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

He felt curiously naked, and somehow folorn.
"Steve," said Oporto faintly, "could you ged me a' glass of water?"
That at least was possible; there was a silver carafe and crystal tumblers, fired with gold designs. Ryeland poured the little man a glass and handed it to him. Oporto took it and sank back against a huge, richly upholstered chair, his eyes closed.
Ryeland roamed around the tittle cubicle. There wasn't much else for him to do. The colonel had warned them against radar-traps in the corridors; it was not to be thought of that they would go out and take the chance of being destroyed by a single wrong move.
For they were Risks; and the iron collars they wore contained eighty grams of a high explosive. A step into
an area proscribed for Risks (and such areas were common all over the world) meant that a triggering radar beam would touch off the explosive. Ryeland had seen that happen once. He didn't want it to happen to him.
Brig or no brig, this room was part of the Planner's private car and it was furnished in a way that Ryeland had not seen in three years. He fingered the drapes around a mock-window and reached out to touch the polished mirror of a hardwood table top.
Three years ago Ryeland had lived in a room something like this. No, he admitted, not quite as lavish. But a room that belonged to him, with furniture that no one else used and a place for his clothes, his books, the things he kept around him. But in that life he had been a cleared man, with a place in the Plan of Man and a quota to be met. That life had ended three years ago, on that fatal Friday afternoon.
Even now, after endless sessions of what was called reconstructive therapy, Ryeland couldn't understand what had happened to him. The vaguely worded charge was "unplanned thinking," but all his merciless therapists had failed to help him recall any thoughts disloyal to-the machine. The only material evidence of unplanned activities was his collection of space literatureЧthe yellowed old copies of books by Ley and Gamow and Hoyle and Einstein that he had saved from his father's library.
Of course he knew that the books were not on the list approved by the Plan, but he had intended no disloyalty with his hobby. In fact, as he had many times told the therapists, the special equations of the helical field were related to the mathematics of the whole universe. Without knowing the equations for the expansion of the universe and the continuous creation of matter in the space between the galaxies, he could not have improved the helical units for the subtrain tunnels.
But the therapists had always refused to specify exact charges. Men under the Plan no longer had rights, but merely functions. The purpose of the therapists was not to supply him with information, but to extract information from him. The sessions had failed, because he couldn't remember whatever it was that the therapists had been attempting to extract.
There was so much that he could not remember ...
Oporto said weakly: "Sdeve, ged me a doctor."
"I can't!" Ryeland said bitterly: "If the Plan wants you sick you'll have to be sick."
Oporto's face turned a shade paler. "Shut up! Somebody may be listening."
"I'm not criticizing the Plan. But we have to stay here, you know that."
"Ryeland," Oporto begged, and went into a coughing fit
Ryeland looked down at the little man. He seemed to be in serious trouble now. Evidently his system was of an ultra-allergic type. Swept clean of disease organisms in the sterile air that blew down on the isolation camp from the Pole, he had been ripe for infection. He was breathing heavily and raggedly, and heat wafted off his forehead as Ryeland brought his hand near it.
"Hold on, Oporto," he said. "It'll only be a little while. Maybe a couple of hours." At a thousand miles an hour, there was no place on Earth much farther away than that.
"I can be dead in a couble of hours," said Oporto. "Can't you ged me a doctor?"
Ryeland hesitated. There was truth to what the little man said. The Plan provided constant immunization for those who lived in areas exposed to disease; but the hypo-allergic, like Oporto, might well lose that immunity in a few months. And Oporto had been breathing sterile air for three years.
"All right," said Ryeland wearily, "I'll do what I can. You come with me, Oporto." Booby-trapped the halls might be, dangerous the trip certainly was; but it was life and death to Oporto.
The door opened easily.
Ryeland, half supporting Oporto, looked out into the corridor. No one was in sight. He sighed; he had hoped that they might find a passerby. Oporto babbled: "Steve, what are you doing? Led me alone. We can't go oud here Чthe colonel warned us!"
"We have to get you to a doctor, remember?" Ryeland scanned the corridor. At the intersections were curious canopied devices like the sun-shelter over a mogul's how-dah. Perhaps they were the radar traps; at least, Ryeland couldn't imagine what else they might be. But there was one back the way they had come, and surely there had been no trap there.. ..
No. Ryeland thought it out carefully. The fact that they had been allowed to get to Compartment 93 didn't prove
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anything at all; quite possibly the traps had been turned off to allow them to pass. In fact, thinking it over, it seemed certain that the one route that would be prohibited would be the corridor going back to the entrance port.
"Oporto," he said, "do you see those doors? I think we can go into one of them."
"You do, Steve? What mages you think so?" the little man asked sardonically.
"Because there's nothing better to try," Ryeland snapped, and dragged the little man with him.
Around his neck the iron collar weighed heavier than ever. If only he were a superman, like that Donderevo whose name stuck half-forgotten in his mind , . . whose fate, somehow, was linked with Ryeland's own.
Who was Donderevo, exactly? The therapists had questioned him so persistently about the man that there had to be some strong reason. Did Ryeland know him? When had he last seen him? When had he received a message from him? What was the message about?
Donderevo was the son of an explorer and trader who had gathered a fortune from the asteroids and the moons of the outer planets, and had built a commercial empire outside the Plan of Man. Ron Donderevo had come to Earth as a student of space medicine at the great technological institute where Ryeland's father was a mathematics professor. While he was there, the Plan had annexed the last reluctant asteroids and moons which had remained outside. Donderevo's father had been defeated in a space fight, resisting the annexation. Donderevo himself had been placed in an iron collar, as a result of a student demonstration. Then one day he had disappeared. The legends said that he had somehow removed the collar, and escaped into space beyond the power of the Plan.
Ryeland remembered meeting him only once, in his own father's study. Ryeland was an eight-year-old Technicub. Donderevo was a grown man, a graduate student, romantic and mysterious with his knowledge of far planets and unknown space. But was that enough to account for the questions?
Ryeland had denied receiving any message from him, but the therapists were unconvinced.
In any event, whatever Donderevo might have been, Ryeland wasn't; his collar was on for good, or until the Machine relented.
Ryeland wondered crazily if he would hear the tiny click 10
of the relay before the decapitation charge went off. Would there be any warning? Would he know?
Or would it all be over, literally, before he knew what was happening?
Tlie only way to find out was to open a door and walk through it.
He pushed a door open, selecting it at random from the half-dozen in the corridor. Oporto broke away from him and, surprisingly spry, ran a few paces down the corridor, whirled and watched him with a face of tense anticipation.
Ryeland didn't stop to think it over, he walked in the door; and nothing happened.
Grinning, embarrassed, Oporto trailed after. "That one was all right, huh, Steve?"
Ryeland nodded; but there was no point in recrimination, although there were a lot of things he had in mind to say to the man who had urged him to take a chanceЧ and then ducked out of the way of the possible consequences. But of more immediate interest was the room they were in.
It was about the size of Compartment 93 and empty. It was quietly furnished: A narrow bed, a table with a few flowers, a large mirror, an array of cabinets. A girl's room, Ryeland guessed, but from the relative modesty of its furnishings, not the room of a girl who was part of the higher brass on this de luxe subtrain. Possibly a secretary's room; perhaps a maid's. Whoever she was, she wasn't in.
But there was another door, leading to a flight of steps.
This time Ryeland didn't wait for Oporto. He caught his breath and held it, and when he had passed through and established once again that that particular door was not radar-trapped, he tasted salt and acid on bis lip. He had bitten hard enough to draw blood.
But he was through.
The stairs were steep, but it was easy enough to help Oporto up them, with the plunging of the car taking pounds off their weight. They came out into another room, also empty and small.