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

 3. The bum was really an agent in place for somebody else. That made a certain amount of superficial
sense until I wondered about the thirty-day limit, and about returning Beer Barrel to the Bowery after the
job was over. The usual procedure with agents in place, if discovered, is either a) watch carefully, and try
to dig up the communications link and from there the rest of the apparatus, or b) dispose of immediately.
This didn't fit either procedure, and I couldn't come up with any reasons why not.
4. The bum was really a being from outer space, and ...
Well, that will give you an idea. What I'd be doing impersonating a being from outer space who was
impersonating a Bowery bum, for thirty days or less, I was completely unable to imagine.
And what any of these ideas, or any one of several others I dreamed up, had to do with my hypnotic
trigger and response, I couldn't see at all. The thing was, as far as I could get into it, absolutely senseless;
the only trouble was that we're not much given to senseless assignments.
Though that gave me a brand-new idea: suppose the whole thing were a loyalty test, designed to see
how far I'd follow orders even if I didn't and couldn't understand the reasons for them ...
I've been with Central Intelligence since 1947. It was a very strange time to pull a loyalty test on me,
after twenty-five years.
That was my last theory. By the time I had tossed it out I was on Third Avenue near Canal Street,
and I was Beer Barrel Dave Welkin.
Three weeks went by as quickly as if they'd been decades.
You have no idea how slowly time passes for a Bowery bum who doesn't drink very much. I spent
all of the time I wasn't sleeping in a scratch room or an alley, or panhandling for small change in the cheap
bars that straggle all the way up to Fourteenth Street, but I did a lot less beer-drinking than I seemed to
be doing. I couldn't afford to be too hazy when the trigger came, or I'd miss hearing it, or be unable to
move quickly, or something. And there are a lot of simple techniques for getting rid of a drink without
making it obvious you're doing soтАФespecially around the Bowery, where getting rid of a drink is just not
what people are looking to see happen.
I found a lot of crowds, mostly at the uptown end of my run: the Bowery meets both N.Y.U. and the
East Village up there, and Stuyvesant Town is only two blocks away from Fourteenth and Third, so I
made my way through a variety of student rallies, young-politics meetings, just plain political rallies and an
assortment of rush-hours, mostly evening: Beer Barrel didn't usually get up too early.
There was, of course, one candidate most of the students and youngsters favored; you know all
about that. Normally, maybe he'd have left the whole area off his speech route, but he needed some big
youth-appeal and student-appeal footage for the evening TV shows, so he scheduled an appearance at
Union SquareтАФthe uptown western edge of my daily travelsтАФfor a Friday evening.
Naturally, there was a crowd, a nice big one.
Naturally, Beer Barrel Dave was on hand.
And just as naturally, that speech went on for fifteen minutes and hit the sentence I was, by then,
half-expecting:
"It is not in our interestтАФin the interest of the people of this countryтАФto charge out to settle every
possible disagreement in the world, from possible arguments over Japanese fishing rights to putative
Czechoslovakian boundary disputesтАФ"
And I was triggered. I started for the candidate a good deal faster than Beer Barrel Dave was used
to moving.
Of course I never reached him. Somebody potted me instead.
I woke up in our New York cubby-hole, hospital sectionтАФwhere the original Beer Barrel had been
stacked away while I worked his tour. I had a large ragged hole in one shoulder, and a variety of bruises
and abrasions from hitting the pavement and being slightly trampled in the rush to collect the character
who'd tried to shoot the candidate. He was collected, naturally, before he could get off another shot, and
a small bag of psychiatrists is still going around and around about whether or not he's sane, or legally
insane, or what. The one sure thingтАФand it is sure: our section checked it out, and we don't report what
we don't know for certainтАФis that he was an individual, acting entirely on his own, with a specific grudge