"Morrison, William - The Sly Bungerhop v1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morrison William)

Colmer was suddenly conscious of two things, one of them obvious because it was positive, the other negative and hard to trace.
The obvious thing was that this was, indeed, a young lady Чor a doll. The face was a doll's face, with bright, unwinking blue eyes, pink and almost inhumanly perfect features.
The negative thing was harder. Something was missing. And then, in a moment, it came to him. She didn't smell.
Colmer was no lady's man, but he had not completely isolated himself from them. Moreover, he read the magazines andЧthat unfailing barometer of what their readers really likedЧthe advertisements the magazines contained. He knew that no self-respecting American girl would be caught dead without at least a few drops of scent behind each ear and maybe some sort of perfumed liquid or spray on the hair, plus, of course, something dainty-smelling to protect her from perspiration all day or all week long.
But there was no odor whatsoever to the bright and doll-like operator of the car.
She said, inches from his face, "You get out here, sir. Ninety-nine."
A little afraid of her and more than a little perplexed, Colmer stepped out. She was pretty but vacuous and insistently repetitious. He wondered if it was worth his while to ask the elevator starter about her. The starter should be right there, under the clock, or chatting with the owner of the cigar standЧ
Colmer looked blearily and wonderingly around him. No elevator starter. No cigar stand. No clock.
Wherever he was, and his myopic vision made it more than merely hard to tell, he was not in the lobby of the Pinkstone Building, where de Wike had his offices.
As far as he could tell, he wasn't in a lobby at all.
There was a droning electrical sound in the air and a faint, sneezy tang of ozone. Long, glowing corridors spread away from him on either side, and though he could see no details, he could at least see that some of the glowing light came from objects in motion along the corridors.
He peered unbelieving, shaking his nearly blind head. This was the end, he thought sourly. If this was some trick of de Wike'sЧif somehow de Wike had conspired with the operator to bring him to the basement of the building orЧNo. None of that was possible.
Colmer reached out one hand to the wall of the corridor for support, more moral than real, and recoiled. The wall was tingling and warm; it seemed to be vibrating.
He screwed his eyes shut and opened them again. Near-sightedness was sometimes an oddly comforting affliction; by being unable to see much of the world around one without glasses, one had sometimes the impression of being wrapped in warm and fuzzy cotton batting, insulated from harm.
But not this time.
This time, Colmer didn't like the world around him and he wanted to know it better.
He opened his eyes and placed his index fingers on the skin at the corners of the eyes, pulling them taut and Oriental. Generally that helped; deforming the eyeball by a little outside pressure sometimes partly took the place of glasses ...
Well, no. Or did it? He couldn't tell. The vaguely glowing nimbuses of light that he could see moving did lose some of their fuzziness, but they were warped and distorted into shapes be couldn't recognizeЧ
Or didn't want to.
He shook his head again and felt the beginning tremor of physical fear.
It was all right for philosophers, he thought numbly, to talk of being unable to distinguish dream from reality. Maybe they didn't know whether they were Chinese sages or blue-bottle flies, but maybe they spent their time in a daze anyhow. Not Colmer. He knew: he wasn't dreaming. This was incredible, but it was real. You don't have to pinch yourself to find out if you're awake. You just know. When you stop knowing, you'reЧ
You're crazy, he finished.
He put that out of his mind, though not easily; but if he was crazy, there didn't seem to be anything he could do about it.
Drunk, maybe? No, he hadn't had a drink that dayЧde Wike, that skunk, hadn't taken him to lunch.
Hypnotized? No, that was also pretty improbable; he had seen no one but de Wike; and de Wike, whose personality was neither electric nor even quite bearable, was not the sort of person who could hypnotize another. De Wike couldn't hypnotize a poet, much less a science fiction novelist, always alert for plot gimmicks.
That seemed to leave insanity.
Well, Colmer thought gloomily, facing up to it, most writers were nuts anyway, or else they would be real estate salesmen, where the big money was, or editorsЧ De Wike kept pestering him about heading their science fiction department. If that was the only remaining possibility, by all the laws of scientific evidence Colmer had painstakingly learned at the feet of such Titans as Einstein, Jeans and Sherlock Holmes, then it had to be accepted as true.
UnlessЧ
He laughed ruefully. It was a silly thought, but there was one other possibility.
Suppose, for instance, that maybe one of the stories he made his living by wasЧwell, true?
It was funny. More than funnyЧit was downright hilarious; he was beginning to drink the stuff he made himself. But just suppose, he thought, stretching the corners of his eyes in a vain attempt to see just what the devil it was he had got into, just suppose there really was such a thing as, for example, a weak spot in the paratime web. Whatever that was.
He'd used it glibly enough in stories and he had intended it to mean that certain places might be sort of gateways between the familiar world of H-bombs and TV commercials andЧdifferent worlds. Parallel worlds, in a space of more than four dimensions.
Suppose it was true? Suppose the elevator had somehow transported him into an if world or maybe another planet?
There was a strange taste at the back of Colmer's mouth. He looked around him with effort. Wherever he looked, the walls glowed with light. The ceilingЧhigh overhead, as far as he could tellЧalso glowed. The light varied in color, but his eyes, even pulled out of shape, were too inefficient to pick out details. In some places, the lights were moving.
Now what would that be? A factory, perhaps?
He suddenly got part of the answer. People, he thought. People walking. Their clothes were luminous as the walls; maybe that was the moving blobs of light.
Colmer took a deep breath and walked toward the moving lights.
The confounded things pursued their own paths. He selected a lavender pair of blobs, hurried toward them; they were gone. Ducked into a doorway? He couldn't tell. Disappointed, he stopped short.
A pale blue glow appeared and came toward him. When it was a dozen feet away, he saw that it was in fact the approximate size and shape of a man. He cleared his throat and blocked the path.
The pale blue glow said, "You-all tucker me?"
Colmer jumped; deep-south Alabama he had not expected. He asked, "What?"
"Dassita say. Tucker me?"
Colmer said miserably, "I don't know what you're talking about. All I know is I pushed the up button andЧwell, here I am."
The man in glowing blue said something quick and impatient; Colmer couldn't even hear him, much less understand. He turned away and called something to a glow of muted rose that was approaching down the hall. It sounded like, "Putta sly bungerhop"; there was more to it, but not that Colmer could understand.
The rose glow came closer and, in turn, revealed itself to be human.
There was a very quick, low-voiced conference, and then the rose glow said, "Que veut-vous?"
French, thought Colmer. Could he be suddenly in France? He said slowly, "I only speak English. Can you tell me where I am?"
Click-popЧit was the sound the elevator operator had made, like popping bubble-gum. Then the man in glowing rose said, "You are in the Palace Building, on the tenth floor. Can't you see the signs?" It was a pleasant, reassuring voice Чbut accented somehow. The accent was not French, whatever it was.
Colmer said doubtfully, "I can't see much of anything. My eyes are bad and I've broken my spectacles."
"Ah," said the pale blue glow in a tone of satisfaction, "putta sly bungerhop."