"Dick, Philip K - The Zap Gun (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

"Oh, they seem to feel it's a fine weapon," Miss Bedouin said, her natural, hormone-enriched breasts moving in synchronicity with his notice of them. "I believe they just can't make out the power source. You know, the erg structure. Before you go to 286Ч"

"They want me," he said, "to take a better look at 285. Okay." It did not bother him. He felt amiably inclined, because this was a pleasant April day and Miss Bedouin (or, if you liked to think about it that way, Miss Bed) was pretty enough to restore any man's sanguineness. Even a fashion designerЧa weapons fashion designer.

Even, he thought, the best and only weapons fashion designer in all Wes-bloc.

To turn up his equalЧand even this was in doubt, as far as he was concernedЧone would have to approach that other hemisphere, Peep-East. The Sino-Soviet bloc owned or employed or however they handled itЧin any case had available to themЧservices of a medium like himself.

He had often wondered about her. Her name was Miss Topchev, the planet-wide private police agency KACH had informed him. Lilo Topchev. With only one office, and that at Bulganingrad rather than New Moscow.

She sounded reclusive to him, but KACH did not orate on subjective aspects of its scrutiny-targets. Perhaps, he thought, Miss Topchev knitted her weapons sketches... or made them up, while still in the trance-state, in the form of gaily colored ceramic tile. Anyhow something artistic. Whether her clientЧor more accurately employerЧthe Peep-East governing body SeRKeb, that grim, uncolored and unadorned holistic academy of cogs, against which his own hemisphere had for so many decades now pitted every resource within itself, liked it or not.

Because of course a weapons fashion designer had to be catered to. In his own career he had managed to establish that.

After all, he could not be compelled to enter his five-days-a-week trance. And probably neither could Lilo Topchev.

Leaving Miss Bedouin, he entered his own office, removing his outer cape, cap and slippers, and extended these discarded items of street-wear to the handicloset.

Already his medical team, Dr. Todt and nurse Elvira Funt, had sighted him. They rose and approached respectfully, and with them his near-psionically gifted quasi-subordinate, Henry Morris. One never knewЧhe thought, constructing their reasoning on the basis of their alert, alarmed mannerЧwhen a trance might come on. Nurse Funt had her intravenous machinery tagging hummingly behind her and Dr. Todt, a first-class product of the superior West German medical world, stood ready to whip out delicate devices for two distinct purposes: first, that no cardiac arrest during the trance-state occur, no infarcts to the lungs or excessive suppression of the vagus nerve, causing cessation of breathing and hence suffocation, and secondЧand without this there was no point to it allЧthat mentation during the trance-state be established in a permanent record, obtainable after the state had ended.

Dr. Todt was, therefore, essential in the business at Mr. Lars, Incorporated. At the Paris office a similar, equally skilled crew awaited on stand-by. Because it often happened that Lars Powderdry got a more powerful emanation at that locus than he did in hectic New York.

And in addition his mistress Maren Faine lived and worked there.

It was a weaknessЧor, as he preferred supposing, a strength of weapons fashion designers, in contrast to their miserable counterparts in the world of clothingЧthat they liked women. His predecessor, Wade, had been heterosexual, tooЧhad in fact killed himself over a little coloratura of the Dresden Festival ensemble. Mr. Wade had suffered auricular fibrillation at an ignoble time: while in bed at the girl's Vienna condominium apartment at two in the morning, long after The Marriage of Figaro had dropped curtain, and Rita Grandi had discarded the silk hose, blouse, etc., forЧas the alert homeopape pics had disclosedЧnothing.

So, at forty-three years of age, Mr. Wade, the previous weapons fashion designer for Wes-bloc, had left the sceneЧand left vacant his essential post. But there were others ready to emerge and replace him.

Perhaps that had hurried Mr. Wade. The job itself was taxingЧmedical science did not precisely know to what degree or how. And there was, Lars Powderdry reflected, nothing quite so disorienting as knowing that not only are you indispensable but that simultaneously you can be replaced. It was the sort of paradox that no one enjoyed, except of course UN-W Natsec, the governing Board of Wes-bloc, who had contrived to keep a replacement always visible in the wings.

He thought, And they've probably got another one waiting right now.

They like me, he thought. They've been good to me and I to them: the system functions.

But ultimate authorities, in charge of the lives of billions of pursaps, don't take risks. They do not cross against the DON'T WALK signs of cog life.

Not that the pursaps would relieve them of their posts... hardly. Removal would descend, from General George McFarlane Nitz, the C. in C. on Natsec's Board. Nitz could remove anyone. In fact if the necessity (or perhaps merely the opportunity) arose to remove himselfЧimagine the satisfaction of disarming his own person, stripping himself of the brain-pan i.d. unit that caused him to smell right to the autonomic sentries which guarded Festung Washington!

And frankly, considering the cop-like aura of General Nitz, the Supreme Hatchet-man implications of hisЧ

"Your blood-pressure, Mr. Lars." Narrow, priest-like, somber Dr. Todt advanced, machinery in tow. "Please, Lars."

Beyond Dr. Todt and nurse Elvira Funt a slim, bald, pale-as-straw but highly professional-looking young man in peasoup green rose, a folio under his arm. Lars Powderdry at once beckoned to him. Blood-pressure readings could wait. This was the fella from KACH, and he had something with him.

"May we go into your private office, Mr. Lars?" the KACH-man asked.

Leading the way Lars said, "Photos."

"Yes, "sir." The KACH-man shut the office door carefully after them. "Of her sketches ofЧ" he opened the folio, examined a Xeroxed documentЧ"last Wednesday. Their codex AA-335." Finding a vacant spot on Lars' desk he began spreading out the stereo pics. "Plus one blurred shot of a mockup at the Rostok Academy assembly-lab... ofЧ" Again he consulted his poop sheetЧ"SeRKeb codex AA-330." He stood aside so that Lars could inspect.