"Gordon R. Dickson - Hilifter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

jump up from and catch an edge is one of the most perfect traps
designable тАУ the tourist room held Cully. He was on top of the bed; and he
needed to be below it to operate the latch handle.
First question: How impenetrable was the bed itself? Cully dug down
through the covers, pried up the mattress, peered through the springs, and
saw a blank panel of metal. Well, he had not really expected much in that
direction. He put the mattress and covers back and examined what he had
to work with above-bed.
There were all the control switches and buttons on the wall, but nothing
among them promised him any aid. The walls were the same metal
paneling as the base of the bed. Cully began to turn out his pockets in the
hope of finding something in them that would inspire him. And he did
indeed turn out a number of interesting items, including a folded piece of
notepaper which he looked at rather soberly before laying it aside, with a
boy scout type of knife that just happened to have a set of lock picks
among its other tools. The note would only take up valuable time at the
moment, and тАУ the lock being out of reach in the door тАУ the lock picks were
no good either.
There was nothing in what he produced to inspire him, however.
Whistling a little mournfully, he began to make the next best use of his pile
of property. He unscrewed the nib and cap of his long, gold fountain pen,
took out the ink cartridge, and laid the tube remaining aside. He removed
his belt, and the buckle from the belt. The buckle, it appeared, clipped on to
the fountain pen tube in somewhat the manner of a pistol grip. He reached
in his mouth, removed a bridge covering from the second premolar to the
second molar, and combined this with a small metal throwaway dispenser
of the sort designed to contain antacid tablets. The two together had a
remarkable resemblance to the magazine and miniaturized trigger
assembly of a small handgun; and when he attached them to the
buckle-fountain-pen-tube combination the resemblance became so marked
as to be practically inarguable.
Cully made a few adjustments in this and looked around himself again.
For the second time, his eye came to rest on the folded note, and, frowning
at himself in the mirror, he did pick it up and unfold it. Inside it read: "O was
the pow'r the Giftie gie us" Love, Lucy. Well, thought Cully, that was about
what you could expect from a starry-eyed girl with Scottish ancestors, and
romantic notions about present-day conditions on Alderbaran IV and the
other new worlds.
". . . But if you have all that land on Asterope IV, why aren't you back there
developing it?" she had asked him.
"The New Worlds are stiffing to death," he had answered. But he saw
then she did not believe him. To her, the New Worlds were still the romantic
Frontier, as the Old Worlds Confederation newspapers capitalized it. She
thought he had given up from lack of vision.
"You should try again . . ." she murmured. He gave up trying to make her
understand. And then, when the cruise was over and their shipboard
acquaintance тАУ that was all it was, really тАУ ended on the Miami dock, he had
felt her slip something in his pocket so lightly only someone as self-trained
as he would have noticed it. Later he had found it to be this note тАУ which he
had kept now for too long.