"Williamson, Jack - 01 - The Humanoids 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

"I'm not to say," she told Ironsmith. "Except it's something Mr. White says is going to happen right away. Something awful bad! That's why he wants to warn Dr. Forester."
Ironsmith peered beyond her, at the long empty road winding down to the desert and stretching into the shimmering distance toward Salt City. His puzzled eyes saw the uncomfortable shifting of her bare, chapped feet, and concern sobered him.
"Tell me, Jane - where did you leave your folks?"
"I don't have no folks," she said gravely. "I never had any folks, and the cops shut me up in a big dark house with had smells and iron on the windows. But I'm all right now." She brightened. "Mr. White took me out through the walls, and he says I don't have to go back."
Ironsmith rubbed his smooth chin, thoughtfully.
"Dr. Forester is pretty hard to see," he told her. "But maybe we can manage something. Suppose we go over to the cafeteria, and eat a dish of ice cream while we talk about it?" He looked at the sergeant. "I'll see her back to the gate."
She shook her head, reluctantly.
"Aren't you hungry?" Ironsmith urged. "They've got four flavors."
"Thank you." He could see the eager longing in her wet black eyes, but she stepped back firmly. "Yes, I'm getting awful hungry. But Mr. White says I haven't time to eat."
Turning, she started away from the gate. Beyond her the black empty road was a narrow shelf blasted into the dark basalt pillars of the mountain, and the nearest haven was that dark smudge already rippling under the morning sun on the far horizon.
"Wait, Jane!" he called anxiously. "Where're you going?"
"Back to Mr. White." She paused, gulping. "So he can tell me how to find Dr. Forester. But I'm awful sorry about that ice cream."
Pushing the card deeper in her pocket, she ran on down the narrow pavement. Watching the way she tried to step in the cooler shade beneath the cliff, Ironsmith felt an increasing solicitude. She seemed a daughter of want. Hunger had made her body too small for her head, and the stoop of her shoulders gave her almost the look of a little old woman. Yet he felt more puzzlement than pity. He didn't understand her odd way of listening at nothing, or her solemn determination to see Forester. He began to wish he had tried to break red tape enough to get her a pass.
In a moment, her fluttering yellow dress was gone beyond the first dark jutting angle of the mountain. He got astride his bicycle to go back to work, and then something stopped him. He waited, watching a lower curve of the road that lay in view beyond, but she didn't come in sight again.
"Let me out," he told the sergeant suddenly. "A homeless kid, with that crazy notion about a message for Dr. Forester - we can't just let her run away in the desert. I'm going to bring her in and try to get Forester to see her. I'll be responsible."
He rode down around the curve, and on for a mile beyond. He didn't find Jane Carter. Presently he came back to the gate, walking to push the cycle up the grade.
"Find her?" the sergeant greeted him.
He shook his head, mopping dusty sweat off his pink, worried face.
"Then where'd she go?"
"I don't know." Ironsmith peered uneasily back down the empty road behind him. "But she's gone."
"I kept watching." The sergeant put down a pair of binoculars. "I didn't see her anywhere. Or anybody else, between here and Salt City." He scratched his head, and then automatically set his cap back to the proper angle and checked the military neatness of his buttons and his tie. "A funny thing," he concluded vehemently. "Damn funny!"
Nodding mildly, Ironsmith asked to use his telephone.
"Belle," he told the operator, "please get me Dr. Forester's office. If he isn't there yet, I want to talk to anyone who is."



Chapter TWO

THE TELEPHONE beside his bed was about to ring, with bad news from the project. That taut expectancy dragged Clay Forester out of a restless sleep, in his small white house in the shadow of the observatory dome. He had worked too late last night at the project; a brown furriness lined his mouth and the yellow glow of sunlight in the bedroom hurt his eyes. He turned stiffly, reaching for the telephone.
It would be Armstrong calling, probably, with some urgent message from the Defense Authority. Perhaps - the stark thought stiffened him - the spy Mason Horn had come back from space with new information about the hostile activities of the Triplanet Powers. Perhaps the teleprinters had already hammered out a Red Alert, to arm the project for interplanetary war.
Forester touched the cold telephone - and checked his hand. The instrument hadn't rung, and probably wouldn't. That disturbed expectation was just the result of past worry, he told himself, and no warning of additional trouble to come. Disaster, of course, was always likely enough at the project, but he didn't believe in psychic premonitions.
Maybe the feeling had somehow resulted from the senseless discussion into which Frank Ironsmith had drawn him yesterday, about precognition. He hadn't meant to argue; the project left him no time to squander, and his mind was too practical, besides, to enjoy any such aimless mathematical fantasies. All he had done was to question Ironsmith's astonishing simplification of one difficult calculation in rhodomagnetic ballistics. The offhand explanation that Ironsmith had casually scrawled on a paper napkin at their table in the cafeteria mounted to a complete repudiation of all the orthodox theories of space and time. The equations looked impressive, but Forester, mistrusting the younger man's effortless cleverness, had sputtered an incredulous protest.
"Your own experience will tell you I'm right," the mathematician had murmured easily. "Time really works both ways, and I'm sure you often perceive the future yourself. Not consciously, I know; not in detail. But unconsciously, emotionally, you do. Trouble is apt to depress you before it happens, and you're likely to feel happy before any good reason appears."
"Nonsense," Forester snorted. "You're putting the effect before the cause."
"So what?" Ironsmith grinned amiably. "The math proves that causality is actually reversible -"
Forester hadn't listened any longer. Ironsmith was just a clerk, even though he ran the machines in the computing section well enough. Too well, perhaps, because he always seemed to have too much free time to spin such unprofitable paradoxes for his own amusement. But cause-and-effect remained the cornerstone of science. Forester shook his head, rising on his elbow to glare sleepily at the telephone and daring it to ring.
It didn't. Not in five seconds, or ten. Relaxing to a weary vindication, he looked at his watch. Nine-twelve. The project seldom let him sleep so late; most nights he couldn't get home at all. The surprising thing, he told himself, was that Armstrong hadn't already called about something.
Trying to forget about precognition, he looked across at the other twin bed, to find it empty. Ruth must be already gone to work at the business office. He sat up heavily, feeling a dull annoyance at her absence. She certainly didn't need the salary, although he had to admit that she was an efficient office manager, and it was true the project left him little time for her.
Lifting from the empty bed, his eyes found the huge aluminum observatory dome framed in the west window. Silvered with the sunlight, it shone with a clean, functional beauty. Once it had been his life, but the sight of it merely depressed him now. For he had no time for nonessentials; he didn't even know what work the staff astronomers were doing now with the big reflector.
Still the telephone hadn't rung. He reached for it impulsively, to call Armstrong, but again he stopped his hand, reluctant to renew the chains of anxious responsibility which bound him to the project. In no haste to begin another long day of killing effort and intolerable strain, he sat back wearily on the side of the bed, looking at that shining dome and thinking moodily of all it had promised and finally refused him.
He had been just nineteen, still an eager graduate student of astrophysics, the summer he first saw this naked basalt butte pointing out of the desert like a broad finger at the unsolved riddles beyond the sky, and knew that here, where the clean dry air made perfect seeing, he must build his own telescope.
Starmont had cost him many years: all the invincible spirit of his youth spent in begging grants from wealthy men, rekindling the courage of disheartened associates, conquering all the difficulties of making and moving and mounting the enormous mirror. He was in his thirties before it was finally done, hardened and sobered, yet still strong with the drive of science.
The defeats had come later, striking treacherously out of the ultimate unknown he was trying to explore. He had striven for truth, and it somehow always eluded him. Once the great reflector had showed him what he thought was the final fact, but the gold had changed as he tried to grasp it - into confusion and contradiction and the leaden reality of the project itself.
His long quest and his defeat, now that he took this empty moment to look back, reminded him of the efforts and frustrations of those first scientists of the mother planet, the alchemists. Ironsmith had lately read him some historical fragment which told how those early searchers after truth had spent their lives looking for the prima materia and the philosophers' stone - the single primary material of the universe, according to their naЛve theories, and the fabulous principle that made it appear as common lead or precious gold.
His own disappointed life, it came to him now, had followed an identical pattern, as if the goal of science had never really changed, in all the ages since. For he had still been searching, with the aid of more facts and better equipment, for the hidden nature of things. He had found new knowledge, even as the first alchemists had done, and bitter failure with it.
All the effort of science, he reflected, had been one long pursuit of the elusive prima materia and the key to all its many manifestations. Other pioneers of thought, in fact, back in the preatomic age on the mother planet, had even discovered a very useful sort of philosophers' stone - in common iron.
Almost magical metal of the first atomic triad, iron had created the mighty science of electromagnetics. It had worked all the miracles of electronics and nucleonics, and presently powered ships of space. It even achieved the first object of the old alchemists, as men with cyclotrons and atomic piles manufactured elements.
The philosophers of that restless age had tried the new wonder-stuff on the common facts of the universe, and Forester could sense the brief triumph they must have felt when most of their riddles seemed to vanish. The electromagnetic spectrum ran from radio waves to cosmic rays, and the mathematicians of a new physics had dreamed for a time of their own special prima materia, a unified field equation.
Forester could share the bewildered frustration of those hopeful scientists, in their inevitable defeat before a few stubborn facts which would not yield to iron. A few phenomena, as various as the binding force which contains the disruptive energy of atoms and the repulsion which thrusts galaxies apart, perversely refused to be joined in the electromagnetic system. Iron alone was not enough.
In his own quest, he had tried another key.