Zelazny, Roger - My Name is Legion

VIP免费

2024-12-12 0 0 367.12KB 169 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

file:///F|/rah/Roger%20Zelazny/My%20Name%20Is%20Legion.txt

PART ONE

The Eve of RUMOKO

I was in the control room when the J-9 unit flaked out

on us. I was there for purposes of doing some idiot

maintenance work, among other things.

There were two men below in the capsule, inspecting

the Highway to Hell, that shaft screwed into the ocean's

bottom thousands of fathoms beneath us and soon to be

opened for traffic. Ordinarily, I wouldn't have worried,

as there were two J-9 technicians on the payroll. Only,

one of them was on leave in Spitzbergen and the other

had entered sick bay just that morning. As a sudden

combination of wind and turbulent waters rocked the

Aquina and I reflected that it was now the Eve of RU-

MOKO, I made my decision. I crossed the room and re-

moved a side panel.

"Schweitzer! You're not authorized to fool around

with that!" said Doctor Asquith.

I studied the circuits, and, "Do you want to work on

it?" I asked him.

"Of course not. I wouldn't know how to begin.

But—"

"Do you want to see Martin and Demmy die?"

"You know I don't. Only you're not—"

"Then tell me who is," I said. "That capsule down

there is controlled from up here, and we've just blown

something. If you know somebody better fit to work on

it, then you'd better send for him. Otherwise, I'll try to

repair the J-9 myself."

He shut up then, and I began to see where the trouble

was. They had been somewhat obvious about things.

They had even used solder. Four circuits had been

rigged, and they had fed the whole mess back through

one of the timers. ...

So I began unscrewing the thing. Asquith was an

oceanographer and so should know little about electron-

ic circuits. I guessed that he couldn't tell that I was

undoing sabotage. I worked for about ten minutes, and

the drifting capsule hundreds of fathoms beneath us be-

gan to function once again.

As I worked, I had reflected upon the powers soon to

be invoked, the forces that would traverse the Highway

to Hell for a brief time, and then like the Devil's envoy

or the Devil himself, perhaps—be released, there in

the mid-Atlantic. The bleak weather that prevails in

these latitudes at this time of year did little to improve

my mood. A deadly force was to be employed, atomic

energy, to release an even more powerful phenomenon

—live magma—which seethed and bubbled now miles

beneath the sea itself. That anyone should play senseless

games with something like this was beyond my compre-

file:///F|/rah/Roger%20Zelazny/My%20Name%20Is%20Legion.txt (1 of 169) [8/27/03 11:36:25 PM]

file:///F|/rah/Roger%20Zelazny/My%20Name%20Is%20Legion.txt

hension. Once again, the ship was shaken by the waves.

"Okay," I said. "There were a few shorts and I

straightened them out" I replaced the side panel.

"There shouldn't be any more trouble."

He regarded the monitor. "It seems to be functioning

all right now. Let me check. . . ."

He flipped the toggle and said, "Aquina to capsule.

Do you read me?"

"Yes," came the reply. "What happened?"

"Short circuit in the J-9," he answered. "It has been

repaired. What is your condition?"

"All systems returned to normal. Instructions?"

"Proceed with your mission," he said, then turned to

me. "I'll recommend you for something or other," he

said. "I'm sorry I snapped at you. I didn't know you

could service the J-9."

"I'm an electrical engineer," I replied, "and I've stud-

ied tills thing. I know it's restricted. If I hadn't been able

to figure out what was wrong, I wouldn't have touched

it."

"I take it you'd rather not be recommended for some-

thing or other?"

"That is correct."

"Then I will not do it."

Which was a very good thing, for the nonce, as I'd

also disconnected a small bomb, which then resided in

my left-hand jacket pocket and would soon be tossed

overboard. It had had another five to eight minutes to

go and would have blotted the record completely. As for

me, I didn't even want a record; but if there had to be

one, it would be mine, not the enemy's.

I excused myself and departed. I disposed of the evi-

dence. I thought upon the day's doings.

Someone had tried to sabotage the project. So Don

Walsh had been right. The assumed threat had been for

real. Consume that and digest it. It meant that there was

something big involved. The main question was,

"What?" The second was, "What next?"

I lit a cigarette and leaned on the Aquini/s rail. I

watched the cold north sea attack the hull. My hands

shook. It was a decent, humanitarian project. Also, a

highly dangerous one. Even forgetting the great risks,

though, I could not come up with a good counterinter-

est. Obviously, however, there was one.

Would Asquith report me? Probably. Though he

would not realize what he was doing. He would have to

explain the discontinuance of function in the capsule in

file:///F|/rah/Roger%20Zelazny/My%20Name%20Is%20Legion.txt (2 of 169) [8/27/03 11:36:25 PM]

file:///F|/rah/Roger%20Zelazny/My%20Name%20Is%20Legion.txt

order to make his report jibe with the capsule's log. He

would say that I had repaired a short circuit. That's all.

That would be enough.

I had already decided that the enemy had access to

the main log. They would know about the disconnected

bomb not being reported. They would also know who

had stopped them; and they might be interested enough,

at a critical time like this, to do something rash. Good.

That was precisely what I wanted.

. . . Because I had already wasted an entire month

waiting for this break. I hoped they would come after

me soon and try to question me. I took a deep drag on

the cigarette and watched a distant iceberg glisten in the

sun. This was going to be a strange one—I had that

feeling. The skies were gray and the oceans were dark.

Somewhere, someone disapproved of what was going on

here, but for the life of me I could not guess why.

Well, the hell with them all. I like cloudy days. I was

bom on one. I'd do my best to enjoy this one.

I went back to my cabin and mixed myself a drink, as

I was then officially off duty.

After a time, there came a knocking on my door.

"Turn the handle and push," I said.

It opened and a young man named Rawlings entered.

"Mister Schweitzer," he said, "Carol Deith would like

to speak with you."

"Tell her I'm on my way," I said.

"All right," and he departed.

I combed my sort of blond hair and changed my

shirt, because she was pretty and young. She was the

ship's Security Officer, though, so I had a good idea as

to what she was really after.

I walked to her office and knocked twice on the door.

As I entered, I bore in mind the fact that it probably

involved the J-9 and my doings of a half hour before.

This would tend to indicate that she was right on top of

everything.

"Hello," I said. "I believe you sent for me?"

"Schweitzer? Yes, I did. Have a seat, huh?" and she

gestured at one on the other side of her expensive desk.

I took it.

"What do you want?"

"You repaired the J-9 this afternoon."

I shrugged. "Are you asking me or telling me?"

file:///F|/rah/Roger%20Zelazny/My%20Name%20Is%20Legion.txt (3 of 169) [8/27/03 11:36:25 PM]

file:///F|/rah/Roger%20Zelazny/My%20Name%20Is%20Legion.txt

"You are not authorized to touch the thing."

"If you want, I can go back and screw it up and leave

it the way I found it."

"Then you admit you worked on it?"

"Yes."

She sighed.

"Look, I don't care," she said. "You probably saved

two lives today, so I'm not about to fault you for a secu-

rity violation. What I want to know is something differ-

ent."

"What?"

"Was it sabotage?"

And there it was. I had felt it coming.

"No," I said. "It was not. There were some short

circuits—"

"Bull," she told me.

"I'm sorry. I don't understand—"

"You understand, all right. Somebody gimmicked

that thing. You undid it, and it was trickier than a cou-

ple of short circuits. And there was a bomb. We monitored

its explosion off the port bow about half an hour ago."

"You said it," I said. "I didn't."

"What's your game?" she asked me. "You cleaned up

for us, and now you're covering up for somebody else.

What do you want?"

"Nothing," I said.

I studied her. Her hair was sort of reddish and she

had freckles, lots of them. Her eyes were green. They

seemed to be set quite far apart beneath the ruddy line of

her bangs. She was fairly tall—like five-ten—though she

was not standing at the moment I had danced with her

once at a shipboard party.

"Well?"

"Quite well," I said. "And yourself?"

"I want an answer."

"To what?"

"Was it sabotage?"

"No," I said. "Whatever gave you that idea?"

"There have been other attempts, you know."

"No, I didn't know."

file:///F|/rah/Roger%20Zelazny/My%20Name%20Is%20Legion.txt (4 of 169) [8/27/03 11:36:25 PM]

file:///F|/rah/Roger%20Zelazny/My%20Name%20Is%20Legion.txt

She blushed suddenly, highlighting her freckles. What

had caused that?

"Well, there have been. We stopped all of them, ob-

viously. But they were there."

"Who did it?"

"We don't know."

"Why not?"

"We never got hold of the people involved."

"How come?"

"They were clever."

I lit a cigarette.

"Well, you're wrong," I said. "There were some short

circuits. I'm an electrical engineer and I spotted them.

That was all, though."

She found one someplace, and I lit it for her.

"Okay," she said. "I guess I've got everything you

want to tell me."

I stood then.

". . . By the way, I ran another check on you."

"Yes?"

"Nothing. You're clean as snow and swansdown."

"Glad to hear it."

"Don't be. Mister Schweitzer. I'm not finished wifh

you yet"

"Try everything," I said. "You'll find nothing else."

. . . And I was sure of that.

So I left her, wondering when they would reach me.

I send one Christmas card each year, and it is un-

signed. All it bears—in block print—is a list of four bars

and the cities in which they exist. On Easter, May Day,

the first day of summer, and Halloween, I sit in those

bars and sip drinks from nine until midnight, local time.

Then I go away. Each year, they're different bars.

Always, I pay cash, rather than using the Universal

Credit Card which most people carry these days. The

bars are generally dives, located in out-of-the-way

places.

Sometimes Don Walsh shows up, sits down next to

me and orders a beer. We strike up a conversation, then

take a walk. Sometimes he doesn't show up. He never

misses two in a row, though. And the second time he al-

file:///F|/rah/Roger%20Zelazny/My%20Name%20Is%20Legion.txt (5 of 169) [8/27/03 11:36:25 PM]

file:///F|/rah/Roger%20Zelazny/My%20Name%20Is%20Legion.txt

ways brings me some cash.

A couple of months ago, on the day when summer

came bustling into the world, I was seated at a table in

the back of the Inferno, in San Miguel de Allende, Mex-

ico. It was a cool evening, as they all are in that place,

and the air had been clean and the stars very bright as I

walked up the flagstone streets of that national monu-

ment. After a time, I saw Don enter, wearing a dark,

fake-wool suit and yellow sport shirt, opened at the

neck. He moved to the bar, ordered something, turned

and let his eyes wander about the tables. I nodded when

he grinned and waved. He moved toward me with a

glass in one hand and a Carta Blanca in the other.

"I know you," he said.

"Yeah, I think so. Have a seat?"

He pulled out a chair and seated himself across from

me at the small table. The ashtray was filled to over-

flowing, but not because of me. The odor of tequila was

on the breeze—make that "draft"—from the opened

front of the narrow barroom, and all about us two-di-

mensional nudes fought with bullfight posters for wall

space.

"Your name is ... ?"

"Frank," I said, pulling it out of me air. "Wasn't it in

New Orleans. . . ?"

"Yeah, at Mardi Gras—a couple years ago."

"That's right. And you're . . . ?"

"George."

"Right. I remember now. We went drinking together.

Played poker all night long. Had a hell of a good time."

". . . And you took me for about two hundred

bucks."

I grinned.

"So what've you been up to?" I asked him.

"Oh, the usual business. There are big sales and small

sales. I've got a big one going now."

"Congratulations. I'm glad to hear that. Hope it

works out."

"Me, too."

So we made small talk while he finished his beer;

then, "Have you seen much of this town?" I asked.

"Not really. I hear it's quite a place."

"Oh, I think you'll like it. I was here for their Festival

once. Everybody takes bennies to stay awake for the

file:///F|/rah/Roger%20Zelazny/My%20Name%20Is%20Legion.txt (6 of 169) [8/27/03 11:36:25 PM]

file:///F|/rah/Roger%20Zelazny/My%20Name%20Is%20Legion.txt

whole three days. Indios come down from the hills and

put on dances. They still hold paseos here, too, you

know? And they have the only Gothic cathedral in all of

Mexico. It was designed by an illiterate Indian, who had

seen pictures of the things on postcards from Europe.

They didn't think it would stay up when they took the

scaffolding down, but it did and has done so for a long

time."

"I wish I could stick around, but I'm only here for a

day or so. I thought I'd buy some souvenirs to take

home to the family."

"This is the place. Stuff is cheap here. Jewelry, espe-

cially."

"I wish I had more time to see some of the sights."

"There is a Toltec ruin atop a hill to the northeast,

which you might have noticed because of the three

crosses set at its summit. It is interesting because the

government still refuses to admit it exists. The view

from up there is great."

"I'd like to see it. How do you get in?"

"You just walk out there and climb it. It doesn't exist,

so there are no restrictions."

"How long a hike?"

"Less than an hour, from here. Finish your beer, and

we'll take a walk."

He did, and we did.

He was breathing heavily in a short time. But then, he

lived near sea level and this was like 6,500 feet, eleva-

tion.

We made it up to the top, though, and wandered

amid cacti. We seated ourselves on some big stones.

"So, this place doesn't exist," he said, "the same as

you."

"That's right."

"Then it's not bugged—no, it couldn't be—the way

most bars are these days."

"It's still a bit of wilderness."

"I hope it stays this way."

"Me, too."

"Thanks for the Christmas card. You looking for a

job?"

"You know it."

"All right. I've got one for you."

file:///F|/rah/Roger%20Zelazny/My%20Name%20Is%20Legion.txt (7 of 169) [8/27/03 11:36:25 PM]

file:///F|/rah/Roger%20Zelazny/My%20Name%20Is%20Legion.txt

And that's how this one started.

"Do you know about the Leeward and Windward Is-

lands?" he asked me. "Or Surtsey?"

"No. Tell me."

"Down in the West Indies—in the Lesser Antilles

system—starting in an arc heading southeasterly from

Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands toward South Amer-

ica, are those islands north, of Guadeloupe which repre-

sent the high points of a subterranean ridge ranging

from forty to two hundred miles in width. These are

oceanic islands, built up from volcanic materials. Every

peak is a volcano—extinct or otherwise."

"So?"

"The Hawaiians grew up in the same fashion. —Surt-

sey, though, was a twentieth-century phenomenon: a

volcanically created island which grew up in a very brief

time, somewhat to the west of the Vestmanna Islands,

near Iceland. That was in 1963. Capelinhos, in the

Azores, was the same way, and had its origin undersea."

"So?" But I already knew, as I said it. I already knew

about Project RUMOKO—after the Maori god of vol-

canoes and earthquakes. Back in the twentieth century,

there had been an aborted Mohole Project and there

had been natural-gas-mining deals which had involved

deep drilling and the use of "shaped" atomic charges.

"RUMOKO," he said. "Do you know about it?"

"Somewhat. Mainly from the Times Science Section."

"That's enough. We're involved."

"How so?"

"Someone is attempting to sabotage the thing. I have

been retained to find out who and how and why, and to

stop him. I've tried, and have been eminently unsuccess-

ful to date. In fact, I lost two of my men under rather

strange circumstances. Then I received your Christmas

card."

I turned toward him, and his green eyes seemed to

glow in the dark. He was about four inches shorter than

me and perhaps forty pounds lighter, which still made

him a pretty big man. But he had straightened into a

nearly military posture, so that he seemed bigger and

stronger than the guy who had been wheezing beside me

on the way up.

"You want me to move in?"

"Yes."

"What's in it for me?"

"Fifty thousand. Maybe a hundred fifty—depending

on the results."

file:///F|/rah/Roger%20Zelazny/My%20Name%20Is%20Legion.txt (8 of 169) [8/27/03 11:36:25 PM]

file:///F|/rah/Roger%20Zelazny/My%20Name%20Is%20Legion.txt

I lit a cigarette.

"What will I have to do?" I finally asked.

"Get yourself assigned as a crewman on the Aqwna

—better yet, a technician of some kind. Can you do

that?"

"Yes."

"Well, do it. Then find out who is trying to screw the

thing up. Then report back to me—or else take them

out of the picture any way you see fit. Then report back

to me."

I chuckled.

"It sounds like a big job. Who is your client?"

"A U.S. Senator," he said, "who shall remain name-

less."

"With that I can guess," I said, "but I won't."

"You'll do it?"

"Yes. I could use the money."

"It will be dangerous."

"They all are."

We regarded the crosses, with the packs of cigarettes

and other various goodies tied to them in the way of re-

ligious offerings.

"Good," he said. "When will you start?"

"Before the month is out."

"Okay. When will you report to me?"

I shrugged, under starlight.

"When I've got something to say."

"That's not good enough, this time. September 15 is

the target date."

". . . H it goes off without a hitch?"

"Fifty grand."

"H it gets tricky, and I have to dispose of a corpus or

three?"

"Like I said."

"Okay. You're on. Before September 15."

"No reports?"

". . . Unless I need help, or have something impor-

tant to say."

file:///F|/rah/Roger%20Zelazny/My%20Name%20Is%20Legion.txt (9 of 169) [8/27/03 11:36:25 PM]

file:///F|/rah/Roger%20Zelazny/My%20Name%20Is%20Legion.txt

"You may, this time."

I extended my hand.

"You've got yourself a deal, Don."

He bowed his head, nodding to the crosses.

"Give me this one," he finally said. "I want this one.

The men I lost were very good men."

"I'll try. I'll give you as much as I can."

"I don't understand you, mister. I wish I knew how

you—"

"Good. I'd be crushed if you ever knew how I."

And we walked back down the hill, and I left him off

at the place where he was staying that night.

"Let me buy you a drink," said Martin, as I passed

him on the foredeck on my way out of Carol Deith's

cabin.

"All right," and we walked to the ship's lounge and

had one.

"I've got to thank you for what you did while Demmy

and I were down there. It—"

"It was nothing," I said. "You could have fixed it

yourself in a minute if somebody else had been down

and you'd been up here."

"It didn't work out that way, though, and we're happy

you were handy."

"I consider myself thanked," I said, raising the plastic

beer stein—they're all plastic these days. Damn it!

"What kind of shape was that shaft in?" I asked him.

"Excellent," he said, furrowing his wide, ruddy fore-

head and putting lots of wrinkles around his bluish eyes.

"You don't look as confident as you sound."

He chuckled then, took a small sip.

"Well, it's never been done before. Naturally, we're

all a little scared. . . ."

I took that as a mild appraisal of the situation.

"But, top to bottom, the shaft was in good shape?" I

asked.

He looked around him, probably wondering whether

the place was bugged. It was, but he wasn't saying any-

thing that could hurt him, or me. If he had been, I'd

have shut him up.

"Yes," he agreed.

file:///F|/rah/Roger%20Zelazny/My%20Name%20Is%20Legion.txt (10 of 169) [8/27/03 11:36:25 PM]

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：

file:///F|/rah/Roger%20Zelazny/My%20Name%20Is%20Legion.txtPARTONETheEveofRUMOKOIwasinthecontrolroomwhentheJ-9unitflakedoutonus.Iwasthereforpurposesofdoingsomeidiotmaintenancework,amongotherthings.Thereweretwomenbelowinthecapsule,inspectingtheHighwaytoHell,thatshaftscrewedintotheocean'sbottomthousand...

展开>> 收起<<

Zelazny, Roger - My Name is Legion.pdf

共169页,预览34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！

Zelazny, Roger - My Name is Legion

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: