Clifford D Simak - Highway To Eternity

VIP免费

2024-12-24 0 0 765.52KB 606 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

New York

Ihe cable reached Boone in Singapore:

NEED A MAN WHO CAN STEP AROUND A CORNER. CORCORAN.

He caught the next plane out.

Corcoran's driver was waiting for him as he came

through Customs at Kennedy. The man took Boone's bag

and led the way to the limousine.

It had been raining, but the rain had stopped. Boone

settled back comfortably on the well-upholstered seat,

watching the scene unwind through the windows. How

long had it been, he asked himself, since he had been in

Manhattan? Ten years, perhaps more than ten.

By the time they reached Corcoran's apartment build-

2 CLIFFORD D. SIMAK

ing, it had begun raining again. The driver gathered

Boone's bags, held an umbrella for him, and ushered him

to a private elevator to the penthouse. Corcoran was wait-

ing in the library. He rose from a chair in the comer and

came across the heavy carpeting with hand outstretched

and a look of relief on his face.

"Thanks for coming, Tom. Had a good flight?"

"Good enough," Boone told him. "I slept on the last

leg."

Corcoran nodded. "I remember you could always sleep

on planes. What are you drinking these days?"

"Scotch with a splash of soda." Boone sank into the

indicated chair and waited until the drink was handed him.

He took a long pull of it, glancing about at the appoint-

ments of the room. "You seem to be doing well these

days,Jay."

"Quite well. I have wealthy clients who pay for what

they get. And operatives all over the world. If a diplomat

sneezes in Bogota, I hear of it within hours. What's doing

in Singapore?"

"Nothing. Just a layover between jobs. I can afford to

be selective about the stories I take to cover these days.

Not like it was when we used to see each other."

"How long ago was it?" asked Corcoran. "When we

first met, I mean."

"It must be fifteen years or more. That unpleasantness

in the East. You came in with the tanks."

"That's it. We got there too late. It was a massacre.

Bodies all piled up and no sign of anyone alive." Corcoran

grimaced at the memory. "Then suddenly, there you

were, unruffled, standing among the dead. You wore that

jacket with all the pockets for your notebooks, recorder,

tapes, camera, and films. You carried so much stuff you

seemed to bulge. And you told me you'd just stepped

around a comer."

Boone nodded. "Death was half a second away. So I

stepped around a corner. When I stepped back, there you

were. But don't ask me to explain. I couldn't tell you then

and I can't tell you now. The only answer is one I don't

like—that I'm some kind of a freak."

HIGHWAY OF ETERNITY 3

"Let's say a mutant. Have you tried it since?"

"I've never tried it. But it's happened twice more—

once in China and again in South Africa. When I did it,

it seemed natural—the kind of thing any man might do.

And now, what about you?"

"You heard what happened to me?"

"Some," Boone answered. "You were a spy—CIA

and all that. You were trapped, but you got word back,

and a fighter snatched you up. A daredevil landing out of

a grade-B movie. The plane was shot to hell and gone,

yet it made it back ..."

"That's right," said Corcoran. "Then it crashed. The

whole back of my head was smashed in, and I was so

close to dead it didn't matter. But I had information that

was vital, so they performed miracles saving my life

. . . Anyhow, they had to do some strange things in fixing

my head. Apparently some of the wiring in my brain got

crossed or something. I see things differently now some-

times—things others don't or can't. And I think in quirky

ways. I tie little items of information together in a sort of

sneaky deduction that defies straight-line thinking. I know

things with no reasonable way to know them. I've made

it pay, too."

"Fine. And does that have anything to do with your

calling me here from Singapore?" Boone asked.

Corcoran leaned back and took a sip of the drink he'd

mixed for himself, considering. Finally he nodded. "It has

to do with one of my clients. He came to me about six

years ago. Said his name was Andrew Martin. Maybe it

was."

Martin had come in, aloof and cold, and wouldn't shake

hands. He refused absolutely to answer any questions.

Then, when Corcoran moved to show him out politely,

Martin reached into his breast pocket, took out an en-

velope, and pushed it across the desk. Inside were one

hundred thousand-dollar bills.

"That's just a retainer," he stated. "For any work you

do, I'll pay double your usual rates."

What he wanted were rumors from all over the world.

Not the usual political things, but unusual or outrageous

4 CLIFFORD D. SIMAK

rumors—the sort that seemed to make no sense at all. He

wouldn't say how he could be reached. He'd phone in

daily and tell Corcoran where to find him—always at a

different place.

There weren't too many of the kind of rumors he

wanted, but for those he paid well, usually more than

double rate, and always in thousand-dollar bills. It went

on that way for years.

Corcoran checked on him, of course. But there wasn't

much to be learned. Martin seemed to have no past and

no discoverable occupation. He had a respectable office

with a part-time receptionist, but she had no idea what

he did. He seemed to have no business dealings at all.

He also had a corner suite at the Everest, but he didn't

live there. At least, when Corcoran's operative got into

the suite, there were no clothes in the closets nor any

other sign of occupancy.

On occasion, Martin was seen around town with a

woman named Stella, as mysterious in her way as he was

in his.

Then, a few months ago, Martin and Stella vanished

into thin air.

Boone sat up abruptly. "What?"

"That's right—or they seemed to. After the last time

I reported to him, he left me and was seen making a phone

call. A short time later, my operative at the Everest saw

Stella leaving and followed her. She and Martin went into

an old warehouse near the docks. They never came out.

And they haven't been seen since."

Boone took a pull on his drink and waited. Finally he

prompted Corcoran. "That last rumor ..."

"It came from London. Had to do with someone

searching frantically for a place called Hopkins Acre."

"That seems innocent enough."

Corcoran nodded. "Except for one thing. In all of Brit-

ain, there is now no place called Hopkins Acre. But there

was, four, five hundred years ago. Located in Shropshire.

I checked. In 1615 it disappeared while the family that

owned it was off on an European tour. It was there one

day, gone the next. No sign left to show it had ever OX-

HIGHWAY OF ETERNITY 5

isted. The whole estate—the land, even the landscape—

all of it gone, along with the people who farmed it or

worked as servants in the house. Even the house. Not

even a hole in the ground was left."

"That's impossible," said Boone. "A fairy tale."

"But a true one," said Corcoran. "We established be-

yond question that it had once been there and had

disappeared."

"And that's the end of the story?" Boone asked. He

shook his head. "But I still don't see why you sent for

me. I'm no good at tracing missing persons or locating

houses that disappeared almost four hundred years ago."

"I'm coming to that. I had other business, and Martin

was gone, so I tried to forget him. But a couple of weeks

ago, I read that the Everest was to be dynamited."

Corcoran raised his eyebrows questioningly. Boone

nodded. He was familiar with the way they placed shaped

charges around a building that was to be demolished.

When the process was done right, the structure simply

came apart and fell as rubble for the shovels and bull-

dozers to clear away.

Corcoran sighed. "That brought Martin back to my

mind. I went down to have a final look at the building.

I'd left it to my operatives before, which was a mistake.

Remember I said I saw things differently now?"

"You saw something?" Boone asked. "Something

your men didn't see?"

"Something they couldn't possibly see. Only I can see

it, and I have to catch it just right. I—well, I can't step

around a corner, but sometimes I seem to see around a

comer. Maybe on a wider spectrum, maybe a little way

into time. Do you think it's possible for a man to step or

see a little way into time, Tom?"

"I don't know. Never thought about it."

"No. Well, anyhow, there it was—a sort of enclosed

balcony like those you see plastered to the sides of apart-

ment houses, just outside the suite Martin had occupied.

Sort of out of sync with normal perception, half in and

half out of our world. And since Martin never lived in the

suite, I'm sure he must have lived in that balcony or box.''

6 CLIFFORD D. SIMAK

Boone picked up his glass and drained it. He put it back

carefully on the table. "You expect me to step around a

corner to get into that box?"

Corcoran nodded.

"I'm not sure I can," Boone told him. "I've never used

the trick consciously. It always happened when I was in

extreme danger—sort of a survival mechanism. I don't

know whether I can do it on demand. I can try, of course,

but ..."

"That's all I ask," said Corcoran. "I've exhausted

every other possibility. The hotel is empty now and

guarded, but I've arranged to get in. I've spent a lot of

time there, probing, tapping, prodding, and drilling, trying

to find a way into the contraption. Nothing. I can look

out of the window against which it's stuck, and there's

no sign of anything between window and street. But when

I go outside and look up, there it is."

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

NewYork IhecablereachedBooneinSingapore: NEEDAMANWHOCANSTEPAROUNDACORNER.CORCORAN. Hecaughtthenextplaneout. Corcoran'sdriverwaswaitingforhimashecamethroughCustomsatKennedy.ThemantookBoone'sbagandledthewaytothelimousine. Ithadbeenraining,buttherainhadstopped.Boonesettledbackcomfortablyonthewell-uphol...

展开>> 收起<<

Clifford D Simak - Highway To Eternity.pdf

共606页,预览122页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Clifford D Simak - Highway To Eternity

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: