"Williamson, Jack - 01 - The Humanoids 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

The telephone interrupted him, and Ruth picked up the extension receiver on the table. Her upper lip whitened as she listened. "Your Mr. Armstrong," she said tonelessly. "He wants to know when you'll be down."
"Ten minutes, tell him." Forester pushed back his plate, glad to leave before there were any more tears. "As soon as I can dress."
"Darling! Don't-" She swallowed that sharp outcry, to murmur into the telephone and set it back mechanically. "I'm sorry for you, Clay." Dark with disappointment, her humid eyes followed him as he rose. "See you at lunch?"
"If I can manage," he agreed, half absently, already wondering again how any sort of child, lost outside the gate, could possibly threaten the project. "The cafeteria at two, if I can make it."
She said nothing else, and she was still sitting at the kitchen table when he had dressed, her shoulders stooped dejectedly in the new blue robe. She looked up at him as he hurried out, with a weary little nod, and then rose abruptly to begin clearing the table. For a moment he wanted to make some gesture of tenderness toward her, but that generous impulse was quickly swallowed in the unceasing crisis of the project. The supernova was gone long ago, faded to a telescopic puff of spreading nebular debris, but its harsh sudden rays had kindled something no man could stop. No matter how his ulcers acted up, the project was something he couldn't abandon.
A hurried three-minute walk, which he felt to be beneficial exercise, brought him to the gleaming steel mesh of the inner fence around the squat, ugly dome of the new concrete building on the north rim of the flat mountain top, which was now his fortress and his prison. Wondering again what that child could have wanted, he was sorry that he had to be so hard to see. He had often felt annoyed at the unrelenting efficiency of the Security Police, yet he realized that he had to be protected - from murderous Triplanet agents as well as from stray barefoot waifs.
For the supernova's light had made Starmont a guarded arsenal. Searchlights played across the tall fence and the uncompromising building inside by night, and armed guards watched always from the four corner towers. Only six men, beside Forester, were admitted inside the gate. Those picked technicians slept in the building, ate in their own mess hall, and came outside only in watchful twos.
Spiritless as a convict returning from parole, Forester signed his name in the pass book at the gate and let the guard pin on his numbered badge. Armstrong inspected him through a wicket at the steel door of the low fortress beyond, let him in, and locked the door again behind him.
"Glad to see you, Chief." The technician's voice was grave. "Something has us worried."
"That little girl?"
"Don't know anything about her." Armstrong shrugged. "But there's a peak on the search drums we thought you ought to see."
Curiously relieved to hear no more of that vanishing urchin, Forester followed him beyond the offices to the huge oval room beneath the heavy concrete dome, where his assistant, Dodge, was watching the search equipment of Project Lookout.
"See that, Chief?" Armstrong pointed at one sharp peak, just slightly higher than many others, in the jagged line a recording pen drew on a slowly turning drum. "Another neutrino burst. The plotted co-ordinates place it somewhere in Sector Vermilion. Think it's strong enough to be significant?"
Forester frowned at that uneven line. The nominal purpose of Project Lookout was to detect the neutrino bursts from any tests of atomic or rhodomagnetic weapons, on the hostile planets or near in space. Tiny rectangular spider webs of red-glowing wire revolved ceaselessly in the enormous search tubes towering beneath the center of the dome, sweeping space; and the black- cased directional trackers along the walls were clucking softly to each detected neutrino that triggered their relays, plotting its path.
The gray thickness of curbed concrete above was no barrier to incoming neutrinos, because no possible shielding - either here or around any Triplanet laboratory - could absorb those most tiny and elusive particles of disrupted matter. Fear of his own discovery betrayed to the enemy had driven Forester to design those tubes, after the computing section had solved problems enough to enable him to predict the rhodomagnetic effects of neutrino-decay. Each particle that passed those glowing grids wrote its history on the turning drums, revealing the direction of its origin.
But Forester stood scowling, now, at that slightly higher peak on the trace, uncertain what it meant. Because the detectors were too sensitive, neutrinos too penetrating, the range of the tubes too vast. Triplanet space fleets were always maneuvering suspiciously in Sector Vermilion, but that was also the direction of the vanished supernova, whose spreading flood of natural neutrinos, a little slower than light, had not yet reached a crest.
"Well, Chief?"
"We had better report it," Forester decided. "That one burst isn't strong enough to be significant, but look at these." His nervous forefinger followed the line on the drum. "Three other peaks almost as high, made earlier. Three and a half hours ago, seven, and ten and a half. That interval happens to be the length of a watch in the Triplanet fleets. They may be testing something, using the supernova spray for a screen."
"Maybe," Armstrong said. "But we've picked up stronger bursts that you said were natural peaks in the supernova spray."
That was true, Forester knew, and part of the reason for his ulcers. He felt incompetent to bear his heavy responsibilities here, because all his training had been for the cautiously tentative weighing and balancing of pure research, not for any decisive action.
"We can't be sure," he agreed uncomfortably. "That regularity may be just coincidence, but it's too alarming to be ignored." He dictated a brief bulletin for Armstrong to encode and put on the teleprinter for the Defense Authority. "I'm going down to work in the lower project," he added. "Call me if anything breaks."
He hurried back to his own silent office, and through it into the innocent-seeming cloakroom beyond. Locking the door behind him, he lifted a mirror to punch a hidden button. The cloakroom dropped, a disguised elevator.
For Project Lookout, however vital the watch it kept, was also a blind for something more important. The Geiger counters in the new military satellite stations above the atmosphere kept a wider watch against enemy weapons; the graver function of the search installation was to hide the deeper secret of Project Thunderbolt.
Project Thunderbolt had sprung from the supernova's explosion. It was the chief cause of Forester's breaking health, and the reason he had no time to go with Ruth to Dr. Pitcher. It was a weapon - of the last, most desperate resort. Only eight other men shared with him the killing burden of its secret. Six were the youthful technicians, Armstrong and Dodge and the rest, physically hard and mentally keen, picked and trained for their appalling duty. The other two were the defense minister and the world president.
And Frank Ironsmith?
Forester frowned, going down in the elevator, puzzled and disturbed when he thought of Ironsmith's call about that urchin at the gate. Because Ironsmith's job was in the computing section, he had no legitimate knowledge of the project, and its security was no concern of his.
If that indolent clerk had ever drawn any unwise conclusions from the problems brought for him to solve, however, he had kept them to himself. Exploring his past, in their routine loyalty check, the Security Police had found no cause for suspicion, and Forester could see no reason to mistrust him now.
The secret of the lower project had been efficiently kept, he assured himself. That hidden elevator dropped him a hundred feet, to a concrete vault in the heart of the mountain. All the blasting and construction had been done by his own technicians, and all supplies were delivered to the less important project above, which was supported by unaudited grants of discretionary emergency funds. Not even Ironsmith could know anything about it.
Yet something tightened Forester's stomach muscles with a faint apprehension, now, as he hurried out of the elevator and along the narrow tunnel to the vault. Snapping on the lights, he peered alertly about the launching station for anything wrong.
The launching tube ran up through the search building, disguised as a ventilator shaft, the gleaming breech mechanism open now and ready. His searching eyes moved to the missiles racked beneath it. They were just as he had left them, and a sense of their supreme deadliness lessened his unease. Turning to the machine shop beside the station, he paused before the newly assembled weapon on a bench there, whose final delicate adjustments had kept him so late last night. Although Armstrong and the others were trained to launch these most terrible machines and the big sealed safe behind him held all the specifications - if some Triplanet assassin should succeed - he had dared trust no other with all the details of war head, drive, and pilot.
Stroking the cold sleekness of the dural case, he couldn't help feeling a creative pride in this thing he had made. Slim and tapered and beautiful with precision machining, it was smaller than any of the old atomic weapons, but heavy with an entirely different order of destruction. Its warhead, smaller than his skinny fist, was designed to shatter a planet. Its rhodomagnetic drive could far exceed the speed of light, and the relay grid of the auto-pilot invested it with a ruthless mechanical intelligence.
Forester picked up his jewelers' loupe and bent to open the inspection plate above the pilot again, afraid he had somehow failed to set the safety keys to prevent any detonation before the functioning of the drive had released them. Such a failure could turn Starmont into a small supernova; the fear of it forever harried his sleep, and ate his ulcers deeper.
He found the keys properly set, but that somehow failed to quiet his shapeless anxiety. Closing the plate again, he wished that he had been a different sort of man, better fitted to carry the lives of planets in his hands. He knew generals and politicians who actually seemed to envy the less appalling powers they believed him to hold, but no such man, he supposed, could have read the clue in the supernova's spectrum.
"Please, mister!"
The child spoke to him timidly as he turned from the missile. She was coming out of the narrow passage from the elevator, walking on bare silent feet. One grimy paw was deep in the pocket of her yellow dress, and she was trembling as if to some desperate resolution, her voice dry with fright.
"Please - are you Dr. Forester?"



Chapter FIVE

FORESTER STARTED to an incredulous alarm. His jewelers' lens fell and clattered with a shocking sound on the steel floor, and rolled through a ladder well down into the power plant on the level below. Because no intruder should be here. Even the six technicians were not allowed to enter this vault except on duty, in twos to watch each other. He stumbled back against the bench, gasping sharply:
"How did you get in?"
He believed himself a mild and kindly man. His mirror showed the perpetual frown that worry had etched into his thin features, but he was still a wistful, harmless-seeming gnome of a man, slight and stooped and brown. He felt a flicker of hurt astonishment at the child's voiceless fear of him, before shocked dismay made him rasp again.
"Who let you down here?"
His voice went up, too shrill. For security and peace had been swept out of his life, by the very being of Project Thunderbolt. Because the holder of such a weapon had to be forever ready to use it instantly, or else to perish by it, this silent vault had become his last refuge from fear, where he caught uneasy naps on a cot beside the launching station and lived on coffee and hurried sandwiches and waited for the teleprinters to thump out orders to strike. Now the child's intrusion had demolished even this uncertain sanctuary.
"Nobody-" She stammered and trembled and gulped. Big tears started down her pinched cheeks, and she dropped a handful of yellow-flowered weeds to wipe them away with a grimy fist. "Please don't be mad, mister," she whispered. "Nobody let me in."
Sensitive to pollens, Forester sneezed to the rank odor of the blooms. Shrinking back from him, as if that had been a threatening gesture, the child began to cry.
"Mr. W-White said you wouldn't l-like me, mister," she sobbed faintly. "But he said you'd have to l-listen to us, if I came to see you here."
Forester had seen Triplanet agents, trapped and waiting for the firing squad. He suffered nightmares, in which he thought Project Thunderbolt had already been betrayed. But this shivering, big-eyed waif surely didn't look as if she had come to kill him, or even to loot the safe behind him, and he tried to soften the rasping anger in his voice.