"Frederik Pohl - Wapshot's Demon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

Wapshot's Demon
HE KEPT ME WAITING on a hard wooden bench for
three-quarters of an hour before his secretary came wan-
dering out, glanced casually at me, stopped to chat with
the switchboard girl, drifted in my direction again, paused
to straighten out the magazines on the waiting-room table,
and finally came over to tell me that the Postal Inspector
would see me now.
I was in no mood to be polite, but I was very good. I
marched in and put my briefcase on his desk and said,
"Sir, I must protest this high-handed behavior. I assure
yon, I have no client whose activities would bring him
in conflict in any way with the Post Office Department. I
said as much to one of your staff on the phone, after I
received your letter ordering me to appear here, but
they"
He stood up, smiling amiably, and shook my hand be-
fore I could get it out of the way. "That's all right," he
said cheerfully. "That's perfectly all right. We'll straighten
it out right away. What did you say your name was?"
I told him my name and started to go on with what I
had to say, but he wasn't listening. "Roger Barclay," he
repeated, looking at a pile of folders on his desk. "Bar-
clay, Barclay, Barclay. Oh, yes." He picked up one of
the folders and opened it. "The Wapshot business," he
said.
The folder seemed to contain mostly large, bright-
colored, flimsy-looking magazines entitled Secret, Most
Secret, Top Secret and Shush! He opened one of them
where a paper clip marked a place and handed it to me.
There was a small ad circled in red crayon. "That's it," he
said. "Your boy Wapshot."
The ad was of no conceivable interest to me; I barely
glanced at it, something about fortune-telling, it looked
like, signed by somebody named Cleon Wapshot at an
address in one of those little towns in Maine. I handed
it back to the Postal Inspector. "I have already mformed
you," I said, "that I have no client involved in difficulties
with the Post Office Department; that is not my sort of
practice at all. And I most certainly have no client named
aeon Wapshot."
That took some of the wind out of his sails. He looked
at me suspiciously, then took a scrawly piece of paper out
of the folder and read it over, then looked at me suspi-
ciously again. He handed over the piece of paper. "What
about this, then?" he demanded.
It was a penciled letter, addressed to the Postal In-
spector in Eastport, Maine; it said:
Dear Sir: