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

"Wayman," the rose glow said, and then, to Colmer, "You came in the slide?"
"I came in the elevator, if that's what you mean."
There was a silence, as though the man were studying him.
Colmer made himself say, with studied indifference, "just as a matter of curiosity, could you tell me what planet we're on?"
The man laughed, but there was a puzzled wonder in his laughter. "Excuse me," he said, "we're rushed just nowЧ" He began to move away.
"Please," Colmer begged blindly. "I'm serious. Are we onЧuhЧthe planet Earth?"
"Of course!"
"How far away is the Sun?"
"The Sun?" Pause. "I don't know. Ninety million miles, something like that."
"How many moons?"
The man laughed again, but with a definite note of strain. He backed away. He must think I'm crazy, thought Colmer, and small wonder!
"Wait!" Colmer called. "Look, can you tell meЧlet's see, can you tell me where the manager is?"
There would have to be a manager, or something like a manager, and maybe that would get him to someone who could explain things.
"Manager?" The voice was doubtful. "I don't knowЧoh, I see. Front office, eh? First floor."
"Thanks," said Colmer gratefully. "How do I get there?" "Side drop," the man said impatiently.
"What's that?" Colmer begged, but the man was gone.
Colmer cursed to himself. He should have saved a few choice words, he thought, and not wasted them all on an innocent like de Wike. He had never before met such unhelpful people.
Still, maybe things weren't so bad. Side drop. Maybe
He moved over to the side of the corridor. That might be the "side" part. He stuck his nose close to the wall and moved along until he found a pattern of lights that seemed to offer some help. The glow of lights in his nearsighted eyes nearly blinded him, but at least he could distinguish the fine details in the difference of color.
These marks were red letters against a glowing gray backgroundЧsyncopated, sketchy letters that formed misspelled words: "Hozontal transmit," "Noth End," "Wes End," and Ч"Syd Drop."
This was the place, all right. Now what?
He ran his eyes along the walls. No buttons to push. Apparently there was some trick to it. He gingerly felt the wall all around the glowing words "Syd Drop"
It vanished. The floor fell away from beneath him.
For a second, he was petrified, and then some invisible force steadied him and he came to a stop.
Now where was he?
There were more moving lights here than on the tenth floor and some of them were approaching him.
"Excuse me," he said, clutching at the nearest. "I'd like to talk to the manager, please, or whatever you call him."
CIick-pop again. A woman's voice this time. "Manager? One who managesЧoh, North Transmit."
Apparently even the females of these people were sparing of words. He sighed and stuck his face up against a wall again. This time he knew what to expect and he was not surprised when he suddenly felt himself clutched, whirled and carried rapidly in a horizontal direction. Off the "Noth Transmit," he stared around, stretching his eyes, which were beginning to water and ache very much.
There was a large glowing patch of white light set in the middle of the gray, and a greenish glow moving toward it. He intersected the greenish glow. "Is this the manager's officeЧI mean the front office?"
The greenish glow growled at him and moved away. Colmer hesitated. Then he heard voices coming from behind the glowing patch of white. He moved toward it slowly.
One of the voices was familiar. It was saying, "Thing temple sly. Putta bungerhop, thing."
Colmer pulled at his aching eyes again and saw, through the square of white, two lesser glows, one violet, one a familiar blue. That was the voice. It was the man he had met back on the tenth floor, here before him.
Colmer sighed and felt his way through the glowing white door. As long as the man was going this way anyhow, why hadn't he escorted Colmer and spared him the nearly impossible job of finding his own way here?
These people, curse their inconsiderateness!
Colmer said loudly, "I'd like to speak to the manager."
There was no click-pop this time; the man answered him at once in English. "About what you're doing here?" The voice was again accented, but in a way like nothing Colmer had ever heard.
"That's right," Colmer said doggedly. "How did I get here?"
"That's what I was going to ask you," said the manager. "Do you have a permit for the temporal slide?"
"The what?" Colmer gritted his teeth. "Look, I was waiting for the elevator. I pushed the button marked `Up' and the elevator stopped andЧ"
"Temple sly bungerhop!" crowed the enraging blue glow. The violet one, the manager, said, "Wait a minute. Where were' you when this happened?"
"WhyЧthe Pinkstone Building. The twentieth floor. That's the top floor, you see, so I wondered about that button. But I had just broken my glasses and I couldn't see very well, soЧwell, here I am."
There was a rapid and confused babbling among the glows Чmore voices than two, Colmer realized, and by squeezing his eyes again, he discovered that there were at least half a dozen persons in the room. Colmer couldn't follow a word of it, though it had a haunting familiarity, like syncopated and slurred English, until the violet-glowing manager's voice said, "Wait a minute until everyone gets his translator on."
There was a series of tiny click-pops.
"Now," said the manager, "you'd better explain." His tone was mild, but it seemed to carry a threat.
Colmer said bravely, "I've got nothing to explain. I never saw this place before in my life. I've had the devil of a time getting aroundЧpractically had to feel my wayЧand your people weren't very helpful, either. They didn't tell me a thing except how to reach this place."
Pause. Then the manager's voice said meditatively, "That may be just as well. What do you think, Arrax?"
A silvery glow just within the range of Colmer's vision said, "But how did he find the temporal slide?"
"What about that?" the manager demanded. "What were you doing just before that?"
"WhyЧ" Colmer stopped, remembering. "I was talking to my publisher. We'd been discussing a new book of mineЧI'm a science fiction writer, you see. The book was about the thirty-first century. I said the thirty-first century was likely to be a harsh, mechanisticЧ"