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

"Ford," White explained, "was a professional gambler."
Forester stood watching, fascinated. Absently, still peering up, the little man was rolling dice against a stick of drying driftwood. Somehow, the dice always came sevens. He met Forester's astonishment with a thin-lipped grin.
"Telekinesis." His voice had a hard nasal twang. "Mr. White taught me the word, just now, but I could always roll the bones." Dancing away from the driftwood, the dice made another seven. "The art is less profitable than you might think," he added cynically. "Because every gambler has a little of the skill - and calls it luck. When you win, the suckers always think you cheated, and the law ain't friendly. Mr. White got me out of a county jail."
Ash Overstreet was a short heavy man, sitting on a rock in stolid immobility. He looked sallow and unhealthy. His thick hair was prematurely white, and massive lenses magnified his dull, myopic eyes.
"A clairvoyant," White said. "Extratemporal."
"We used to call it just a nose for news, when I was a reporter." Scarcely moving, Overstreet spoke in a hoarse whisper. "But I had a sharper perception than most. I got to seeing so much, before I learned control, that I had to dull my insight with drugs. Mr. White found me locked up in a narcotics ward."
Forester shook his head uneasily. All such phenomena of the mind belonged to a disreputable borderland of science, where the truth had always been obscured by ignorant superstition and by the trickery of such cheap mountebanks as this Graystone. He wanted to stalk out scornfully, but something made him look around for the little girl in yellow. She was gone.
He blinked at the fire, shivering uncomfortably. The hungry-looking child had been here, he was certain, just a moment before, chattering to Ironsmith, but now her place was empty. Ironsmith was watching the doorway, with a calm, bright interest, and Forester turned that way in time to see her come running in again. Handing the clerk some small metal object, she sat down again by the fire.
"Please, Mr. Graystone." She watched the simmering pot, with enormous eager eyes. "Please, can't we eat?"
"You've already met Jane Carter," White was drawling softly. "Her great accomplishment is teleportation."
"Tele-" Forester gasped, wrestling with a sudden overwhelming surmise. "What?"
"I think you'll have to agree that Jane's pretty good." The big man smiled down through the red beard, and she looked back, her eyes luminous with a mute admiration. "In fact, she has the richest psychophysical capacities that I've found on any of the planets where I've looked for resources to fight our common enemy."
Forester shivered to the wind at his back.
"Jane was another misfit," White went on. "In this age of machine worship, her young genius had been ignored and denied. Her only recognition had come from some petty criminal, who attempted to turn her talents to shoplifting. I took her out of a reform school."
Her thin blue face smiled up at Forester.
"I'm not going back to that bad place," she told him proudly. "Mr. White never has to beat me, and he's teaching me psychophysics." She spoke the word with grave care. "I went to find you in that deep cellar in the mountain, all by myself. Mr. White says I did very well."
"I-I think you did!" Forester stammered faintly.
She turned hopefully to watch the stew again, and Forester peered sharply about that smoke-darkened room, where a few driftwood timbers and little piles of straw made the only furniture.
"A curious fortress, I know." That ruthless purpose burned again in White's blue eyes. "But all our weapons are in our minds, and the hard pursuit of the enemy has left us no resources to waste on needless luxuries."
Forester watched the little gambler roll another nervous seven. That must be some kind of trick, he thought, and the child's appearance at Starmont another. He refused to take any serious stock in this paraphysical stuff, but he tried to conceal that bleak mistrust as he swung back to White. He must stall, study these people, discover the motives and the methods of their strange chicanery.
"What enemy?" he demanded.
"I see you aren't taking my warning very seriously." White's rumbling drawl became ominously intense. "But I think you will when you hear the news." The big man took his arm, to lead him away from the fire. "Mason Horn is going to land tonight."
Forester swallowed hard, unable to cover his shock. For Mark White, whether a desperate Interplanet agent or merely a clever rogue, had no right to know even the name of Mason Horn.



Chapter SEVEN

THE MISSION of Mason Horn was another high secret, as closely guarded as Project Thunderbolt itself. Two years ago, when the pen traces in the new search dome at Starmount first began to hint of neutrino bursts from some nearer and less friendly source than the supernova, that competent astronomer had been drafted from the observatory staff to find why the Triplanet fleets always selected Sector Vermilion for their space maneuvers. Hurriedly briefed in the dangerous art of interplanetary espionage and equipped as a legitimate salesman of medico-radiological supplies, he had taken passage on a Triplanet trading vessel. No word of him had yet come back.
"Mason Horn!" Forester felt ill with shock. "Did he find-"
Caution choked him, but White's great shaggy head had already nodded at Ash Overstreet. Turning slowly from the fire, the clairvoyant looked up with an expression of lax stupidity.
"Horn's an able secret agent," he rasped hoarsely. "In fact, though the man himself doesn't suspect it, he has fairly well-developed extrasensory perceptions. He was able to penetrate an Interplanet space fort stationed out in the direction designated as Sector Vermilion, and he got away with some kind of military device. I don't understand it, but he thinks of it as a mass- converter."
Forester's legs turned weak, and he sat down on a driftwood block. During all those ghastly years, while he had been perfecting the slender missiles of his own project and waiting beside them in the vault through anxious days and sleepless nights, this was what he had most greatly feared. He had to swallow before he could whisper:
"So that's your bad news?"
"No." White shook his flowing, fiery mane. "Our enemy is something vaster and more vicious than the Triplanet Powers. And the weapon against us is something more deadly than any mass-converter. It is pure benevolence."
Forester sat hunched and shuddering.
"I'm afraid you don't understand mass-conversion weapons," he protested faintly. "They use all the energy in the detonated matter - while the fission process, in the best plutonium bombs, releases less than a tenth of one per cent. They make a different sort of war. One small missile can split the crust of a planet, boil the seas and sterilize the land, and poison everything with radio-isotopes for a thousand years." He stared at White. "What could be worse than that?"
"Our benevolent enemy is."
"How could that be?"
"That's what I brought you here to tell you." Forester waited, perched uncomfortably on the damp timber, and White kicked aside a straw bed to stand over him impatiently. "It's a simple, dreadful story. The beginning of it was ninety years ago, on a planet known as Wing IV, nearly two hundred light-years from here at the far side of the colonized section of the galaxy. The human villain of it was a scientist whose name translates as Warren Mansfield."
"You pretend to know what happened there only ninety years ago?" Forester stiffened skeptically. "When even the light that left the star Wing at that time is not halfway to us yet?"
"I do." White's smile had a passing glint of malice. "The missiles of your secret project are not all that travels faster than light!"
Forester gulped with cold dismay, listening silently.
"Ninety years ago," the huge man rumbled, "the planet Wing IV had come to face the same technological crisis that this one does today - the same crisis that every culture meets, at a certain point in its technological evolution. The common solutions are death and slavery - violent ruin or slow decay. On Wing IV, however, Warren Mansfield created a third alternative."
Forester looked up at him searchingly, waiting.
"Physical science had got out of hand there, as it has here. Mansfield had already discovered rhodomagnetism there - perhaps because the light of the Crater Supernova struck Wing IV a century before it reached here. He had seen his discovery misused as a weapon, as most physical discoveries have been. Foolishly, he tried to bottle up the technological devil he had freed."
Forester began to wish he had called the police after all, for this man knew far too much to be free.
"Military mechanicals had already been evolved too far, you see, there on Wing IV," White went on. "Mansfield used his new science to design android mechanicals of a new type - humanoids, he called them - intended to restrain men from war. The job took many years, but he was finally too successful. His rhodomagnetic mechanicals are a little too perfect."
The big man paused, taut with an angry energy, but Forester sat too dazed to ask the frightened questions in his mind. He shivered again, as if the damp wind at his back had the chill of outer space.
"I knew Mansfield," White resumed at last. "Later, and on a different planet. He was an old man, then, but still desperately fighting the benevolent monster he had made. A refugee from his own humanoids. For those efficient mechanicals were following him from planet to planet, spreading out across the human worlds to stamp out war - exactly as he had meant them to do. Mansfield couldn't stop them."