessly incompatible but didn't realize it until after marriage. She wanted passion and he wanted peace. She called it mental cruelty and heaved him overboard. A couple of years afterward she married again."
"His personal record shows that he has no children. He has named his mother as next of kin. She's eighty years old."
"Perhaps she has cracked up and he's rushed to her bedside," Bransome suggested.
"As I said before, he's had all day to phone and tell us. He hasn't phoned. Moreover, there's nothing wrong with his mother. We checked on that a short time ago."
"Then I can't help you any further."
"One last question," persisted Laidler. "Do you know of anyone else in this plant who might be well-informed about Berg's private life? Anyone who shares his tastes and hobbies? Anyone who might have gone around with him evenings and weekends?"
"Sorry, I don't. Berg wasn't unsociable but he wasn't gregarious either. Seemed satisfied with his own company outside of working hours. I've always regarded him as a very self-contained kind of individual."
"Well, if he walks in tomorrow, wearing a big, fat grin, he'll need all his self-containment, I can tell you. He'll be on the carpet for playing hookey without telling anyone. It's against the rules and it gives us trouble. Rules aren't made to be broken-and we don't like trouble." He eyed Bransome with irritated authority and ended, "If he fails to reappear and if you should hear about him from any source whatever, it will be your duty to inform me at once."
"I'll do that," Bransome promised.
Leaving the office, he returned to the green area, his mind mulling the subject of Berg. Should he have told Laidler about Berg's recent surliness? Of what use if he had? He could not offer an explanation for it; he couldn't imagine a reason except, perhaps, that all unwittingly he had done something or said something that had upset Berg. But most definitely Berg was not the type to nurse a grievance in silence. Even less was he the kind to spend a day sulking in some hiding-place, like a peevish child.
Pondering these matters, he remembered Berg's odd remark of two months ago, "Someday I may vanish myself-and make good as a strip-teaser." Had that been an idle comment or did it have a hidden significance? In the latter case, what had Berg meant by "strip-teaser"? There was no way of telling.
"To blazes with it!" said Bransome to himself. "I've other things to worry about. Anyway, he's sure to turn up tomorrow with a plausible excuse."
But Berg did not appear next day or any day thereafter. He had gone for keeps.


TWO:
In the next couple of months three more top-graders took their departure in circumstances that could and should have set all the alarm-bells ringing-but didn't. One, like Berg, lit out for the never-never land, apparently on a whim. The other two left more formally after offering weak, unconvincing excuses that served only to arouse the ire of Bates and Laidler. The latter felt impotent to do anything about it but gripe. In a free country a man makes his own moves to suit himself without being arrested and imprisoned for incomplete candidness and without being compelled to undergo a prefrontal lobotomy.
Then came the turn of Richard Bransome. Appropriately enough, the world fell about his ears on Friday the Thirteenth. Up to then it had been a pleasant, comfortable world despite its shortcomings. There had been, on occasion, routine and boredom, rivalries and fears, the thousand and one petty pinpricks such as most men have to endure. But life had been lived, a life full of those little taken-for-granted items that are never fully appreciated until suddenly they vanish forever.
In the morning the regular departure of the 8:10 train. The same faces in the same seats, the same rustle of unfolding newspapers and low mutter of conversation. Or in the evening, the anticipatory homecoming along a tree-lined avenue where always some neighbor was polishing a car or cutting a lawn. The pup gamboling around him on the front path. Dorothy's face, flushed with kitchen-heat, smiling a welcome while the two kids hung from his wrists and demanded that he rotate and make carnival noises.
All these petty but precious treasures that made each day: at one stroke they lost solidity, actuality, realness. They blurred and went right out of focus, fading like reluctant ghosts undecided whether to stay or go. They retreated from him, leaving him in an awful mental solitude. He made a frantic grasp at them with all the desire of his shocked mind and momentarily they came back-only to fade away again.
Words started it, plain, ordinary words in an overheard conversation. He was homeward bound on a cool evening that held first hint of coming winter. Thin streamers of mist crawled through the growing dark. As always, he had to change trains and wait twelve minutes for the connection. Following his long-established habit, he went to the snack bar for coffee. He sat at the counter, on the right-hand stool, and gave the order he'd given times without number.
"Coffee, black."
Nearby two men sat nursing cups of coffee and talking in desultory manner. They looked like long-distance night truckers soon to go on duty. One of them had a peculiar drawling accent that Bransome could not identify.