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

4
Toward noon the ranking engineer from Lanferman Associates of San Francisco and Los Angeles, the firm which produced the mockups and prototypes and whatnot from Lars Powderdry's sketches, showed up at the New York office of Mr. Lars, Incorporated.

Pete Freid, at home here from long years of experience, sauntered round-shouldered and stooped but still tall into Lars' office. He found Lars drinking a solution of honey and synthetic amino acids in a twenty per cent alcohol base: an antidote to the depletion of body-constituents by the trance-state which had occurred earlier in the morning.

Pete said, "They found that what you're swilling is one of the ten major causes of upper g.i. cancer. Better quit now.

"I can't quit." Lars said. His body needed the replacement-source and anyhow Peter was kidding. "What I ought to quitЧ" he began, and then became silent. Today he had talked too much already, and before the man from KACH. Who, if he was any good, remembered, recorded and put on permanent file everything he heard.

Pete wandered about the office, crouched for all eternity from his excessive height and also, as he tirelessly reiterated, his "bad back." There was a certain vagueness as to what the bad back consisted of. Some days it was a slipped disk. Other times, according to Pete's rambling monologs, it was a worn disk: the distinction between these two eternal, Jobish afflictions he never ceased delineating. On Wednesdays, for example today, it was due to an old war-time injury. He dilated on that now.

"Sure," he told Lars, his hands in the rear pockets of his work-trousers. He had flown three thousand miles from the West Coast aboard the public jet, wearing his grease-stained shop clothes, with, as a concession to human society, a twisted, now black but perhaps formerly brightly colored necktie. The tie hung like a lead-rope from his unbuttoned, sweaty shirt, as if, under former slave conditions, Pete had been led periodically to slaughter by means of it. Certainly he had not been led to pasture. Despite his rambling, ambulatory, psychomotor activity he was a born worker. Everything else in his lifeЧhis wife and three children, his hobbies, his friendshipsЧthese fell to ruin when work-time came. And for him this arrived at eye-opening time at six or six-thirty in the morning. He was, in contrast to what Lars regarded as neurologically normal humanity, a wide-awake early riser. It amounted to a defect. And this after a fugue the night before, until bar-closing time, of beer and pizza, with or without Molly, his wife.

"What do you mean, 'sure'?" Lars said, sipping his special drink. He felt weary: today trance-state had enervated him beyond the recall of the chemical elixir. "Okay, you mean, 'Sure, I ought to quit my job.' I know the rubric you've got to offer. Frankly I've heard it so many times I couldЧ"

Peter interrupted, in his agitated, husky, urgent voice, "Aw, the hell, you know what I mean. Bull! You never listen. All you do is go to heaven and come back with the word of God, and we're supposed to believe as gospel every stupid thing you write down, like someЧ" He gestured, tic-like, his big frame shuddering under his blue cotton shirt. "Look at the service you could do humanity if you weren't so lazy."

"What service?"

"You could solve all our problems!" Pete glowered at him. "If they've got weapons designs up thereЧ" He jerked his thumb vaguely toward the ceiling of the office, as if, during his trance-states, Lars literally rose. "Science ought to investigate you. Chrissake, you ought to be at Cal Tech being examined, not running this fairy outfit you run."

"Fairy," Lars said.

"Okay, maybe you're not a fairy. So what? My brother-in-law's a fairy and that's okay with me. A guy can be anything he wants." Pete's voice rose to a shout that boomed and echoed. "As long as it's integrity, it's what he really is and not what he's told to do. You!" His tone was withering, now. "You do what they tell you. They say, Go get us a bunch of primary design-concepts in two-D form, and you do!" He lowered his voice, grunted, rubbed his perspiring upper lip. Then, seating himself, he reached his long arms out, groping for the heap of sketches on Lars' desk.

"These aren't them," Lars said, retaining the sketches.

"These aren't? Then what are they? They look like designs to me." Pete twisted his head, extended his neck, piston-wise, to peer.

Lars said, "From Peep-East. Miss Topchev's." Pete's opposite number in Bulganingrad or New MoscowЧthe Soviets had two design-engineering firms available, the typical overlapping duplication of a monolithic societyЧhad the task of rendering these to their next step.

"Can I see them?"

Lars passed them to Pete, who put his nose almost against the flat, glossy surfaces, as if suddenly nearsighted. He said nothing for a time as he turned from one to the next, and then he snarled, sat back, hurled the stack of pics onto the desk. Or nearly onto it. The stack fell to the floor.

Pete, stretching, picked them up, respectfully straightened them until they were precisely even, one with the next, and set them down on the desk, demonstrating that he had meant no incivility. "They're terrible," he said.

"No," Lars said. No more so than his own, actually. Pete's loyalty to him, as a person, made a puppet out of Pete's jaws; friendship wagged the big man's tongue, and although Lars appreciated this he preferred to see the record set straight. "They can go into plowshare. She's doing her job." But of course these sketches might not be representative. The Soviets had a notorious reputation for managing to traduce KACH. The planet-wide police agency was fair game for the Soviets' own secret police, the KVB. It had not been discussed at the time Don Packard had produced the sketches, but the fact was just this: the Soviets, onto the presence of a KACH agent at their weapons fashion designs level, probably showed only what they cared to show, and held the rest back. That always had to be assumed.

Or at least he assumed that. What UN-W Natsec did with their KACH-obtained material was something else: he had no knowledge of that. The Board's policy could range from total credulity (although that was hardly likely) to utter cynicism. He, himself, tried to seek out a moderate middle-ground.

Pete said, "And that fuzzy print, that's her. Right?"

"Yes." Lars showed him the blurred glossy.

Again Pete put his nose to the subject of his scrutiny. "You can't tell anything," he decided finally. "And for this, KACH gets money! I could do better just by walking into the Bulganingrad Institute for Defensive Implementation Research Division with a polaroid Land-camera."