"Edward L. Ferman - Best From F&SF, 23rd Edition" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ferman Edward L)

first you blunder into the dark trees on either side, and once the earth surges up over you in a chaos of
writhing red shapes, but now you are learning, and you soar down past the crossroads, up the farther hill,
and now, now you are on the big road, flying eastward, passing all the cars, rushing toward the great
world where you long to be.
It took Smith six weeks to increase the efficiency of the image intensifier enough to bring up the ghost
pictures clearly. When he succeeded, the image on the screen was instantly recognizable. It was a view
of Jack McCranie's office; the picture was still dim, but sharp enough that Smith could see the expression
on Jack's face. He was leaning back in his chair, hands behind his head. Beside him stood Peg Spatola in
a purple dress, with her hand on an open folder. She was talking, and McCranie was listening. That was
wrong, because Peg was not supposed to be back from Cleveland until next week.
Smith reached for the phone and punched McCranie's number.
"Yes, Tom?"
"Jack, is Peg in there?"
"Why, no-she's in Cleveland, Tom."
"Oh, yes."
McCranie sounded puzzled. "Is anything the matter?" In the screen, he had swiveled his chair and
was talking to Peg, gesturing with short, choppy motions of his arm.
"No, nothing," said Smith. "That's all right, Jack, thank you." He broke the connection. After a
moment he turned to the breadboard controls of the device and changed one setting slightly. In the
screen, Peg turned and walked backward out of the office. When he turned the knob the other way, she
repeated these actions in reverse. Smith tinkered with the other controls until he got a view of the
calendar on Jack's desk. It was Friday, June 15тАФlast week.
Smith locked up the device and all his notes, went home and spent the rest of the day thinking.
By the end of July he had refined and miniaturized the device and had extended its sensitivity range
into the infrared. He spent most of August, when he should have been on vacation, trying various
methods of detecting sound through the device. By focusing on the interior of a speaker's larynx and
using infrared, he was able to convert the visible vibrations of the vocal cords into sound of fair quality,
but that did not satisfy him. He worked for a while on vibrations picked up from panes of glass in
windows and on framed pictures, and he experimented briefly with the diaphragms in speaker systems,
intercoms and telephones. He kept on into October without stopping and finally achieved a system that
would give tinny but recognizable sound from any vibrating surfaceтАФa wall, a floor, even the speaker's
own cheek or forehead.
He redesigned the whole device, built a prototype and tested it, tore it down, redesigned, built
another. It was Christmas before he was done. Once more he locked up the device and all his plans,
drawings and notes.
At home he spent the holidays experimenting with commercial adhesives in various strengths. He
applied these to coated paper, let them dry, and cut the paper into rectangles. He numbered these
rectangles, pasted them onto letter envelopes, some of which he stacked loose; others he bundled
together and secured with rubber bands. He opened the stacks and bundles and examined them at
regular intervals. Some of the labels curled up and detached themselves after twenty-six hours without
leaving any conspicuous trace. He made up another batch of these, typed his home address on six of
them. On each of six envelopes he typed his office address, then covered it with one of the labels. He
stamped the envelopes and dropped them into a mailbox. All six, minus their labels, were delivered to the
office three days later.
Just after New Year's, he told his partner that he wanted to sell out and retire. They discussed it in
general terms.
Using an assumed name and a post office box number which was not his, Smith wrote to a
commission agent in Boston with whom he had never had any previous dealings. He mailed the letter,
with the agent's address covered by one of his labels on which he had typed a fictitious address. The
label detached itself in transit; the letter was delivered. When the agent replied, Smith was watching and