"A. E. Van Vogt - Slan (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Vogt A E)

He gave scarcely more than a surface thought to the possibility of danger. This was the day -- long ago, it had been planted in his mind, hypnotically set by his father. It did seem important, however, that he slip out of the house without the old woman's hearing him.
Briefly, he let his mind contact hers, and without the slightest sense of disgust sampled the stream of her thought. She was wide awake and tossing on her bed. And through her brain poured freely and furiously a welter of astoundingly wicked thoughts. Jommy Cross frowned abruptly. Into the veritable hell of the old woman's recollection (for she lived almost completely in her amazing past when she was drunk) had come a swift, cunning thought: 'Got to get rid of that slan ... dangerous for Granny now that she's got money. Mustn't let him suspect ... keep it out of my mind so ... '
Jommy Cross smiled mirthlessly. It was not the first time he had caught the thought of treachery in her brain. With sudden purposefulness he finished tying the shoelace, stood up and went into her room.
Granny lay, a sprawling shape under the sheets that were stained brown with liquor. Her deeply sunken black eyes stared dully out of the wrinkled parchment of her face. Gazing down at her, Jommy Cross felt a quiver of pity. Terrible and vicious as had been the old Granny, he preferred her as she had been then to this weak old soak who lay like some medieval witch miraculously deposited in a blue and silver bed of the future.
Her eyes seemed to see him for the first time, clearly. A string of bloodthirsty curses reeled from her lips. Then, 'Waddya want? Granny wants to be alone.'
The pity drained out of him. He gazed at her coldly: 'I just wanted to give you a little warning. I'm leaving soon, so you won't have to spend any more time thinking of ways to betray me. There aren't any safe ways. That treasured old hide of yours wouldn't be worth a nickel if they caught me.'
The black eyes gleamed up at him slyly. 'Think you're smart, eh,' she mumbled. The word seemed to start a new trend of thought that it was impossible for him to follow mentally. 'Smart,' she repeated gloatingly, 'smartest thing Granny ever did, catching a young slan. Dangerous now though ... got to get rid of him ... '
'You old fool,' Jommy Cross said dispassionately. 'Don't forget that a person who harbors a slan is automatically subject to death. You've kept that mud-turtle-complexioned neck of yours well oiled, so it probably won't squeal when they hang you, but you'll do plenty of kicking with those scrawny legs.'
The brutal words spoken, he turned abruptly and went out of the room, out of the house. On the bus, he thought: 'I've got to watch her, and as soon as possible leave her. Nobody who thinks in probabilities could trust anything valuable to her.'
Even downtown, the streets were deserted. Jommy Cross climbed off the bus, conscious of the silence where usually there was bedlam. The city was too quiet; there was a very absence of life and movement He stood uncertainly at the curb, all thought of Granny draining from him. He opened bis mind wide. At first there was nothing there but a wisp from the half-blank mind of the driver of the bus which was disappearing now down the otherwise earless road. The sun glared down on the pavement. A few people scuttled hurriedly past, in their minds simply a blank terror so continuous and unvarying that he could not penetrate beyond it.
The silence deepened, and alarm crept into Jommy Cross. He explored the buildings around him, but no clamor of minds came from them, nothing whatever. The clatter of an engine burst abruptly from a side street Two blocks away a tractor emerged, pulling a tremendous gun that pointed menacingly into the sky. The tractor clattered into the center of the street, was unhooked from the gun, and bellowed off into the side street from which it had come. Men swarmed around the gun, preparing it, and then stood by, looking up at the sky, waiting tensely.
Jommy Cross wanted to walk closer, to read their minds, but he didn't dare. The sense of being in an exposed and dangerous position grew into a sick conviction within him. Any minute a military or police car might roll past and its occupants ask him what he was doing in the street He might be arrested, or told to take off his cap and show his hair and the golden threads that were his tendrils.
Something big was definitely up, and the best place for him was the catacombs, where he'd be out of sight, though in a different kind of danger. He started hurriedly toward the catacomb entrance that had been his goal ever since leaving the house. He was turning into a side street when the loud-speaker at the corner blared into life. A man's voice roared hoarsely:
'Final warning -- get off the street! Get out of sight. The mysterious airship of the slans is now approaching the city at terrific speed. It is believed the ship is heading toward the palace. Interference has been set up on all radio waves, to prevent any of the slan lies from being broadcast Get off the streets! Here comes the ship!'
Jommy froze. There was a silver flash in the sky, and then a long, winged torpedo of glittering metal hurtled by straight above. He heard a staccato roar from the gun down the street, and the echo of other guns, and then the ship was a distant sparkling point, heading toward the palace.
Curiously, the sun's glare hurt his eyes now. He was conscious of confusion. A winged ship! Scores of nights during these past six years he had watched the spaceships soar up from the building in the tendrilless slan Air Center. Wingless rocket ships, and something more. Something that made great metal machines lighter than air. The rocket part seemed to be used only for propulsion. The weightlessness, the way they were flung up as if by centrifugal force, must be antigravity! And here was a winged ship, with all that that implied; jet engines, rigid confinement to Earth's atmosphere, ordinariness. If this was the best the true slans could do, then --
Sharply disappointed, he turned and walked down the long flight of stairs that led to the public washroom. The place was as empty and silent as the streets above. And it was a simple matter for him who had passed through so many locked doors to pick the lock of the steel-barred door leading to the catacombs.
He was conscious of the tenseness of his mind as he stared through tile bars of the door. There was a vague foreground of concrete beyond, then a blur of darkness that meant more stairs. The muscles of his throat tightened, his breath became deep and slow. He hunched his slim length forward, like a runner getting ready for a sprint He opened the door, darted inside, and down the long reach of dark, dank steps at top speed.
Somewhere ahead, a bell began ringing monotonously, set off by the photoelectric cells whose barrier Jommy had crossed on entering the door -- a protection put up years ago against slans and other interlopers.
The bell was just a short distance away now, and still there was no mind stirring out of the corridor that yawned before him. Apparently none of the men working or on guard in the catacombs was within hearing range. He saw the bell, high up on the wall, a glimmering piece of metal, brrring noisily. The wall was smooth as glass, impossible to climb, the bell more than twelve feet from the floor. On and on it clanged, and still there was no clamor of approaching minds, not the faintest wisp of thought.
'No proof that they're not coming,' Jommy thought tensely. 'These stone walls would quickly diffuse thought waves.'
He took a run at the wall, and leaped with desperate strength, up, up, toward the instrument His arm strained, his fingers scraped the marble wall, a full foot below the bell. He fell back, knowing his defeat. It was still ringing as he rounded a bend in the corridor. He heard it grow fainter and fainter, fading into the distance behind him. But even after the sound was gone, the ghost of it went on ringing in his mind, an insistent warning of danger.
Queerly, the sense of a warning buzz in his brain grew stronger, until suddenly it seemed to him that the bell was actually there again, faint with distance. The feeling grew stronger, until abruptly he realized that there was another bell, clanging as noisily as the first one. That meant (he felt appalled) there must be a long line of such bells sending out their alarms, and somewhere in that vast network of tunnels there must be ears to hear them, men stiffening and looking at each other with narrowed eyes.
Jommy Cross hurried on. He had no conscious knowledge of his route. He knew only that his father had hypnotized a picture of it into his mind, and that he need but follow the promptings of his subconscious. It came abruptly, a sharp mental command: 'To the right!'
He took the narrower of the two forks -- and came at last to the hiding place. It was all simple enough, a cleverly loosened slab in the marble wall that slid out under the pressure of his strength, revealing a dark space beyond. He reached in; his groping fingers touched a metal box. He pulled it to him. He was shaking now, his fingers trembling. For a moment he stood very still, fighting for self-control; striving to picture his father standing here before this slab hiding his secrets for his son to find if anything went wrong with his own personal plans.
It seemed to Jommy that this might be a cosmic moment in the history of slans, this moment when the work of a dead father was passed on to a fifteen-year-old boy who had waited so many thousands of minutes and hours and days for this second to come.
The nostalgia fled from him abruptly as a mist of outside thought whispered into his mind. 'Damn that bell!' somebody was thinking. 'It's probably someone who ran down when the slan ship came, trying to get away from expected bombs.'
'Yeah, but don't count on it. You know how strict they are about these catacombs. Whoever started that bell is still inside. We'd better turn in the alarm to police headquarters.'
A third vibration came: 'Maybe the guy's lost'
'Let him explain that,' said the first man. 'Let's head toward the first bell and keep our guns ready. Never know what it might be. With slans flying around in the sky these days, there could be some of them coming down here, for all we know.'
Frantically. Jommy examined the metal box for the secret of its opening. His hypnotic command was to take out the contents and put the empty box back in the hole. In the face of that order, the thought of grabbing up the box and running never even entered his head.
There seemed to be no lock and no catch. And yet, there must be something to fasten the lid down -- Hurry, hurry! In a few minutes the approaching men would be passing directly by the spot where he was now standing.
The dimness of the long concrete and marble corridors, the dank odors, the consciousness of the thick cords of electric wires that ran by overhead feeding millions of volts to the city above, the whole world of the catacombs around, and even memories of his past -- these were the thoughts that raced through Jommy's mind, as he stared down at the metal box. There was a thought of drunken Granny, and of the mystery of the slans, and it all mixed together with the approaching footsteps of the men. He could hear them plainly now, three pairs of them, clumping toward him. Silently, Jommy Cross tore at the cover of the box, his muscles tensed for the effort He nearly lost his balance, so easily did the unfastened cover lift up.
He found himself staring down at a thick rod of metal that lay on top of a pile of papers. He felt no surprise at its being there. There was, instead, a faint relief at discovering intact something he had known was there. Obviously, more of his father's hypnotism.
The metal rod was a bulbous thing about two inches wide at the center but narrowing down at the ends. One of the ends was roughened, unmistakably meant to give the hand a good grip. There was a little button at the foot of the bulb part, convenient for the thumb to press it. The whole instrument glowed ever so faintly with a light of its own. That glow and the diffused light from the corridor were just bright enough for him to read on the sheet of paper beneath.
This is the weapon. Use it only in case of absolute necessity.
For a moment, Jommy Cross was so intent that he didn't realize the men were upon him. A flashlight glared.
'What the -- ' one of the men roared. 'Hands up, you!'
It was his first real, personal danger in six long years, and it felt unreal. The slow thought crept into him that human beings were not very quick in their reflexes. And then he was reaching for the weapon in the box before him. Without conscious haste, he pressed the button.
If any of the men fired, the action was lost in the roar of white flame that flashed with inconceivable violence from the mouth of the tube of force. One moment they were alive, rough-built, looming shapes, threatening him; the next, they were gone, snuffed out by that burst of virulent fire.
Jommy looked down at his hand. It was trembling. And there was a sickness in him at the way he had smashed three lives out of existence. The blur before his vision straightened slowly, as his eyes recovered from the fiery dazzlement. As his gaze reached farther out from him, he saw that the corridor was completely empty. Not a bone, not a piece of flesh or clothing remained to show that there had ever been living beings in the vicinity. Part of the floor was hollowed out, where that scorching incandescence had seared a concavity. But the slight, smooth depression it made would never be noticed.
He forced his fingers to stop trembling; slowly the sick feeling crept out of him. There was no use feeling badly. Killing was a tough business, but these men would have dealt death to him without compunction, as men already had to his father and mother -- and to countless other slans who had died miserably because of the lies these people kept feeding to each other, and swallowing without the slightest resistance. Damn them all!
For a moment, his emotions were violent. He thought: Was it possible that all slans grew bitter as they became older, and ceased feeling compunctions about the killing of human beings, just as human beings had no compunctions about murdering slans?
His gaze fell on the sheet upon which his father had written:
... the weapon. Use it only in case of absolute necessity.
Memory flooded him, of a thousand other instances of his parents' noble quality of understanding. He could still remember the night his father had said, 'Remember this: no matter how strong the slans become, the problem of what to do with human beings remains a barrier to occupation of the world. Until that problem is settled with justice and psychological sanity, the use of force would be a black crime.'
Jommy felt better. There was proof. His father hadn't even carried with him a replica of this weapon that might have saved him from his enemies. He had taken death before he would deal it
Jommy Cross frowned. Nobility was all very well, and perhaps he had lived too long with human beings to be a true slan, but he couldn't escape the conviction that fighting was better than dying.
The thought stopped, alarm replacing it There was no time to waste. He had to get out of here, and quickly! He slipped the gun into his coat pocket, swiftly caught up the papers in the box, jammed them into his pockets. Then tossing the now empty, useless box back into its hole, slid the stone into place. He raced down the corridor, along the way he had come, up the steps, and stopped short within sight of the washroom. A little while before, it had been empty and silent. Now, it was packed with men. He waited, poised yet indecisive, hoping their numbers would dwindle.
But men came in, and men went out, and there was no lessening of the crowd, no diminishing of the bedlam of noise and thought. Excitement, fear, worry; here were little men in whose brains thundered the realization that big things were happening. And the echo of that realization poured through the iron bars of the door to where Jommy waited in the dimness. In the distance, the bell was still ringing. Its unrelenting brrr of warning finally dictated the action he must take. Clutching the weapon in his pocket with one hand, Jommy stepped forward gingerly, and pushed the door open. He shut it behind him softly, tensed for the slightest sign of alarm.