"(novel) (ebook) - Perry Rhodan 0070 - (62) The Last Days of Atlantis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Rhodan)

With affected indifference I turned to look at the little 3-foot creature who, like myself, had not been born on Earth. Rhodan had aptly dubbed him 'Pucky' because of the mischievous sprightliness in his big, shining eyes. He differed, however, from Shakespeare's immortalized imp in that he was a combination of a giant mouse and a beaver with a furry, spoon-shaped tail. The intelligent little fellow stood on 2 short legs which were encased in an elegant pair of custom-made hip-boots. In addition, Pucky wore the pale green space uniform of the Solar Empire. Gleaming on his left shoulder was the insignia of a lieutenant in the secret Mutant Corps.
This comical-appearing character was nonetheless a sly one, obviously loaded with guile clear up to his floppy ears. Ever since I had come to know him, from the time of my flight to Venus, we had enjoyed a curious sort of friendship which mostly found its expression in cryptic remarks and subtle arguments.
"Hello, tattletale," I greeted him. "Would you perhaps be the 'glider' Perry promised me?"
The long mouse muzzle opened. I looked with fascination at Pucky's single, large, incisor tooth, which he was fond of displaying at every opportunity. The non-Earthling's shrill laughter was painful to my ears but when it stopped suddenly I was startled. Since the time on Venus when I had thrown a piece of rotted wood at his head, I knew that he normally laughed long and heartily. The members of his race had an insatiable appetite for play. Laughing and fooling around were all a part of this characteristic.
The mousebeaver made a grandiose gesture with his hands. "I am the glider," he announced. "Give me your hand, spy!"
I frowned slightly as I watched the easygoing little fellow waddle toward me. To him I was still an Arkonide spy. When he was next to me I bent down and took hold of his arm without a word. He was light in weight, perhaps too much so for his height. Probably the creatures from the planet Vagabond possessed very delicate skeletons, which was certainly offset by the power of their brains.
Pucky's large eyes were fixed upon my face. His incisor tooth had disappeared inside his mouth. We looked at each other for several moments in silence, during which I sensed that he was trembling with an inner turmoil. He did not attempt to probe my mind by means of his telepathic gift. I had become accustomed for some years now to shield my brain behind a closed screen.
"What's the matter?" I asked. "You seem to be acting a bit strangely. Since when have you been satisfied to merely call me a spy? You usually have a few rascally comments to make, on top of your normal insults. So...?"
I saw him clench his little fists momentarily and then he grasped my arm with both hands. "Do you know how the cell shower works? I mean-can you calculate its effects or maybe redesign it?"
His voice was shriller than usual. He spoke swiftly and with a surprising earnestness. The pressure of his little hands increased. The mousebeaver was very deeply disturbed.
"Well, the technical concept is fairly understandable," I replied cautiously. "But just knowing the function of a decomposition field is still a long way from comprehending the resulting biochemical processes. After all, I..."
"Hold on tight," he interrupted me. "We'll jump together. You have to get to the shower chamber. Oh gosh, I can hardly concentrate!"
I noted that he was extraordinarily pressed to achieve the condition he required and I asked him several times to tell me what was agitating him so.
"Bell!" he exclaimed, trembling in his anxiety. "It's Bell! He was in the cell shower machine when the phase-distortion started. Something's happened to him. No, wait-don't think so hard. You're sending out interference impulses. That makes it hard for a teleporter to transfer you. Don't think of anything-tighten up your defence screen!"
To me it seemed as if this whole accursed world were coming apart. On the one hand, Rhodan fired off one of his heaviest guns, and on the other hand here was unquestionably his most capable mutant, trembling with fear for Reginald Bell.
I conquered my nervousness and strove to screen off my brain waves. Moments later I felt a quick, painful tug. Pucky and I had made our 'jump', as he blithely referred to the complicated process of building up a mass transfer field in the 5th dimension.
When I rematerialised I recognized the inner contours of the pillared Physiotron chamber. A tall, lean figure slowly approached me. In Rhodan's eyes was a frightening coldness. I had seen this look on his face once before when we had faced each other on a desolate world in mortal combat.
He came quite close before he stopped. "How good is your arithmetic, Admiral?" he asked. I think I've run out of numbers." He stepped to one side so that I could see the cell-activation converter.
Close to the colour-marked ring of the safety zone stood a young officer with a stubble of rusty red hair and a smooth, unwrinkled face. I had to look carefully to be convinced that it was Reginald Bell, Something seemed to stick in my throat. I almost staggered as I walked toward the danger zone. The man with the water-blue eyes did not move.
I searched for the deep furrows that had been etched into Bell's forehead during the past few years. The first wrinkles of care of course had appeared long before after his first Moon landing, which he had made in the company of the expedition leader, Perry Rhodan. On the 14th of May 2042, Bell would complete his 104th year of life. At this moment it was May 5 of that year, so his birthday was only a few days away.
Some 62 years before today, he and Rhodan had both received their first biological cell shower on Wanderer. 5 days ago he had entered the Physiotron a 2nd time in order to submit to the indispensable cell activation process.
I risked still another step before I stopped. This young man with the smooth, barely distinguished features-was this Reginald Bell, Rhodan's 2nd-in-command?
"Reginald, is it really you?" I asked falteringly
The full young lips hardly moved. His stocky, broad-shouldered physique revealed less fat around the hips than I had been accustomed to seeing.
"This is the way I was back in the 60s, more or less," he answered tonelessly, "when a certain Gen. Pounder sent me to the new Space Academy. At that time I was 27 years old."
A sense of horror welled up within me. Simultaneously I received a signal from my auxiliary brain, which had been activated thousands of years ago on Arkon. The message from its logic transmitter was short: "Beware-breakdown during the 2nd cell shower. Regeneration can be retrogressive. He is becoming younger!"
This awareness was like a blow to the face. I struggled to hold on to my self-composure. My smile must have looked sickly, if anything, but Bell did not seem to notice it. I could sense that this energetic man had inwardly given up any hope of survival.
I turned to look at the others behind me. In addition to Rhodan, only the scientists and officers of the Drusus were in evidence. Dr. Arnulf Skjoldson, chief medical officer, stood next to Dr. Ali el Jagat, head of the mathematical department.
Jagat's thin, aquiline face remained expressionless as he handed me a sheet of synthetic material on which a line diagram had been drawn. Without preliminaries he plunged into his explanation. Which I could understand because I sensed that there was no time to lose. It would have been purposeless to try discussing all the whys and wherefores of Bell's life and destiny. So it was typical of Jagat to call out the facts as he saw them:
"This is the first evaluation, Admiral. At the present moment Bell is at a stage which represents the 32nd year of his life. Those pulse spikes show the beginning of the retrogression process. The flatter curves mark the time-lapse since the 2nd activation. The chart is saying that an uninterrupted development of the process will bring him to a critical phase within about 60 hours. If we don't do anything to stop it, within 3 weeks he'll be a babbling baby."
The mental image of Bell as a flailing, kicking infant might have been amusing under less tragic circumstances but here there was no one who seemed to be amused in the slightest degree. The chart was the result of a test computer run and it didn't require a mathematician to determine when the critical point would arrive.
I looked searchingly at the doctor. Skjoldson made a helpless gesture with his hands. A mop of his straw-blond hair hung over his furrowed brow. "You have no solution, doctor?" I asked him.
"None! What has happened here with this equipment goes beyond my comprehension. I don't even understand the purely physical processes involved-and that goes for the biochemical changes as well. It is incredible to me that a maturely developed man should become younger. This goes against all the laws of Nature."
"Like everything else on this artificial planet," interjected Bell tonelessly. "OK, you can cut the chatter, men. No diapers for me. Before I get to that stage, count me out-curtains!"
His youthful face was grim. He looked at each of us, devoid of any hope. Finally his attention was focussed upon a tall, lean figure back in the entrance hall. I followed his gaze.
We had given the biopositronic robot the name of Homunk, which was short for homunculus. He was the product of what had to be considered an exclusive and esoteric science. He could not have been constructed more perfectly without coming close to duplicating the work of the Creator.
Homunk's biosynthetic facial film exhibited a compulsory smile. Beneath the virtually living yet synthetic tissue of his bodily 'flesh' envelope operated a mechanism that had no counterpart in the known galaxy.
The fully positronic micro-laminar brain was more efficient than I had ever seen in the best of our own machines. In this highly complex computer brain there were more circuit elements packed into the space of a cubic centimetre than we could have stored effectively into a cubic yard and still get anywhere near the same performance. Its electronic speed was something like 80 million bits of information per second. How big the memory storage was we did not know. In any case, Homunk was something that one could designate as being perfect.
His builder-designer had fashioned him in the outward appearance of a human or an Arkonide. His speaking mechanism was a biological masterpiece. Using a positronic oscillator, it could convert electromagnetic control pulses into understandable and perfectly modulated words, with the help of its semi-organic vocal cords. Homunk was a walking miracle-but at present he seemed to be failing us miserably.
Rhodan beckoned to the robot. He approached with swinging, elastic strides. His stereotyped smile provoked me into making an unfriendly remark. "It appears to me that your great master has come to the end of his wits. Where is that creature and all of his roaring laughter now?"
Homunk came to a stop and his ersatz eyes looked at me. He called me "Sir", as he did everybody. "Since his escape from semispace he has not communicated, Sir. I am disquieted."
A cosmonaut officer from the Drusus laughed humourlessly at the idea of a robot being worried about anything. But then silence pervaded the large chamber.
At this moment I knew that the 2nd catastrophe had just made its appearance. It had disappeared! The being in whom the mentalities of millions of disembodied intelligences were combined into a titanic psychic force seemed not to have survived the chaos of the return out of semispace. At the moment, we ourselves were practically the proprietors and rulers of the synthetic planet Wanderer.
Perry Rhodan only looked at me. He had apparently asked his decisive questions before my arrival so now he left the initiative to me.
Inwardly I began to despair. People of my race do not perspire; however, I felt a dampness around my eyes. My logic sector remained stubbornly silent. Apparently even my auxiliary brain saw no practicable way out.
Since my silence persisted, Rhodan interjected his thoughts. "Homunk has suggested that we reconstruct the entire experiment-and repeat it. Some weeks ago Wanderer was trapped by an overlap of the Druuf timeplane. Owing to the forceful method of its escape, the planet landed in an unstable intermediate dimension. If we were to deliberately penetrate the time wall again and risk making an escape under the same conditions we would actually have to land in semispace. Circumstances permitting, Bell could then reenter the cell shower."
Rhodan's cryptic smile indicated to me that he did not consider the plan to be very promising.
I bluntly rejected the idea. "Impossible! How are you going to get the titanic mass of a celestial body like this through the warpfield?"
"With the powerful equipment available here we could generate a correspondingly large energy-lens to gate us through."
I made a negative gesture. It was senseless to even discuss it.