"Blish, James - Jack Of Eagles" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

JACK OF EAGLES


by James Blish




". . . the time of experience, apprehended with true freshness, . . . consists of a blurred sequence of memories, culminating in the budding and unfolding present. . . . An integral component of this budding and unfolding present is an attitude of expectancy toward the future, no matter what it brings. . . . If someone could invent a figure for speaking of the flight of time, in which the idea is prominent that in our thought we recognize that the germinating present contains the seeds of a complete break with the past, he might alter the future course of thinking."

P. W. Bridgman: The Nature of Physical Theory



Chapter One


WHISPERS IN THE EARTH


Danny Caiden was reasonably sure that there was nothing wrong with him.
He had an average income, and enough education to handle the packaging section of a food-industry trade paper; even enough to write a poem or two on the side. Danny's poetry was certainly not very good yet, despite the interest the office aesthete took in it, but did serve as an outlet for the way he felt on good days and bad ones. He was a little under six feet, big-boned, with yellow hair, a friendly face with a nose that was slightly too large for it, and no obligations to anybody but himself.
He was like many of the people in the world he occupied, and he liked both the people and the world. On the rare days when he got sick of writing enthusiastically about the latest way of wrapping something basically inedible so that people would eat it, his stories became a little more acid than Henry Mall, the paper's senior editor, would allow anyone's stories but his own to be, and he had a beer or so before going back to his room-and-a-half on 13th Street. On the nights when he loved everybody and had Saturday or Sunday to look forward to, he had a lot of beers and slept until the next noon.
A normal guy, Danny thought. He lay on his bed and wriggled his stockinged toes in the yellow lamplight. He had no anxieties, no woman trouble, no compulsive political convictions. He didn't care who got elected this year or any year, and he didn't even have a cold.
But all the same, he was lying awake on his bed at three in the morning of a work-day, wondering why he had visions.
He turned the word over a few times. It was so remote from his thinking vocabulary that it probably never would sound right to him in any context; but it was the only word that gave him any handle at all for what had been happening to him. Actually, of course, what he had been having lately was voices-except that one didn't "have" voices, and besides, they weren't voices. They were just noises.
Noises that he heard twice, once inside his head, and once outside. Like double vision. Double audition? There might just be such a term, but it didn't sound right either.
He wriggled his toes and went over the day for at least the eighth time, trying to see what there was about it that he had missed so far which would allow him to label the experience in familiar terms.
Now then: He had come out of Childs after lunch, feeling a little too full, and had started to turn the corner to go back to the office. He remembered being in the middle of a step; remembered wishing that his other suit would get back from the cleaners; remembered wishing that lunch-hour could be followed by another hour for a cat-nap. He remembered wondering whether or not the man from the orange-growers' association would confirm that idiotic report that had come in from Food Chronicler's Florida correspondent; and whether or not Mall would let Danny's caption for the bread-eating campaign picture go through. It wouldn't be fair, after all, to let the baking industry get away with bragging about putting back into bread half of the nutrients they'd taken out of it, without at least a mild dig . . .
Just around the corner, someone had screamed. There had been a shearing squeal of brakes and rubber. Then something metallic had hit something else. The impact was sudden and quickly over, almost as if a truck full of brass ingots had been run off a high building.
Then there were more screams, a dull boom, and . . . more screams, round and full and impossible to listen to. People were running.
Danny had not run. He had stopped abruptly, and put his back against the cool concrete flank of the building. A month ago-about that-he had been coming around this same corner, and had heard those same noises. He had run then.
But he'd found nothing around the corner but the usual agitated rivers of people trudging back from their lunch hours. No accident-no horrified crowd-nothing.
And so, this time, he had been afraid to go around the corner. The original illusion had gradually faded from his memory, but the fact brought it back. The exact, one-for-one correspondence of the sequences of sounds scared him. It was not the dщjр vu, the momentary "recognition" of a place or event one actually has never seen before; Danny had experienced that as often as most normal persons, and knew that it was upsetting only because it was impossible to trace the false memory back to any real experience. But this-there was a real memory of all these shocking noises in Danny's mind, a memory he could place and date.
Which was why he was afraid to turn the corner; for he had no evidence yet that the second experience was any more real than the first one had been. Hard as it was to believe that his stable, basically untroubled mind was capable of handing him the first illusion, two such would be enough to upset the most phlegmatic of men.
People continued to run past Danny. He could not remember, then or now, seeing anybody running before; only hearing the sound of running. Something really had happened, then. Fried scallops clumping in his stomach, he went around the corner.
There had been an accident, all right. A cab, trying to beat a light, had hit an avenue bus amidships, and the gas tank of one of the two vehicles-it was hard to tell which-had burst. There was a pyre at the intersection. Carbonized bodies twitched feebly, some still managing to scream now and then. The mob was drawing in slowly, murmuring with fascination, but held off by the heat.
Danny, sick, had detoured, and stumbled his way to his elevator. He got off on the wrong floor, and was good for nothing for the rest of the afternoon.
It had been bad enough to have the sounds of that collision stored in his head-but for Danny, every one of those sounds had an echo. He had heard them all a month before they had happened.
He was bawled out twice by Mall for being sarcastic about the merits of free enterprise, and failed dismally to respond to a gambit offered by the new redhead in the typing pool. He left the office ten minutes too early, and afterwards had taken aboard more than enough beer to put him back into a cheerful and uncritical state.
But still, at 3:00 A.M., Danny was sober, awake, and twitching his toes speculatively in the lamplight. For him, that collision had happened twice. Something had made him hear it before it had actually happened.
Now that he came to think of it, his mind had played him some tricks before-if they were tricks. At least, he could think of one odd gift, unimportant until now in his universe, for which he had no explanation, and which seemed to involve prediction of a sort: the thing he had always called "the finding trick."
He had been kidded about the finding trick for as long as he could remember, but it worked. It still did, or at least it had still been working the last time he had used it, in the middle of the winter just ended. Bill Emers had phoned him long-distance from Banff, drunker than Silenus, demanding to know where he'd misplaced his ski-wax.
Without bothering to think, Danny had said, "You put it on the right-hand corner of the mantel, but it's been dumped off somehow. It's probably in the scuttle with the fire-tools."
Which was where it was. Danny could still hear Emers chortling to his friends as he put the phone down, but he himself was bored with the finding trick, and more than bored by being forced to prove that he had it, every time some casual acquaintance wanted to liven up a party. He had never been to Banff, let alone to the lodge where Bill Emers had been staying at the time; furthermore, he knew nothing about skiing except that it was a sport for people who, unlike Danny, didn't hate cold weather. He had simply spoken on impulse, as he always did when people asked him to find things they had lost.
And, he had always been right-every time.
So there it was. He took no stock in the supernatural; he was not much inclined to think even gods necessary, let alone spectres. But it was too late to ignore the fact that there was something strange about himself. Prophetic noises, and a long-range sensitivity to where things were . . .
Was that it, then? A sensitivity-a special ability to detect coming events, like a street wreck or the loss of some object like a can of ski-wax? It seemed useless, if that was what it was, but it was at least a start toward understanding. The daily papers often printed wide-eyed stories, especially in the mid-summer "silly season" when real news was suffering from the doldrums, about people who could pull off tricks that other people couldn't-women who glowed in the dark, girls who went floating unconscious out of their bedroom windows, little boys who attracted gushes of water or oil or even "flows" of mysterious rocks. As a newspaperman of a rather low grade, Danny had seen his fair share of such reports; the great press associations had odd ideas about what a paper dealing with food processing and packaging might like to print.
Danny got up on his elbows and reached for a cigarette. Maybe there was really a line there. It was probably foolish, but he could no longer just let these things happen to him. They were too hard on the nerves. And there might just be the chance that a special ability to guess right-not only about where things were, but when they would be there-could be brought under control, and used at will.