"Lafferty, R A - Past Master" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lafferty R A)

VHE THREE big men were met together in a
private building of one of them. There was a clattering thunder in the street outside, but the sun was shining. It was the clashing thunder of the mechanical killers, ravening and raging. They shook the building and were on the verge of pulling it down. They required the life and the blood of one of the three men and they required it immediately, now, within the hour, within the minute.
The three men gathered in the building were large physically, they were important and powerful, they were intelligent and interesting. There was a peculiar linkage between them: each believed that he controlled the other two, that he was the puppeteer and they were the puppets. And each was partly right in this belief. It made them an interlocking nexus, taut and resilient, the most intricate on Astrobe.
Cosmos Kingmaker, who was too rich. The Heraldic Lion.
Peter Proctor, who was too lucky. The Sleek Fox.
Fabian Foreman, who was too smart. The Worried Hawk.

"This is Mankind's third chance," said Kingmaker. "Ah, they're breaking the doors down again. How can we talk with it all going on?"



He took the speaking tube. "Colonel," he called out. "You have sufficient human guards. It is imperative that you disperse the riot. It is absolutely forbidden that they murder this man at this time and place. He is with us and is one of us as he has always been."
"The colonel is dead," a voice came back. "I am Captain John Chezem the Third, next in command."
"You be Colonel Chezem now," Kingmaker said. "Call out what reinforcements you need and prevent this thing."
"Foreman," said Peter Proctor softly within the room. "Whatever you are thinking this day, do not think it so strongly. I've never seen the things so avid for your life."

"It is Mankind's third chance we have been throwing away here," Kingmaker intoned to the other two in the room, speaking with great serenity considering the siege they were under. Even when he spoke quietly, Kingmaker was imposing. He had the head that should be on gold coins or on Great Seals. They called him the lion, but there were no lions on Astrobe except as statuary. He was a carven lion, cut out of the Golden Travertine, the fine yellow marble of Astrobe. He had a voice of such depth that it set up echoes even when he whispered. It was part of the aura of power that he set up about himself.
"Mankind's first chance was the Old World of Old Earth," Kingmaker said. "What went -wrong there, what continues to go wrong there, has been imperfectly analyzed. Earth is still a vital thing, and yet we must speak of it and think of it as something in the past. It didn't make it before in that Old World, and it isn't going to make it now. It has shriveled."
Thunder and bedevilment! They were howling and quaking worse than ever. They'd take the building apart stone by stone to get their prey, and they wouldn't be long about it. The mechanical killers were relentless when they came near their kill, and Fabian Foreman was their intended kill.

"Mankind's second chance was America, the New World of Old Earth," Kingmaker continued. "In one sense it was the First New World, a sort of childhood of ourselves. And Mankind experienced its second failure there. That was

8

AT THE TWENTY-FIFTH HOUR

really the end of Old Earth. She lives in our shadow now; has done so since we were big enough to cast a shadow."
Thunder, thumping thunder outsidel The screaming of maniac machinesl
"Astrobe is Mankind's third chance," continued the regal Kingmaker. "If we fail here we may not be given another opportunity. There is something of number and balance that tells us we cannot survive another loss. If we fail here we fail forever. And we are failing. Our luck has run out."
Howling, undermining, and a section o f one o f the outside walls beginning to slidel
"Our luck will never run out," Proctor stated. "We've oceans of luck still untapped. We are doing quite well."
"Those cases on Old Earth did not end in total failure," Foreman stated in a somewhat shaky voice, "though they did end in total death. And it is not a one, two, three thing. It is cyclic and it has happened many times."
It was veritable explosions outside when Foreman spoke. It was his life that the mechanical killers demanded right now. Hereafter all the conversation was a little digicult, almost submerged in the ocean of noise and violence.
"Oh my bleeding earsl They were black enough failures," Kingmaker cut back in, "but that blackness was shot full of lightning. True, there were many failures, Fabian, but I make three the magic number. The clock stood at the twentyfifth hour so often that the very survival of man through it all appears a miracle."
"Let's drag it back to daylight," Proctor growled softly above the noise that indicated that the killers had already broken into some of the upper rooms of the building. "Only ourselves are here and we are not impressed by each others' eloquence. We are here to select a candidate. We are not here to stay the crack of doom."
"Wrong, Proctor," Kingmaker rumbled like buried thunder, and Kingmaker was always impressed by his own eloquence. "We are here to stay the crack of doom. It has fallen to us three, the inner circle of the Masters, to do exactly that thing."
"Doom's been cracking for a long time, Cosmos," Proctor jibed. He was a sleek and pleasant man even when he took



exception. His voice was a sort of mechanical purr, or was that of a fox that has been eating honey.
"Aye, how it cracks!" said Kingmaker. "If you have an ear for history, Peter, you will notice that it cracks louder every time. In many ways we are a meaner people this time around. Would we three be at the top of the heap in any of the earlier orders?"
"I repeat that the earlier testings of man were not total failures," Foreman said, "and perhaps they were not failures at all. They were deaths. It is not the same thing."
The floors were being undermined. You could hear the hate-roaring o f the things underfoot now.
"There has always been a web of desperate and quite incredible triumph," Foreman continued. "The indomitableness of man has so far been the most amazing thing about him. I hate to see it going out of us." Foreman's voice did have a little of the hawk's cry in it, but also a jingle of old laughter. He was tall and graying and lined. He seemed older than the other two, and he wasn't. "We've lost so much! Every time we die we lose something. So much could have been done, so much became livid with rottenness, that we belittle what was done. So for one not quite total failure in the Old World of Old Earth we were given another life something over one thousand years ago. We were given the American thing."
"And failed even worse," Proctor purred with a sort of cheerful bitterness.
"No, we did not," Kingmaker protested. "We failed even better. It's an ascending spiral-till it breaks."
"That's true," Foreman said. "Our American failure was less nearly total. With a New World to work in, and with unlimited prospects, we limited them shamefully. There was no error of the Old World that we did not commit -again in the New World on a vaster plane. But there was another side to it. There were times when we almost balanced the loaded scales, when we reanimated both the Old and New Worlds. There were times when we won hands down when we didn't have a chance. We enlarged ourselves, the two hemispheres of us, and we set to tasks that before could not have been conceived.