"Niven, Larry - ARM 1 - ARM" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

I had punched in the instructions and was relaxing with more coffee and a cigarette when Ordaz called.
Detective-Inspector Julio Ordaz was a slender, dark-skinned man with straight black hair and soft black eyes. The first time I saw him in a phone screen, he had been telling me of a good friend's murder. Two years later I still flinched when I saw him.
"Hello, Julio. Business or pleasure?"
"Business, Gil. It is to be regretted."
"Yours or mine?"
"Both. There is murder involved, but there is also a machine ... Look, can you see it behind me?" Ordaz stepped out of the field of view, then reached invisibly to turn the phone camera.
I looked into somebody's living room. There was a wide circle of discoloration in the green indoor grass rug. In the center of the circle, a machine and a man's body.
Was Julio putting me on? The body was old, half-mummified. The machine was big and cryptic in shape, and it glowed with a subdued, eerie blue light.
Ordaz sounded serious enough. "Have you ever seen anything like this?"
"No. That's some machine." Unmistakably an experimental device: no neat plastic case, no compactness, no assembly-line welding. Too complex to examine through a phone camera, I decided. "Yah, that looks like something for us. Can you send it over?"
Ordaz came back on. He was smiling, barely. "I'm afraid we cannot do that. Perhaps you should send someone here to look at it."
"Where are you now?"
"In Raymond Sinclair's apartment on the top floor of the Rodewald Building in Santa Monica."
"I'll come myself," I said. My tongue suddenly felt thick.
"Please land on the roof. We are holding the elevator for examination."
"Sure." I hung up.
Raymond Sinclair!
I'd never met Raymond Sinclair. He was something of a recluse. But the ARM had dealt with him once in connection with one of his inventions, the FyreStop device. And everyone knew that he had lately been working on an interstellar drive. It was only a rumor, of course ... but if someone had killed the brain that held that secret...
I went.
* * * *
The Rodewald Building was forty stories of triangular prism with a row of triangular balconies going up each side. The balconies stopped at the thirty-eighth floor.
The roof was a garden. There were rosebushes in bloom along one edge, full-grown elms nestled in ivy along another, and a miniature forest of bonsai trees along the third. The landing pad and carport were in the center. A squad car floated down ahead of my taxi, then slid under the carport to give me room to land.
A cop in a vivid orange uniform came out to watch me come down. He was carrying a deep-sea fishing pole, still in its kit.
He said, "May I see some ID, please?"
I had my ARM ident in my hand. He checked it in the console in the squad car, then handed it back. "The inspector's waiting downstairs," he said.
"What's the pole for?"
He smiled suddenly, almost secretively. "You'll see."
We left the garden smells via a flight of concrete stairs. They led down into a small room half-full of gardening tools and a heavy door with a spy-eye in it. Ordaz opened the door for us. He shook my hand briskly, glanced at the cop. "You found something? Good."
The cop said, "There's a sporting goods store six blocks from here. The manager let me borrow it. He made sure I knew the name of the store."
"Yes, there will certainly be publicity on this matter. Come, Gil." Ordaz took my arm. "You should examine this before we turn it off."
No garden smells here, but there was something -- a whiff of something long dead -- that the air-conditioning hadn't quite cleared away. Ordaz walked me into the living room.
It looked like somebody's idea of a practical joke.
The indoor grass covered Sinclair's living room floor, wall to wall. In a perfect fourteen-foot circle between the sofa and the fireplace, the rug was brown and dead. Elsewhere it was green and thriving.
A man's mummy, dressed in stained slacks and turtleneck, lay on its back in the center of the circle. At a guess it had been about six months dead. It wore a big wristwatch with extra dials on the face and a fine-mesh platinum band, loose now around a wrist of bones and brown skin. The back of the skull had been smashed open, possibly by the classic blunt instrument lying next to it.
If the fireplace was false -- it almost had to be; nobody burns wood -- the fireplace instruments were genuine nineteenth- or twentieth-century antiques. The rack was missing a poker. A poker lay inside the circle, in the dead grass next to the disintegrating mummy.
The glowing device sat just in the center of the magic circle.
I stepped forward, and a man's voice spoke sharply. "Don't go inside that circle of rug. It's more dangerous than it looks."
It was a man I knew: Officer-One Valpredo, a tall man with a small, straight mouth and a long, narrow Italian face.
"Looks dangerous enough to me," I said.
"It is. I reached in there myself," Valpredo told me, "right after we got here. I thought I could flip the switch off. My whole arm went numb. Instantly. No feeling all. I yanked it away fast, but for a minute or so after that my whole arm was dead meat. I thought I'd lost it. Then it was all pins and needles, like I'd slept on it."
The cop who had brought me in had almost finished assembling the deep-sea fishing pole.
Ordaz waved into the circle. "Well? Have you ever seen anything like this?"
I shook my head, studying the violet-glowing machine. "Whatever it is, it's brand-new. Sinclair's really done it this time."
An uneven line of solenoids was attached to a plastic frame with homemade joins. Blistered spots on the plastic showed where other objects had been attached and later removed. A breadboard bore masses of heavy wiring. There were six big batteries hooked in parallel and a strange, heavy piece of sculpture in what we later discovered was pure silver, with wiring attached at three curving points. The silver was tarnished almost black, and there were old file marks at the edges.
Near the center of the arrangement, just in front of the silver sculpture, were two concentric solenoids embedded in a block of clear plastic. They glowed blue shading to violet. So did the batteries. A less perceptible violet glow radiated from everywhere on the machine, more intensely in the interior parts.
That glow bothered me more than anything else. It was too theatrical. It was like something a special effects man might add to a cheap late-night thriller to suggest a mad scientist's laboratory.
I moved around to get a closer look at the dead man's watch.
"Keep your head out of the field!" Valpredo said sharply. I nodded. I squatted on my heels outside the borderline of dead grass.
The dead man's watch was going like crazy. The minute hand was circling the dial every seven seconds or so. I couldn't find the second hand at all.
I backed away from the arc of dead grass and stood up. Interstellar drive, hell. This blue-glowing monstrosity looked more like a time machine gone wrong.