"A Maze Of Death v1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

"I'm no good at prayers. I didn't summon the Walker; it was his idea to come to me."
"How about a drink?" Tallchief said. "And then maybe you could give me a hand with my stuff, moving it to my quarters and like that."
"I have to move my own stuff."
"That's an outstanding cooperative attitude."
"If you had helped me--"
Tallchief said, "I'll see you later." He continued on, groping and flailing in the darkness, until all at once he stumbled against a clanking hull. A noser. He had found the right area; now to pick out his own ship.
He looked back. Morley had gone; he was alone.
Why couldn't the guy have helped me? he asked himself. I'm going to need another person for most of the cartons. Let's see, he pondered. If I can turn on the landing lights of the noser I'll be able to see. He located the locking wheel of the hatch, spun it, tugged the hatch open. Automatically the safety lights came on; now he could see. Maybe I'll just move in my clothes, bathroom articles and my copy of The Book, he decided. I'll read The Book until I get ready to go to sleep. I'm tired; piloting the noser here took everything out of me. That and the transmitter failing. Utter defeat.
Why did I ask him to help me? he wondered. I don't know him, he hardly knows me. Getting my stuff moved is my own problem. He has problems of his own.
He picked up a carton of books, began to lug it away from the parked noser in the general direction--he hoped--of his living quarters. I've got to get a flashlight, he decided as he waddled along. And hell, I forgot to turn on the landing lights. This is all going wrong, he realized. I might as well go back and join the others. Or I could move this one carton and then have another drink, and possibly by that time most of them would have come out of the briefing room and could help me. Grunting and perspiring, he made his way up the gravel path toward the dark and inert structure which provided them with their living quarters. No lights on. Everyone was still involved in pasting together an adequate prayer. Thinking about that he had to laugh. They'll probably haggle about it all night, he decided, and laughed again, this time with angry disgust.
He found his own living quarters, by virtue of the fact that the door hung open. Entering, he dropped the carton of books to the floor, sighed, stood up, turned on all the lights . . . standing there he surveyed the small room with its dresser and bed. The bed did not please him; it looked small and hard. "Christ," he said, and seated himself on it. Lifting several books from the carton he rummaged about until he came onto the bottle of Peter Dawson scotch; he unscrewed the lid and drank somberly from the bottle itself.
Through the open door he gazed out at the nocturnal sky; he saw the stars haze over with atmospheric disturbances, then clear for a moment. It is certainly hard, he thought, to make out stars through the refractions of a planetary atmosphere.
A great gray shape merged with the doorway, blotting out the stars.
It held a tube and it pointed the tube at him. He saw a telescopic sight on it and a trigger mechanism. Who was it? What was it? He strained to see, and then he heard a faint pop. The gray shape receded and once more stars appeared. But now they had changed. He saw two stars collapse against one another and a nova form; it flared up and then, as he watched, it began to die out. He saw it turn from a furiously blazing ring into a dim core of dead iron and then he saw it cool into darkness. More stars cooled with it; he saw the force of entropy, the method of the Destroyer of Forms, retract the stars into dull reddish coals and then into dust-like silence. A shroud of thermal energy hung uniformly over the world, over this strange and little world for which he had no love or use.
It's dying, he realized. The universe. The thermal haze spread on and on until it became only a disturbance, nothing more; the sky glowed weakly with it and then flickered. Even the uniform thermal disbursement was expiring. How strange and goddam awful, he thought. He got to his feet, moved a step toward the door.
And there, on his feet, he died.


They found him an hour later. Seth Morley stood with his wife at the far end of the knot of people jammed into the small room and said to himself, _To keep him from helping with the prayer_.
"The same force that shut down the transmitter," Ignatz Thugg said. "They knew; they knew if he phrased the prayer it would go through. Even without the relay." He looked gray and frightened. All of them did, Seth Morley noticed. Their faces, in the light of the room, had a leaden, stone-like cast. Like, he thought, thousand-year-old idols.
Time, he thought, is shutting down around us. It is as if the future is gone, for all of us. Not just for Tallchief.
"Babble, can you do an autopsy?" Betty Jo Berm asked. "To a certain extent." Dr. Babble had seated himself beside Tallchief 's body and was touching him here and there. "No visible blood. No sign of an injury. His death could be natural, you all realize; it might be that he had a cardiac condition. Or, for example, he might have been killed by a heat gun at close range . . . but then, if that's the case, I'll find the burn marks." He unfastened Tallchief's collar, reached down to explore the chest area. "Or one of us might have done it," he said. "Don't rule that out."
"They did it," Maggie Walsh said.
"Possibly," Babble said. "I'll do what I can." He nodded to Thugg and Wade Frazer and Glen Belsnor. "Help me carry him into the clinic; I'll start the autopsy now."
"None of us even knew him," Mary said.
"I think I probably saw him last," Seth Morley said. "He wanted to bring his things from his noser here to his living area. I told him I'd help him later on, when I had time. He seemed to be in a bad mood; I tried to tell him we needed him to compose a prayer but he didn't seem interested. He just wanted to move his things." He felt acutely guilty. Maybe if I had helped him he'd still be alive, he said to himself. Maybe Babble's right; maybe it was a heart attack, brought on by moving heavy cartons. He kicked at the box of books, wondering if this box had done it--this box and his own refusal to help. Even when I was asked I wouldn't give it, he realized.
"You didn't see any indication of a suicidal attitude at work, did you?" Dr. Babble asked.
''No."
"Very strange," Babble said. He shook his head wearily. "Okay, let's get him to the infirmary."


6

The four men carried Tallchief's body across the dark, nocturnal compound. Cold wind licked at them and they shivered; they drew together against the hostile presence of Delmak-O--the hostile presence which had killed Ben Tallchief.
Babble switched on lights here and there. At last they had Tallchief up on the high, metal-topped table.
"I think we should retire to our individual living quarters and stay there until Dr. Babble has finished his autopsy," Susie Smart said, shivering.
Wade Frazer spoke up. "Better if we stay together, at least until Dr. Babble's report is in. And I also think that under these unexpected circumstances, this terrible event in our lives, that we must immediately elect a leader, a strong one who can keep us together as a group, when in fact right now we are not, but should be--must be. Doesn't everyone agree?"
After a pause Glen Belsnor said, "Yeah."
"We can vote," Betty Jo Berm said. "In a democratic way. But I think we must be careful." She struggled to express herself. "We mustn't give a leader too much power. And we should be able to recall him when and if at any time we're not satisfied with him; then we can vote him out as our leader and elect someone else. But while he is leader we should obey him--we don't want him to be too weak, either. If he's too weak we'll just be like we are now: a mere collection of individuals who can't function together, even in the face of death."
"Then let's get back to the briefing room," Tony Dunkelwelt said, "rather than to our personal quarters. So we can start casting votes. I mean, it or they could kill us before we have a leader; we don't want to wait."
In a group they made their way somberly from Dr. Babble's infirmary to the briefing room. The transmitter and receiver were still on; each person, entering, heard the dull, low hum.
"So big," Maggie Walsh said, gazing at the transmitter. "And so useless."
"Do you think we should arm ourselves?" Bert Kosler said, plucking at Morley's sleeve. "If there's someone after us to kill all of us--"
"Let's wait for Babble's autopsy report," Seth Morley said.
Seating himself, Wade Frazer said in a business-like way, "We'll vote by a show of hands. Everybody sit down and be quiet and I'll read off our names and keep the tally. Is that satisfactory to everyone?" There was a sardonic undertone to his voice, and Seth Morley did not like it.
Ignatz Thugg said, "You won't get it, Frazer. No matter how badly you want it. Nobody in this room is going to let somebody like you tell them what to do." He dropped into a chair, crossed his legs, and got a tobacco cigarette from his jacket pocket.
As Wade Frazer read off the names and took the tally, several others made their own notations. They don't trust Frazer to make an accurate account, Seth Morley realized. He did not blame them.
"The greatest number of votes for one person," Frazer said, when all the names had been read, "goes to Glen Belsnor." He dropped his tally sheet with a blatant sneer. . . as if, Morley thought, the psychologist is saying Go ahead and doom yourselves. It's your lives, if you want to toss them away. But it seemed to him that Belsnor was a good choice; on his own very limited knowledge he had himself voted for the electronics maintenance man. He was satisfied, even if Frazer was not. And by their relieved stir he guessed that most of the others were, too.
"While we're waiting for Dr. Babble's report," Maggie Walsh said, "perhaps we should join in a group prayer for Mr. Tallchief 's psyche to be taken immediately into immortality."
"Read from Specktowsky's Book," Betty Jo Berm said. She dipped into her pocket and brought out her own copy, which she passed to Maggie Walsh. "Read the part on page 70 about the Intercessor. Isn't it the Intercessor that we want to reach?"