"Pohl, Frederik & Williamson, Jack - Starchild 01-03 - The Starchild Trilogy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

"Where is it?" Oporto grumbled, looking around. A harsh light flooded the grimy platforms, glittering on the huge aluminum balloons that lay in their cradles outside the vacuum locks. Men with trucks and cranes were loading a long row of freightspheres in th_ platform next to theirs; a little cluster of passengers began to appear down the moving stairs of a platform a hundred yards away. Oporto said abruptly: "I'll give you six to five the next train in is ours."
"No bet." Ryeland knew better than to take him up. But he hoped the little man was right. It was cold on the platform. Chill air roared around them from the ventilators; Oporto, already chilled, sneezed and began to sniffle. Ryeland himself was shivering in his thin maximum-security denims.
At the camp, when their travel orders came through, regulations demanded a thorough medical examination before they left. That was the rule under the Plan, and
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the examination included a steaming shower. "They want nice clean meat at the Body Bank," the guard guffawed; but Ryeland paid no attention. He couldn't afford to.
A man who wore the iron collar around his neck could only afford a limited look into the future. He could think about the day when the collar came off, and nothing else.
A warning horn shrieked into the pit. Ryeland jumped; Oporto turned more slowly, as though he had been expecting it. Which he had.
Red signals flickered from the enormous gates of the vacuum lock on Track Six. Air valves gasped. The gates swung slowly open and a tractor emerged towing a cradle with the special car they were waiting for. "You would have lost," Oporto commented and Ryeland nodded; of course he would have.
The car stopped. Equalizer valves snorted again, and then its tall door flopped out from the top, forming a ramp to the platform. Escalators began to crawl along it.
Oporto said anxiously: "Steve, I don't like the looks of this!" Out of the opening door of the car two men in uniform came running. They ran up the escalators, raced onto the platform and up the stairs. They didn't look at Ryeland or Oporto; they were in a hurry. They were bearing thick leather dispatch cases the same color as their uniforms.
Bright blue uniforms!
Why, that was the uniform of the special guard ofЧ
Ryeland lifted his eyes to look, unbelieving. At the roof of the shed, amid the ugly web of ducts and pipes and cables, a brilliant light burst forth, shining down on the sphere. And across its top, forty feet above the platform, there was a gleaming blue star and under it, etched in crystalline white, the legend:
THE PLAN OF MAN OFFICE OF THE PLANNER
The special car they had been waiting for was the private car of the Planner himself!
The first thought that crossed Steve Ryeland's mind was: Now I can present my case to the Planner! But the second thought canceled it. The Planner, like every other human on Earth or the planets, was only an instrument of the Planning Machine. If clearance ever came to RyelandЧ if the collar came off his neckЧit would be because the
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Machine had considered all the evidence and reached a proper decision. Human argument would not affect it.
With an effort, Ryeland put the thought out of his mind; but all the same, he couldn't help feeling a touch better, a degree stronger. At least it was almost certain that their destination would not be the Body Bank!
"What was that compartment number?"
Oporto sighed. "93. Can't you remember anything? Train 667Чthe product of the two primes, 23 and 29. Track 6, their difference. Compartment 93, then- last digits hi reverse order. That's an easy oneЧ" But Ryeland was hardly listening. The intimate acquaintance that Oporto seemed to have with all numbers was no longer news to him, and he had more urgent things on his mind. He led the way up the ramp and into the Planner's subtrain car. A woman in the blue uniform of the guard passed them, glanced at their collars and frowned. Before Ryeland could speak to her she had brushed past them busily and was gone. It said a lot for the efficiency of the collars, he thought wryly, that she didn't bother to find out what two Risks were doing wandering freely around the Planner's private car. There was no cause for worry; if they took a wrong turning, the collars would make it their last.
But by the same token, it was highly dangerous for them to wander around. Ryeland stopped short and waited until someone else came by. "Sir!" he called. "Excuse me!"
It was a straight, gray-haired man in the blue of the Planner's guard, wearing the silver mushrooms of a Techni-corps colonel ."What is it?" he demanded impatiently.
"We're ordered to compartment 93," Ryeland explained.
The colonel looked at him thoughtfully, "Name," he snapped.
"Ryeland, Steven. And Oporto."
"Umm." Presently the colonel sighed. "All right," he said grouchily. "Can't have you messing up the Planner's car with your blood. Better get secured. This way." He led them to a tiny room, ushered them in. "Look," he said, flexing the knob of the door. "No lock. But I should warn you that most of the corridors are radar-trapped. Do you understand?" They understood. "All right."
He hesitated. "By the way. My name's Lescure, Colonel Pascal Lescure. We'll meet again." And he closed the door behind him.
Ryeland looked quickly around the room, but it wasn't the splendor of its furnishings or the comfort of its appoint-
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ments that interested him. It was the teletype. Quickly he reported in for himself and Oporto. The answer came:
R. Action. Await further orders.
Oporto was beginning to look flushed and to tremble. "Always it's lige this," he said thickly. "I ged a cold and if I don't tage care I'm sick for weegs. I'm feeling lighd-beaded already!" He stood up, tottering.
Ryeland shook his head. "No, you're not lightheaded. We're moving." The hand at the controls of the subtrain knew whose private car he was driving down the electrostatic tubes. The giant sphere was being given a featherbed ride. They had felt no jar at all on starting, but now they began to feel curiously light.
That was intrinsic to the way of travel. The subtrain was arrowing along a chord from point to point; on long hauls the tunnels dipped nearly a thousand miles below the earth's surface at the halfway mark. Once the initial acceleration was over, the first half of a trip by subtrain was like dropping in a super-speed express elevator.
Absently Ryeland reached out an arm to brace Oporto as the little man weaved and shuddered. He frowned. The helical fields which walled the tunnels of the subtrains owed part of their stability to himself. On that Friday night, three years before, when the Plan Police burst in upon him, he had just finished dictating the specifications for a new helical unit that halved hysteresis losses, had a service life at least double the old ones.
And yet _he could only remember that much and no more.
Had something been done to his mind? For the thousandth time Ryeland asked himself that question. He could remember the equations of his helical field theory that transformed the crude "magnetic bottles" that had first walled out the fluid rock, as early nucleonicists had walled in the plasma of fusing hydrogen. Yet he could not remember the work that had led him to its design. He could remember his design for ion accelerators to wall the atomic rockets of spaceships, and yet the author of that designЧ himselfЧwas a stranger. What sort of man had he been? What had he done?
"Sdeve," Oporto moaned. "You wouldn't have a drink on you?"
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Ryeland turned, brought back to reality. A drink! Oporto was feverish. "I'd better call the machine," he said.
Oporto nodded weakly. "Yes, call in. I'm sick, Sdeve."
Ryeland hesitated. The little man did look sick. While he was standing there, Oporto blundered past him. "I'll do id myself," he grumbled. "Get out of my way."
He reached with fumbling fingers for the keyboard, his face turned angrily toward Ryeland. That was a mistake; he should have been watching. In the unsteady footing he lurched, reached for the keyboard, missed, stumbled and fell heavily against the teletype.
It toppled with a crash. There was a quick white flash from inside it and a sudden pungent smell of burning.
Oporto got slowly to his feet.
Ryeland opened his mouth and then closed it without saying anything. What was the use? Obviously the teletype was out of commission; obviously Oporto hadn't done it on purpose.
Oporto groaned: "Oh, dabbit. Steve, where'd thad colonel go? Maybe he could ged me something ..."
'Take it easy," Ryeland said absently. The little man's condition was clearly not good but, in truth, it was not Oporto that was on Ryeland's mind just then. It was the teletype.
Always, since the first days after school, there had been no move Steve Ryeland made, no action he performed, without checking in with the Machine. Even at the maximum-security camp there had been a teletype on direct linkage with the Machine, standing in one desolate comer of the bare barracks.