"2 Quantum Murder" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Peter F)

AQUANTUMMURDER 15


different from the Constables and the Public Order Ministry.'
'They took away enough of the kibbutz's crops,' Eleanor said sharply. 'Fair and even distribution, like hell.'
'Hey, wildcat.' He patted her rump.
'Behave, Gregory.' She skipped away and climbed up into the Ranger, but her smile had returned.
Greg slumped into the passenger seat, and remembered to pull his safety belt across. 'I suppose I ought to sniff around the rest of the village,' he said reluctantly. 'Make sure there aren't any premier-grade apparatchiks lurking around in dark corners.'
'That is one of the things we came here to get away from.' She swung the EMC Ranger round the triangular junction outside the church, and headed back the way they came. 'You and I, we've done our bit for this country.'
'So now we leave it to the Inquisitors?'
Eleanor grunted in disgust.
They met Corry Furness on the edge of the village. Eleanor stopped the Ranger and lowered her window to tell him it was all right to use his bike again.
'Mr Collister wasn't one of them, was he?' Corry asked.
'No,' Greg said.
Corry's face lit with a smile. 'I told you.' He pedalled off down the avenue of dead trees with their lacework of vines and harlequin flowers.
Greg watched him in the mud-splattered wing mirror, envying the lad's world view. Everything black and white, truth or lie. So simple.
Eleanor drove towards the farm at half the speed she'd used on the way in, suspension rocking them lightly as the wheels juddered over the skewed surface. The clouds on the southern horijon were starting to thicken.
'You'll have to give me a hand to get the lime saplings into the barn when we get back,' Greg said. He was watching the way the loose vine tendrils at the top of the trees were Stirring. 'I'll never get them planted before the storm now.'
'Sure. I've nearly got the undercoat finished on all the firstfloor windows,'
'That's something. It's going to be Monday before I'm
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PETER F. HAMILTON
through with the saplings. After this downpour it'll be too wet to get into the field for the next couple of days, and then we'll have to spend Sunday clearing up, no doubt.'
'Better make that Tuesday. We've got Julia's roll-out ceremony on Monday,' Eleanor said. 'That'll cheer you up.'
'Oh, bugger. I'd forgotten.'
'Don't be so grumpy. There aft thousands of people who would kill for an invitation.'
'Couldn't we just sort of skip the ceremony?'
'Fine by me, if you want to explain our absence to Julia,' she said slyly.
Greg thought about it. Julia Evans didn't have many genu-. inc friends. He was rather pleased to be counted amongst them, despite the disadvantages.
Julia had inherited Event Horizon from her grandfather, Philip Evans, a company larger even than a kombinate, manufacturing everything from domestic music decks to orbital microgee-factory modules. Two years ago she had been a very lonely seventeen-year-old girl; wealth and a drug-addict father had left her terribly isolated. Greg had got to know her quite well during the security violation case. Well enough for her to be chief bridesmaid at his wedding. Julia, of course, had been thrilled at the notion of adding a little touch of normality to her lofty plutocrat existence. The mistake of asking her had only become apparent when he and Eleanor had left for their honeymoon.
Every tabloid gossipcast in the world had broadcast the pictures. Greg Mandel: a man important enough to have the richest girl in the world as his bridesmaid. More millionaires than he knew existed wanted to be friends with the newly weds; buy them drinks, buy them meals, buy them houses, have them as non-executive directors.
Julia had also developed a mild crush on him for a while. A hard-line ex-urban predator and gland psychic, the classic romantic mysterious stranger. Of course, he had done the decent thing and ignored it. Hell of a thing, decency.
GregХ found he was grinning wanly. 'I don't want to try ~ explaining to Julia.'
CHAPTER TWO


N
icholas Beswick looked out of his mullioned window, watching a near solid front of thick woolly clouds slide over the secluded Chater valley. It was mid-afternoon, and the storm was arriving more or less on time. The warm rain began to fall, a heavy grey nebula constricting oppressively around the ancient Abbey.
His room faced west, giving him a good view out over the long gentle slope of grassy parkland which made up that side of the valley. But the brow was no longer visible, in fact he was hard pressed to see the road slicing through the park outside the front of the building, beyond the deep U-shaped loop of the drive. Mist was struggling to rise up from the grass, only to be torn apart by the deluge of hoary water.
There would be no swimming in the fish lakes this evening, he realized ruefully, no opportunity of seeing Isabel in her swimsuit. The daily swim had become an iron-cast habit for the six students; Launde Abbey didn't have any outdoor sport pitches or indoor games courts, so they clung to whatever activity they could make for themselves with a grim tenacity.
The lack of facilities had never bothered him. He had been at the Abbey since October, and he still found it hard to believe he had been admitted. Launde Abbey was looked upon as a kind of semi-mythical grail by every university physics student in England: the chance to study under Dr Edward Kitchener.
Kitchener was regarded by most of his peers as the Newton of the age, a double Nobel Laureate for his work in cosmology and solid-state physics; his now-classic molecular interaction equations had defijied a whole range of new crystals and semiconductors which could be produced in orbiting microgee factories. The royalty payments from the latter work had made him independently wealthy before hc reached forty, which also kicked up the embers of envy among his colleagues
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whose work tended more to the intellectual. Nor did it help that he was slightly unconventional in the way he approached his subject matter; at his level of theorizing, physics verged on philosophy. He .considered he had a perfect right to intrude on the country of the mind, to develop new aspects of thought processes. It had led to some fierce disagreements with the psychology establishment, and he didn't always confine his arguments to the pages of respected journals - critics were often subjected to an open tirade of abuse and scorn at scientific conferences. Then twenty-two years ago, after nearly twenty years of ill-tempered confrontation with his fellow theorists, he had, with characteristic abruptness, resigned from his position at Cambridge and retreated to Launde Abbey to pursue his theories without carping interference from lesser minds, his brilliance and loud vocal intolerance of the dry, crusty world endemic to academia creating a media legend of Bohemian eccentricity in the process.
When psi-stimulant neurohormones were developed, seventeen years ago, he awarded them an unqualified welcome, saying they gave the human mind direct access to the cosmos at large, presenting physicists with the opportunity to perceive first-hand the particles and waveforms they had only ever seen on peer and in projection cubes. Even after it became clear that neurohormones couldn't produce anything like the initial over-optimistic results predicted, he never lost his conviction. Psi, he contended, was the greatest event in physics since relativity, exposing hitherto unquantifiable phenomena. Simply defining the mechanism of psi in conventional terms was enough to fascinate him, a rationale which would tie up nature and supernature, something beyond even the elusive Grand Unification theory.
This tenuous goal was one to which more and more of his time was devoted. But every year he invited three degree students into his home for an intensive two-year session of lectures, research and intellectual meditation.
And childish tantrums, Nicholas had discovered, at first to his embarrassed surprise, and then with secret amusement. Even the most brilliant of men had character flaws.
PETER F. HAMILTON
A QUANTUM MURDER
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