"Williamson, Jack - 01 - The Humanoids 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)
Shuddering to the cold sea wind, still desperately waving his hat, Forester scrambled ahead of Ironsmith across the great wet stones of the broken causeway. He was breathless when they came back to the car, and cold with sweat from something else than running.
"You had us worried, sir," Dodge called gratefully from beside the tripod in the ditch. "That hour was almost up."
Turning to peer uneasily back at the old round tower, dark in the driving mist, Forester told him to unload the launcher and test the mechanism. He obeyed, and shouted a startled curse. His jaw dropped when Ironsmith silently handed him the missing firing link.
"Don't ask questions now." Forester clung weakly to the door of the car. "Just stow your gear, and let's get back to Starmount. Because I think the project is going to be alerted. Soon!"
He didn't feel like driving. Armstrong took the wheel, and he sat with Ironsmith and the folded tripod behind. Chilled, and stiff with fatigue, and vaguely ill from the motion of the car, he studied Ironsmith uneasily. The clerk sat comfortably sprawled with his feet propped on the launcher tube, watching the landscape with a casual interest until they left the mountains and dropped back to the brown monotony of the desert, when he stretched and closed his eyes and went to sleep. Tortured with apprehensive uncertainties, Forester jogged him back to a quiet alertness.
"I'm a physicist." Hoarse with worry, Forester felt that he had to talk. "I'm used to limiting my inquiries to phenomena that are reproducible at will, by mechanical means, under strict controls. This psychic stuff - I just don't want to believe it."
"I understand." Ironsmith nodded cheerfully. "I recall a paper you wrote to attack the evidence for extraphysical action. You were pretty violent."
"Just a lab report," Forester protested defensively. "You see, Ruth's instrument firm had supplied equipment for some crackpot experiment. There were dice in a little frame that tilted to roll them, mechanically, making the conditions for each fall identical. The experimenter claimed that he could control the fall mentally, and I thought Ruth was taking him too seriously. I ordered a duplicate frame and tried to repeat the experiment - just to show her that it was all nonsense. And my results showed a curve of random distributions."
"Which itself was a pretty good proof of extraphysical action." Grinning quizzically at his startled gape, the clerk added innocently, "Because that was what you wanted. Any sort of extraphysical research, don't you see, requires a slight modification in the methods of classical physics. The experimenter is also a part of the experiment. Your negative results were a logical outcome of your negative purpose."
Forester stared, as if discovering a stranger. Ironsmith had never seemed much more than a convenient accessory to the electronic calculators, serenely content with his insignificant job. He had annoyed Forester with his careless dress and his chewing gum and his commonplace friends. He had always showed an irritating irreverence for the established aristocracy of scholarship, and Forester was startled into silence, now, by his unexpected cogency.
"Purpose is the key," he went on casually. "But Mark White has too much of the wrong sort - he's looking for weapons, instead of the truth. That's why I think he'll never learn enough to control those mechanicals. He hates them too hard."
"But he has reasons." Resentment of the clerk's pleasant calm spurred Forester to a harsh protest. "He knows the humanoids, remember, and we don't. I intend making a full report of his warning to the Defense Authority. Whatever the circumstances, our military forces ought to be alerted against any such planned invasion."
"I'd think that over, sir." Ironsmith shook his head. "Because this whole affair would look a little odd, don't you realize, to anybody who wasn't on the spot. You'll have to admit that our own testimony wouldn't sound very impressive to a military commission, what with White's rather childish theatrics and the trampish look of his associates."
His boyish face brightened.
"Besides, sir, I think these new mechanicals might turn out to be very useful. For all White told us, I still can't see any real reason to hate or fear them. If they can actually abolish war, we need them now. Don't you think so, sir?"
Forester didn't, but the quiet protest recalled that bleak doubt in Armstrong's eyes. Reflecting that the members of the Defense Authority might prove equally incredulous, he decided to wait for better evidence.
It was twilight when the car labored up the narrow road from the desert, to the guarded fences and flood-lit buildings of Starmont. Groggy with fatigue, Forester felt a pang of envy when Ironsmith swung easily out as they stopped at the inner gate, to step easily on his bicycle and pedal briskly off toward the computing section, whistling as he went.
The Red Alert came at midnight, on the tight-beam teleprinter. That warning signal meant that hostile action from the Triplanet Powers had been detected. It called for the staff of Project Thunderbolt to arm two missiles against each of the enemy planets, and stand by for the final order to end three worlds.
A second message, five minutes later, called Forester himself to the capital for an emergency meeting of the Defense Authority. He took off at once, with no time even for a word to Ruth. His official aircraft landed in cold rain at dawn on a military field, and a waiting staff car took him into a guarded tunnel in the face of a hill.
Deep in the underground sites which men had dug in their frantic search for vanished safety, he came at last into a narrow room of gray concrete, and took his place at the foot of a green- covered table to wait for the meeting. He hadn't been able to sleep on the plane, tossed with nocturnal thunderstorms along an occluded front. The flight lunch he had shared with the crew felt heavy on his stomach, and he needed a dose of bicarbonate. Clammy in his travel-wrinkled clothing, he sat longing for the dry warmth of Starmont and trying not to think of anything else. He blinked and started when he saw Mason Horn.
The secret agent came in through another guarded door, walking between two armed lieutenants of the Security Police. Forester rose eagerly to call out his greeting, but Horn answered with only a stiff little nod, and one of the lieutenants beckoned Forester back. They waited, watchfully apart at the end of that long gray room. Horn carried a small brown leather case, chained to his left wrist. Sinking back into his chair, Forester felt a new chill in the damp blast from a fan somewhere behind him. He knew what that case must contain, and the knowledge was monstrous.
The nearer lieutenant saw his eyes on the case, and frowned at him sharply. Starting again, he shifted his gaze and tried to wipe the stickiness out of his palms. The silent weight of rock above began to give him a smothered feeling, and a faint reek of drying paint sharpened his physical unease. He slumped in his chair, and straightened again when the high military and political officials who formed the Defense Authority began to arrive, surrounded by hushed and nervous satellites.
The aged world president entered at last, leaning on the arm of his solicitous military aide, one Major Steel. Calling out quavering greetings to a few of his cronies, he shuffled to his big chair at the end of the table. Steel helped him to sit, and he waited for the dapper little officer to prompt him before he spoke to the hushed meeting.
"Gentlemen, I've bad news for you." His voice faltered thinly. "Mr. Mason Horn will tell you what it is."
"This is the bad news." His voice was as blandly casual as if he had been offering a chic new number in brown suede for the spring market. "I brought it back from a Triplanet arsenal in Sector Vermilion. The president has instructed me not to reveal the technical specifications. I'm only to tell you what it can do."
The men around that long, bright-lit table, most of them withered with years and all tight-faced with anxiety, leaned silently to watch as Horn's plump, careful fingers unscrewed the flat-ended metal egg into two parts and set them on the table. Cold light glittered on small knurled metal knobs and graduated scales.
"Huh!" The chief of staff sniffed scornfully. "Is that all?"
"It's enough, sir." Horn gave him a brief, amiable smile, as if about to explain the irresistible sales appeal of a plastic evening sandal. "Actually, the device itself is only a sort of fuse. The explosive charge is formed by any matter which happens to be near. The atoms aren't just fissioned, but converted entirely to free energy. This little knob sets the radius of detonation - anywhere from zero to twelve yards."
When his smooth voice stopped, an appalled silence filled that buried room. Men leaned to stare with a sick, slack-jawed fascination at the tiny machine on the table. The muted drone of the ventilator fan became an unpleasant roaring, and the reek of paint seemed stronger. Forester sat shivering, trying not to be ill.
"One of these could finish us." With a fumbling care, Mason Horn began screwing the two small sections back together. "If you want to estimate its effectiveness for yourselves, convert the cubic yards of soil and rock to tons, and then multiply the answer by one thousand. That will give you the approximate equivalent in plutonium."
He paused, carefully locking the chain again.
"The Triplanet Powers have now had more than two years to plant these where they want them," he added quietly. "They may have been dropped into our seas, or sowed across the polar caps, or perhaps even smuggled into this very site. Placed in advance, they can be detonated by remote control, by a time mechanism, or even by the penetrating radiation from a mass-explosion on another planet. No defense is possible, and we cannot attack, not even with similar weapons, without destroying ourselves."
"I don't see that." The chief of staff cleared his throat, with a stern authority. "When they discover that you have escaped with this device, they will assume that we have also duplicated it successfully. Perhaps we should plant the information with one of our double agents - to create the fear of retaliation, and so make it impossible for them to strike."
"I'm afraid it wouldn't work out that way, sir." Horn frowned, as if in regretful disapproval of the shoddy workmanship of some competing line. "Because such absolute weapons create their own explosive psychology. I think it would be foolish to reveal that we have successfully stolen this weapon, because I saw symptoms enough of official hysteria in the enemy governments to convince me that we should be prepared to die on the instant they discover the loss. That delicate situation makes me doubt the wisdom of my whole mission, sir."
And Horn stepped respectfully back, mopping at his plump red face and waiting as if to write up an order for shoes. The chief of staff scowled at him, and abruptly sat down, seeming to say with his indignant shrug that such unmilitary men, with their unbelievable new weapons and their shocking ignorance of discipline, had ruined all his old pleasure in the ancient calling of war.
Wiping his palms again, Forester shook his head at the mute query on the bleak gray face of the minister of defense. Project Thunderbolt was ready. The war heads of his own long self-guided missiles, not far different from Mason Horn's prize, had a detonation radius of forty yards. Once the launching order was given, nothing could save the hostile planets. But it was too late to launch them now, if their blasts would also trigger enemy detonators planted here.
The old president was turning anxiously to his aide, with some question in his watery eyes. Nodding briskly, little Major Steel helped him to his feet. Forester tried to conceal a sharp disapproval, recalling the legends of Steel's phenomenal memory and efficiency, and mistrusting his undue influence.
"An unpleasant situation, gentlemen." Clutching the edge of the table with trembling yellow hands, the president cleared his throat uncertainly. "It first appeared to offer us only the hard choice of war without hope, or peace without freedom. However-" Gasping breathlessly, he gulped water the little officer held to his lips. "However, Major Steel has revealed a third alternative."
Chapter NINE
THAT QUAVERED phrase took Forester's breath. He remembered a pale tattered man, squatting by a smoky fire and peering as if at distant things with a strange alertness. Something drummed in his ears, and the old leader's faltering voice seemed far away.
"-quite a shock to me, as you will soon understand." The president nodded his cadaverous head at the trim little officer, who stood motionless at attention, peering fixedly down the table. "But the alternative he offers has ended a nightmare for me, and I urge you to accept his advice without question."
He coughed, leaning weakly on the table, and waited for the brisk little aide to hold the glass for him to drink again.
"Gentlemen, I believe in Major Steel." He turned to smile at the officer with a vague gratitude. "He has been my efficient right hand for the past ten years, and I feel that we can trust him now. He has brought us an amazing escape from both death and slavery. But I'm going to let him state the facts, with only this one word of warning - he is not a human being."
Forester knew that he shouldn't have been surprised. Mark White had tried to prepare him for this moment, and he had always mistrusted the superhuman energy and competence of the president's aide. Yet, as he watched the human-seeming thing at the other end of the long green table now, something made him shudder. Something cold brushed up his spine, and something took his breath.
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