"Henry Kuttner - The Lion and the Unicorn UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

This was it.
It was past midnight. In the cellar laboratory, McNey leaned back in his chair, wincing as he felt the pressure of the bandages about his ribs. He blinked at the fluorescents, sighed, and rubbed his forehead.
His hand hovered over the notepad. An equation was lacking. He wasn't quite ready to think of it just yet.
But the job was almost finished. It would give the Baldies a weapon, at last, against the paranoids. They couldn't tap the paranoid's secret wave length, but they could-
Not yet. Don't think of it yet.
Even Line had helped, unknowingly, by one suggestion he had made. Mimicry. Yes, that was one answer. The paranoids would not even suspect-
Not yet.
Well, Line had gone back to his Hedgehound tribe and his Hedgehound squaw. In the end, the psychological fixation implanted in the boy's mind had proved stronger than the strong bonds of race. Too bad, because Line had had something that few Baldies possessed-an innate hardness, a resourceful strength that might prove useful in the dark days that were coming.
The dark days that might yet be postponed, for a while, if-
Marian was asleep. McNey forced his thought from her. After years of marriage, they were so closely attuned that even that casual thought might waken her. And not until she had fallen asleep had he dared tp bring his mind to bear on this ultimate problem. There could be no secrets between Baldies.
But this would be a secret-the one that would give Dave
Barton a weapon against the paranoids. It was the unbreakable code that McNey had searched for for two years now.
It was a secret method of communication for Baldies.
Now. Work fast. Work fast!
McNey's stylus moved rapidly. He made a few adjustments in the machine before him, sealed its fastenings thoroughly, and watched power-flow develop. After a while, something came out of a small opening at one end of the device, a fine mesh of wire, with a few flatly curved' attachments. McNey took off his wig, fitted the wire cap to his head, and donned the wig again. After a glance at a mirror, he nodded, satisfied.
The machine was permanently set now to construct these communicator caps when raw materials were fed into it. The matrix, the blueprint, had been built into the device, and the end result was a communicator gadget, easily hidden under a wig, which every non-paranoid Baldy probably would eventually wear. As for the nature of the gadget-
The problem had been to find a secret means of communication, akin to the paranoids' untappable wave band. And telepathy itself is simply a three-phase oscillation of electromagneto-gravitic energy, emanating from the specialized colloid of the human brain. But telepathy, per se, can be received by any sensitive mind en rapport with the sender.
And so the trick had been-find a method of artificial transmission. The brain, when properly stimulated by electric energy, will give out electromagnet-gravitic energy, undetect-able except to telepaths because there are no instruments sensitive to this output. But when the paranoids would receive such radiations, without the unscrambling assistance of one of McNey's little caps, they wouldn't suspect a code.
Because they'd be hearing-sensing-only static.
It was a matter of camouflage. The waves masqueraded. They masqueraded on a wave band that nobody used, for that particular band was too close to that of the radio communicators used in thousands of private helicopters. For these radios, five thousand megacycles was normal; fifteen thousand manifested itself as a harmless harmonic static, and McNey's device simply added more squirts of static to that harmonic interference.
True, direction finders could receive the signals and locate them-but helicopters, like Baldies, were scattered all over the country, and the race traveled a good deal, both by
necessity and by choice. The paranoids could locate the source of the fifteen thousand megacycles emanating from the wire caps-but why should they think to?
It was an adaptation of the Hedgehounds' code of imitating bird and animal calls. A tenderfoot in the woods wouldn't look for a language in the cry of an owl-and the paranoids wouldn't be seeking secret messages in what was apparently only static.
So, in these light, easily disguised mesh helmets, the problem was solved, finally. The power source would be an automatic tapping of free energy, an imperceptible drain on any nearby electrical generator, and the master machine itself, which made the communicators, was permanently sealed. No one, except McNey himself, knew even the principles of the new communication system. And, since the machine would be guarded well, the paranoids would never know, any more than Barton himself would know, what made the gadget tick. Barton would realize its effectiveness, and that was all. The list of raw materials needed was engraved on the feeder-hopper of the machine; nothing else was necessary. So Barton would possess no secrets to betray inadvertently to the paranoids, for the secrets were all sealed in the machine, and in one other place.
McNey took off the wire cap and laid it on the table. He turned off the machine. Then, working quickly, he destroyed the formulas and any traces of notes or raw materials. He wrote a brief note to Barton, explaining what was necessary.
There was no more time left after that. McNey sank back in his chair, his tired, ordinary face without expression. He didn't look like a hero. And, just then, he wasn't thinking about the future of the Baldy race, or the fact that the other place where the secret was sealed was in his brain.
As his hands loosened the bandage about his ribs, he was thinking of Marian. And as his life began to flow out with the blood from his reopened wound, he thought: / wish I could say good-by to you, Marian. But I mustn't touch you, not even with my mind. We're too close. You'd wake up, and-
1 hope you won't be. too lonely, my dear-
He was going back. The Hedgehounds weren't his people, but Cassie was his wife. And so he had betrayed his own race, betrayed the future itself, perhaps, and followed the
wandering tribe across three states until now, with the autumn winds blowing coldly through bare leaves, he had come to the end of his search. She was there, waiting. She was there, just beyond that ridge. He could feel it, sense it, and his heart stirred to the homecoming.
Betrayal, then. One man could not matter in the life of a race. There would be a few Baldy children less than if he had married Alexa. The Baldies would have to work out then- own salvation-
But he wasn't thinking about that as he leaped the last hurdle and ran to where Cassie was sitting near the fire. He was thinking about Cassie, and the glossy darkness of her hair, and the soft curve of her cheek. He called her name, again and again.
She didn't believe it at first. He saw doubt in her eyes and in her mind. But that doubt faded when he dropped beside her, a strange figure in his exotic town clothing, and took her hi his arms.
"Line," she said, "you've come back."
He managed to say, "I've come back," and stopped talking and thinking for a while. It was a long time before Cassie thought to show him something in which he might be expected to evince interest.
He did. His eyes widened until Cassie laughed and said that it wasn't the first baby in the world.
"I... us ... you mean-"
"Sure. Us. This is Line Junior. How'd you like him? He takes after his dad, too."
"What?"
"Hold him." As Cassie put the baby into his arms, Line saw what she meant. The small head was entirely hairless, and there was no sign of lashes or eyebrows.
"But... you ain't bald, Cassie. How-"
"You sure are, though, Line. That's why."
Line put his free arm around her and drew her close. He couldn't see the future; he couldn't realize the implications of this first attempt at mixing races. He only knew a profound and inarticulate relief that his child was like himself. It went deeper than the normal human desire to perpetuate one's own kind. This was reprieve. He had not, after all, wholly failed his race. Alexa would never bear his children, but his children need not be of alien stock in spite of it.
That deep warping which the Hedgehounds had wrought
upon himself must not happen to the child. /'// train him, he thought. He'll know from the start-he'll learn to be proud he's a Baldy. And then if they ever need him . . . no, if We ever need him . . . he'll be ready where I failed.
The race would go on. -It was good and satisfying and right that the union of Baldy and human could result in Baldy children. The line need not come to dead end because a man married outside his own kind. A man must follow his instinct, as Line had done. It was good to belong to a race that allowed even that much treason to its tradition, and exacted no lasting penalty. The line was too strong to break. The dominant strain would go on.
Perhaps McNey's invention could postpone the day of the pogrom. Perhaps it could not. But if the day came, still the Baldies would go on. Underground, hidden, persecuted, still they must go on. And perhaps it would be among the Hedge-hounds that the safest refuge could be found. For they had an emissary there, now-
Maybe this was right, Line thought, his arm around Cassie and the child. Once I belonged here. Now I don't. I'll never be happy for good in the old life. I know too much- But here I'm a link between the public life and the secret life of the refugees. Maybe some day they'll need that link. "Line," he mused, and grinned.
Off in the distance a growl of song began to lift. The tribesmen, coming back from the day's hunting. He was surprised, a little, to realize he felt no more of the old, deep, bewildered distrust of them. He understood now. He knew them as they could never know themselves, and he had learned enough in the past months to evaluate that knowledge. Hedgehounds were no longer the malcontents and misfits of civilization. Generations of weeding-out had distilled them. Americans had always been a distillation in themselves of the pioneer, the adventurous drawn from the old world. The buried strain came out again in their descendants. The Hedgehounds were nomads now, yes; they were woodsmen, yes; they were fighters, always. So were the first Americans. The same hardy stock that might, some day, give refuge again to the oppressed and the hunted.
The song grew louder through the trees, Jesse James Hart-well's roaring bass leading all the others.