"Laurence M. Janifer - Agent in Place" - читать интересную книгу автора (Janifer Laurence M)

trying to get Beer Barrel reduced to a nickname instead of an insult. It isn't the beer anyhow, and never
has been; it's the way I'm built.
By the time he was through I was calmed down enough on Beer Barrel to realize that I had never
heard of anybody named Dave Welkin, with or without the descriptive pendant.
"Welkin," I said. "All right, sir. If you say so. Who is he?"
"Oh," the Director said, "he's a bum. A Bowery bum."
I didn't ask, "Why?" because I don't like wasted time either. If he'd wanted me to know why he'd
have told me; he really does like to be as open as he can with us. Of course he has to decide how open
that is.
All the same, as I was picking up what background there was on Beer Barrel Dave Welkin, letting
my beard grow, allowing Cosmetics to skin-tone me an unattractive and very dirty gray, and getting used
to the clothing, both for wear and for smell, I was trying to get the answer for myself.
All I had to go on was that the job wouldn't last over thirty days, and that the hypnotic trigger
business was the phrase Czechoslovakian boundary disputes, which, when I heard it, was going to
make me move rapidly toward whoever had said it. It was a good trigger; wandering around the Bowery
I wasn't likely to hear it by accident.
I learned that Beer Barrel Dave Welkin would be held under hypnotics in a New York cubby-hole of
ours, returnable after I reported in, and I learned that he had a great fondness for beer, had been on the
Bowery "over five years" and was about my age, though he looked fifteen or twenty years older, and that
his preferred method of panhandling was heading for crowds and bumping his way through them. He
sounded as if he might have wanted to be a pickpocket if he'd been a little less bleary; as it was, he
probably thought that crowds gave him more handout chances per square panhandling foot.
The trigger sounded as if I were in for a political impersonation job, but nothing else did; Beer Barrel
Dave (after the first few days I got so I could hear the phrase without wincing, even inside) was hardly
the type. And as far as I knewтАФand I think I'd knowтАФthere were no Czechoslovakian boundary
disputes going on anywhere in the world, unless you count a perennial tendency toward revolt against
Moscow as a boundary dispute.
I came up with quite an assortment of theories. The first notion was that I was being sent in as an
agent in placeтАФan inconspicuous type who does nothing at all until the word comes through, and then
pops up from within an organization and starts wrecking it. But agents in place have tours of duty that
tend to start at twenty years and go straight on up; and moving toward a person who spoke a single
phrase didn't look much like helping to wreck anything. Not to mention the fact that nobody could call
the collection of Bowery bums among whom Beer Barrel spent his time an organization, and even if it
was it didn't look like one anybody was very anxious to overthrow.
The big question was: who would want to pot a Bowery bum? And for that I developed a variety of
ingenious answers. Here are a few:
1. The bum had managed to drift by and hear part of a supersecret conversation, maybe in involving
some brand-new scientific breakthrough, and couldn't be left alive to repeat it to anybody else.
Objection: super-secret conversations are seldom carried on around the Bowery, and it was doubtful
that, if he'd heard anything, Beer Barrel would retain much of it for any longer than ten
minutesтАФrecoverable under hypnosis, maybe, but that implies that you know exactly who and what to
look for. Improbable.
2. The bum had picked up a bit of some super-secret scientific paper, and had to be rubbed out
before he could pass it on. Objection: the same as 1. To begin with, there is really very little
super-secrecy going on near the Bowery. And one other question hard to answer: why would Beer
Barrel hang on to the paper? If he did happen to stuff it into the one pocket of his clothing that didn't have
a large hole in it, what was so tough about simply getting the paper back, and letting Beer Barrel drift on
down the street? Of course, if he'd read the paper, and it was known that he'd read it, the contents might
be recoverable hypnotically . . . but that chain of reasoning gets even more improbable than the previous
one. No.