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

"What's wrong?" cried Hank.
"Art . . ." Margie managed, "flew out тАУ lab window."
Hank jumped to his feet, and pulled his chair out for her. She fell into it
gratefully.
"Nonsense!" said Arlie. "Illusion. Or" тАУ he scowled at Margie тАУ "collusion
of some sort."
"Got your breath back yet? What happened?" Hank was demanding.
Margie nodded and drew a deep breath.
"I was testing him," she said, still breathlessly. "He was talking a blue
streak and I could hardly get him to stand still. Something about Titus
Quintus Flamininius, the three-body problem, Sauce Countess Waleska,
the family Syrphidae of the order Diptera тАУ all mixed up. Oh, he was
babbling! And all of a sudden he dived out an open window."
"Dived?" barked Arlie. "I thought you said he flew?"
"Well, the laboratory's on the third floor!" wailed Margie, almost on the
verge of tears.
Further questioning elicited the information that when Margie ran to the
window, expecting to see a shattered ruin on the grass three stories below,
she perceived Art swinging by one area from the limb of an oak outside the
window. In response to sharp queries from Arlie, she asserted vehemently
that the closest grabable limb of the oak was, however, at least eight feet
from the window out which Art had jumped, fallen, or dived.
"And then what?" said Hank.
Then, according to Margie, Art had uttered a couple of Tarzan-like
yodels, and swung himself to the ground. When last seen he had been
running off across the campus through the cool spring sunlight, under the
budding trees, in his slacks and shirt unbuttoned at the throat. He had been
heading in a roughly northeasterly direction тАУ i.e., toward town тАУ and
occasionally bounding into the air as if from a sheer access of energy.
"Come on!" barked Hank, when he had heard this. He led the way at a run
toward the hospital parking lot three stories below and his waiting car.


On the other side of the campus, at a taxi stand, the three of them picked
up Art's trail. A cab driver waiting there remembered someone like Art
taking another cab belonging to the same company. When Hank identified
the passenger as a patient under his, Hank's, care, and further identified
himself as a physician from the university hospital, the cab driver they were
talking to agreed to call in for the destination of Art's cab.
The destination was a downtown bank. Hank, Arlie, and Margie piled back
into Hank's car and went there. When they arrived, they learned that Art had
already come and gone, leaving some confusion behind him. A
vice-president of the bank, it appeared, had made a loan to Art of two
hundred and sixty-eight dollars and eighty cents; and was now, it seemed,
not quite sure as to why he had done so.
"He just talked me into it, I guess," the vice-president was saying
unhappily as Hank and the others came dashing up. It further developed
that Art had had no collateral. The vice-president had been given the
impression that the money was to be used to develop some confusing but
highly useful discovery or discoveries concerning Hannibal, encyclopedias,