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

"But how did you get past the guards?"
"Mr. White sent me." Shyly, she offered him a thin gray card. "With this."
Sneezing again, Forester kicked away the weeds, and took the finger-smudged card. His breath went out as he read the brief message on it, boldly inked:

Clay Forester:
Sharing your concern for the People of these endangered planets, we can trade distressing and vital information for the aid we need from you. If you want to know how Jane Carter reached you, come alone to the old Dragonrock Light, or bring Frank Ironsmith - we trust nobody else.
Mark White, Philosopher

Hearing the child's bare feet pattering on the steel floor, he looked up in time to see her running back down the tunnel to the elevator. He darted after her, shouting at her to wait, but the door closed in his face and a green arrow lit to show that the disguised cage was going up.
Shaken with dismay, Forester ran back to his desk in the shop to telephone the upper project. Armstrong had seen no intruders, certainly no small girl in a yellow dress, but he promised to meet the rising elevator and hold anybody in it. Forester waited an agonized three minutes, and started nervously when the telephone rang again. Armstrong's voice seemed oddly constrained.
"Well, Chief, we unlocked the door and searched the elevator."
"Did you catch her?"
"No, Chief," Armstrong said slowly. "There wasn't anybody in it."
"But I saw her go in." Forester tried to hold down his voice. "There isn't any other landing, and the door can't open between stops. She had to be in the elevator."
"She wasn't," Armstrong said. "Nobody was."
Forester considered himself a man of reason. Technological marvels no longer astonished him, but he preferred to ignore any stray bits of experience which refused too stubbornly to fit the ordered pattern of physics. The planet-shattering missiles of the project no longer aroused any particular wonder in him, because they were part of the same pattern.
But the urchin's visit wasn't.
The grotesque impossibility of her coming and going left him shuddering. Restraining himself from starting up the escape ladder beyond the emergency door, he kept his numb forefinger on the elevator button. The cage came back at last, and he went up to join the two technicians, greeting them with a hoarse-voiced demand.
"Have you caught her yet?"
Staring oddly, Armstrong shook his head. "Sir, there has been no outsider here."
The man's voice was too courteous, too flatly formal, his level gaze too penetrating. Forester felt a sudden sickness. Sneezing again, from his allergy to those weeds the child had dropped, he said flatly:
"Somebody brought that elevator up."
"Sir, nobody went down." Armstrong kept on staring. "And nobody came up."
"But she was - down there," Forester croaked. These men knew the intolerable strain upon him always. Perhaps it wasn't strange for them to think that he had cracked, but he insisted huskily, "Look, Armstrong. I'm sane - yet."
"I hope you are, sir." But the man's bleak eyes were unconvinced. "We've searched the place and phoned the guard detachments," he reported stiffly. "There is nobody inside except the staff. Nobody but you has been admitted through our gate today." He glanced behind him uneasily. "The only odd thing is that call from Mr. Ironsmith."
"He called me, too" - Forester tried to keep his voice from trembling - "about the child at the gate, but that doesn't explain how she got inside."
"Ironsmith said she had some message-"
"She did." Forester displayed the gray card, soiled from Jane Carter's fingers. The two men studied it silently, and he saw the hard suspicion fade from Armstrong's eyes.
"Sorry, sir!"
"Can't blame you." Feebly, Forester answered his apologetic grin. "Now we can get at the problem."
They all went down again, to search the vault, but they found no intruder there. The great safe was still intact, plastered with unbroken seals. The long missiles lay safe in the racks. But Forester gathered up the weeds the child had dropped, frowning at him dazedly.
"This math expert," Armstrong said. "How does he come in?"
"We'll find out."
Picking up the desk telephone, Forester told Ironsmith to meet him at the inside gate, right now. They hurried silently back to the upper project, and out to the gate. Two guards waited for each of them to sign the pass book and surrender his badges, and finally let them outside to meet Ironsmith, who was already waiting for them, leaning on his rusty bicycle and calmly chewing gum. Forester asked him harshly:
"What about this little girl?"
"Who?" Ironsmith's easy grin had faded when he saw their tight faces, and now his gray eyes widened. "Did Jane Carter come back again?"
Narrowly watching that open, boyish face, Forester realized suddenly how many secrets he had carried to the computing section. He still couldn't quite believe that Ironsmith was a Triplanet agent, but a sudden sick panic tightened his voice.
"All right?" he rasped. "Who is Jane Carter?"
"I never saw her before-" Seeing the drooping weeds in Forester's hand, Ironsmith started slightly. "Did she leave those?" he whispered. "I saw her picking them, just outside the main gate, when I was riding down to meet her."
Searching his pink, bewildered face, Forester handed him the gray card. He read it silently, and shook his sandy head. In a flat, accusing voice, Forester said:
"What I want to know is why you called me about her."
"Just because I couldn't understand how she went away," Ironsmith answered innocently. Handing back the gray card, he added quietly, "I'll go with you to Dragonrock Light."
"No, Chief!" Armstrong protested instantly. "Let the Security Police look for this mysterious Mr. White. Our job is here, and not playing cloak-and-dagger games with Triplanet spies." A sudden apprehension shook his voice. "Sir, you wouldn't think of really going?"
Forester was a man of science. Priding himself on the clear logic of his mind, he felt only scorn for intuition and mistrust for impulse. His own reckless words astonished him now, for he said quietly, "I'm going."
"If this White had any honest purpose," Armstrong objected, "he could contact you in some ordinary way. I don't like the look of all this funny business, sir, and you know your life is far too valuable to risk in what is probably a Triplanet trap. Why don't you just notify the police?"
But the technicians, after all, were a sort of military force, and Forester held command. He listened carefully to all the sensible cautions of Armstrong and the rest, but nothing altered that abrupt decision. For the child's visit had left him no choice. If strangers could enter and leave that guarded vault, they could wreck or steal his missiles at will. He gave his soft-voiced orders, and Armstrong and Dodge began loading a gray-painted official car with portable weapons.
"Stand by," he instructed the four men left behind. "Two off and two on. Watch the teleprinters for a Red Alert - just in case these people are Triplanet agents, trying to cripple the project until their fleets can strike."
The car was ready when he recalled his date for lunch with Ruth, and telephoned her hastily to say he wouldn't have time to eat. He tried to sound casual, and the project had parted them countless times before, but she must have heard the anxious tension in his voice.
"Clay!" she broke in sharply. "What's the trouble now?"
"Nothing, darling," he lied uneasily. "Nothing at all."