John Brunner - Wrong End of Time

VIP免费
2024-12-15 0 0 252.08KB 88 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
VERSION 0.5 dtd 040100
THE WRONG END OF TIME
BY JOHN BRUNNER
Absolute calm, though not absolute stillness. The sea shifted lazily against
the sandy beach, its motion indexed not by the white crests of ripples-the
water was too oily for waves to break-but by the pale spots of imperishable
plastic rubbish.
Tangled greenery grew down to within a short distance of the tide-mark.
Night. The sky was almost clear of cloud. There was no natural moon, but
as though Phobos and Deimos had been transported from Mars-two small man-made
moons arced between the stars.
Silence. Only branches rustling and the sound of the sea.
Less than a mile off-shore, a smear of white obtruded on the glassy
water. It could have been due to a partly submerged rock. It was not. It
lasted two minutes and disappeared.
Something fractionally blacker than the black ocean began to approach
the land.
A shadow among shadows, Danty Ward crept through the underbrush. He felt
his footing at each step so that he did not break the night-quiet; nonetheless
he managed to move rather swiftly. He wore a dark jersey and dark pants, and
he had paused by a puddle to smear mud on the highlights of his cheekbones and
forehead. Gilding the lily in reverse. He was not following a trodden path,
but he was keeping parallel to and a few yards from a dirt road that few
people traveled. Indeed, hardly anyone came to this stretch of shore at all.
It was most inadvisable to try. There were complex alarms and boobytraps, not
to mention an electronic fence. Beyond these, hidden among trees and thickets,
were highly efficient radar antennae. There were also silos in which were sunk
short-range missiles with nuclear warheads of about quarter-megaton capacity.
Back near the superway he had passed posters that showed a clenched fist
hammering a city into ruins. Underneath
captions said: PART OF THE WORLD'S MOST PERFECT DEFENSIVE SYSTEM.
He had taken the precaution of turning everything off.
Somewhere nearby came the scrunching sound of a foot moving in gravel.
Danty halted stock-still to feel the world, then stealthily made towards the
road he had been avoiding. Parting the fronds of a flowering bush he saw a car
on the other side of the track. about twelve feet away. A man leaned against
it, his left wrist held close to his face as if he were trying to read his
watch in the thin before dawn light.
With a little nod of satisfaction Danty slipped back into nowhere.
He passed on now towards the beach. coming soon to the point at which
the greenery thinned and left only tough dune grasses. courtesy of the Federal
Erosion Commission. "Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the
main; if a clod be washed away by the sea . . . "
Like living on a melting iceberg.
A few yards farther on. a boulder stuck its blunt snout up from the
sand. Danty looked both ways along the beach, then darted into shelter beside
the rock. His back against it, he relaxed, invisible until daylight.
If he was right. though. he would be gone by then.
He stared seaward. Straining his eyes. he discerned something more
coherent than a chance assembly of weed or garbage being carried inshore.
Matt-dark but a little shiny because it was wet. Purposively shaped. A man in
a survival suit.
Danty allowed himself a grunt of self-approbation, and concentrated on
making his relaxation still more complete.
Vassily Sheklov, on the other hand, was tense. He had no qualms about
the suit he was wearing-it was a very advanced model, and he would cheerfully
have bet on it to carry him through hell-fire. It could not, however, protect
him from the oppressive weight of knowledge about his situation, which bore
down on his skull as though the dome of the night sky were leaning its entire
burden on his head. He had unwisely allowed the submarine captain to press a
last glass of vodka on him, by way of a toast to the success of his mission.
The liquor-and his careful
yoga exercises-had sustained him during the nerve-racking period while they
were inching towards the coast, sometimes within a meter of grounding on the
bottom; to duck beneath the sweep-pattern of the radar they knew to be located
hereabouts. they had to break surface not more than a kilometer from the
beach. where the water was ridiculously shallow for such a big vessel. But now
he was out here on his own he was horribly aware of what the slug of alcohol
might have done to the speed of his reflexes.
Landing in a spot that was as thick with nuclear missiles as a
porcupine's back with spines! He had to keep . reminding himself that the
paradoxical advice had come ., from Turpin, who ought to be reliable if anyone
was. Ac- -. cording to him a reserved area was the safest choice pro-
vided the submarine didn't trigger the automatic firing . mechanisms, because
Americans were almost superstitious
about such places and nobody would be within miles.
Thus far the advice had proved sound. Sheklov noted the fact in the tidy
mental card-index of data about Turpin that he was compiling.
His knees touched bottom. He found his footing, and abruptly the
buoyancy of his suit converted into weight: Not a great weight. He stood up
with sea around his legs and looked the scene over.
Nothing moved except branches and man-made litter bobbing on the
wavelets.
He went up the sand looking for the tidemark, and found that the full
tide. due soon after dawn, would erase all but a few of his footprints. When
he gained the protection of the first bushes, he opened his suit and peeled it
off. Underneath he wore authentic American leisure clothing, smuggled via
Mexico or Canada.
He laid the suit down in a wind-sculpted hollow and hit the destruct
switch on its shoulder. Faint smoke drifted up, and the plastic began to
deliquesce.
Waiting for the process to go to completion, he used a fronded branch to
scuff over the three footprints he had left above the high-water mark. On his
return to the suit: he found only a puddle of jelly, already beginning to soak
into the sand. He shoveled more sand over it with a bit, of jetsam and tossed
miscellaneous garbage on top of the' little pile. Then, with a final glance
out to sea to confirm that the submarine had vanished, he headed inland.
Danty rose from his boulder and faded into the undergrowth again. He
kept pace, discreetly.
Sheklov found the dirt road easily. The captain had been laudably
precise in his navigation. He walked by its edge-carefully, because it had
rained here within the past few hours and the ground was soft-until he came
within sight of a car: an expensive make that he recognized from his briefing.
Waiting beside it, a man raised his arm in hesitant greeting.
Continuing at a neutral pace, Sheklov studied him. He wore a dark jacket
and pants, by Russian standards rather old-fashioned. He was about fifty,
above medium height, plump-cheeked. paunchy, sweating a little-from
nervousness, presumably, because the night was cool. . . Yes, this was Turpin
okay. Either that, or someone had gone to a lot of trouble to prepare a
duplicate.
Now the man spoke in a wheezy whisper, saying, "Holtzer?"
Sheklov nodded. For the time being, he was indeed Holtzer.
Turpin let go a gusty sigh and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief.
"Sorry," he said, the word muffled by its folds. "The strain of waiting was
beginning to get to me. Uh-did you have a good trip?"
"Well, the water was pretty dirty," Sheklov said, and tensed for the
answer. It was conceivable something had gone wrong, at the receiving if not
at the delivering end. But Turpin's response was word-perfect.
"Still, the air around here isn't too bad."
Sheklov let a thought form in his mind.
t made it!
The realization hit him with almost physical violence, so that he did
not immediately react when Turpin opened the car door and motioned for him to
get in. Belatedly he complied, noting the decadent luxury of the vehicle's
interior . . . and then the sullen inertia of the door as he closed it.
Armored, of course. The thing must weigh six or seven tons. And in plain
sight next to the radiation-counter: a gun, its muzzle snugly inserted into a
socket on the dash, its butt convenient for the driver's right hand.
Well, he was going to have to get used to that kind of thing.
"What about tracks?" he said, thinking of how deeply so much weight
could drive tires into the ground as soft as he had just been walking on.
Turpin started the car and bean to turn it around. It was equipped with manual
con- trols. naturally. He'd had it dinned into him that over here people liked
to gamble with each other's lives on the roads.
"Sonic projectors in the wheel-arches." Turpin answered. "They
homogenize dust and mud. If someone comes by before the next rain he might
realize a car has been this way, but he won't have a hope in hell of
identifying a tread-pattern. But don't talk until we're out of the reserved
area, please. I shall have to use some pretty tricky gadgets to get us through
the perimeter alarms. As soon as we hit the superway, through, we can relax."
The third time he sawed the car back and forth, it was facing in the
direction he wanted, and he sent it silently down the track, back to the
superway, back to the real America.
When the car had gone, Danty stepped out from the bushes and began to
walk unconcernedly in its wake. He was a mile or so from the superway. He
would reach it a few minutes before dawn.
He didn't bother to turn the site back on.
• ,(r)
The mud on Danty's face had dried. Rubbing at it as he walked, he reduced it
to a grayish smear. That would have to do until he reached soap and water.
Emerging on to the hard shoulder of the superway between two billboards
advertising insurance against juvenile leukemia and KOENIG'S INTIMATE
INSULATION, he gazed towards the oncoming traffic. He ignored the long-
distance freight-trucks, which had schedules to keep, and concentrated on the
last of the night-riders, the lamps of their cars dimming as they headed home
for a day's sleep. These were the people who seemed to feel oppressed by the
isolation of their continent, even though it was three thousand miles wide,
and needed to relieve their tension by simply going, regardless of whether
there was any place to go to.
It was the third car that stopped: a red-and-gold Banshee. The dead
weight of its Armour made it almost nosedive into the concrete as it responded
to its compulsorily excellent brakes. The man at the wheel wore a snug hat and
tailored fatigues, and also-as he stared at Dantyan expression of surprise.
Not at what he saw. Danty was ordinary enough to look at, apart from the
mud on his face: young, thin, midbrown complexion, sharp chin, dark eyes above
which his brows formed a shallow V. But at the notion of stopping for him in a
state where hitch-hiking had been illegal for decades.
Before he could recover his presence of mind, however, Danty had
sauntered over and leaned on his door. Rashly, the man was driving with its
window open.
"Going to Lakonia?" he inquired.
"Uh . . ." The driver licked his lips; hand hovering close to his
dashboard gun. "Now look here! I didn't stop to give you a ride! I-"
And broke off in consternation. The question had just occurred to him:
Then why in hell did I stop?
He could see no other reason than Danty, who went on looking at him
levelly.
"Ali. shit" the driver said at last. "Okay, get in. Yes, I am heading
for Lakonia."
"Thanks," Danty said, and went around to the passenger's door.
Before his unwelcome companion had fastened his safety-harness, the
driver stamped on the accelerator and shot back into the center of the road,
watching his mirror anxiously-not so much for following cars, as for a
patrolman who might have witnessed that entirely unlawful pickup. The speedo
needle reached the limit mark and stopped climbing, never the less their speed
increased perceptibly afterwards. Danty concealed a grin. Another reason for
the driver to feel worried. Plainly he'd eased the control on the governor.
Everybody did that, but you were still liable to arrest if you were caught.
Relaxing after a mile or two without incident, the driver reached for
the cigarette dispenser.
"Want one?" he asked reluctantly.
"Thanks." Danty shook his bead. "Don't use them."
The driver took his. ready-lit, and sucked on it twice before speaking
again, this time with the petty bravado of a man defying the law and trying
not to let the fact bother him.
"Now don't you get the idea I go around the country free-lifting all the
time!"
"Of course not," Danty said equably.
"So you'd better be a friend of mine, hm? Just in case My name's
Rollins, George Rollins. What's yours and where are you from?"
"Danty. And it says CowvMe in my redbook."
Rollins betrayed obvious relief. Cowville was right next door to
Lakonia; in fact it was the nucleus from which Lakonia had spread like a stump
of wild-rose root with a gorgeous over-blown double floribunda grafted on it.
Taking a man back to his home city wasn't too bad. Danty let the idea curdle.
Then he added mildly, "But mostly I'm from all over."
"You make a habit of traveling this way?" Rollins curled his lip. It was
probably in his mind to add: Because if you do, you must be a lousy rebl
Everybody knows they shave and cut their hair nowadays!
"No, this is kind of a special case."
"Glad to hear it!" Rollins snapped, and fell silent. After a moment he
reached for the radio buttons and snapped on an early-morning music program.
Soothed by the sound of the current chart-toppers, the Male Organs, Danty
dozed.
He awoke to a prod in his ribs and the sound of the gas-gauge emitting a
penetrating hum.
"Got to pull in for gas," Rollins told him unnecessarily. "Now you watch
how you act, hear? Don't want some radiated gas-attendant to turn me in for
free-lifting!"
Danty touched the gritty mud on his face. He said, "Well, then I can get
to a washroom and clean up."
"You do that! And watch yourself!" Rollins ordered.
His imitation bravado leaked away as the car slowed. His lips moved as
though he were rehearsing what he would say when they stopped.
He was. Therefore it came out smoothly enough. "Fifty, please!" he
called to the attendant in his overhead booth, watching the forecourt through
armour-glass with his hands poised above the triggers for his guns.
"Fifty it is," the man answered, and began to haul on his waldoes.
Angled, a fuel-pipe launched down from its high hook and sought the car's
filler like a blind snake.
So far, so good. As Danty left his seat, Rollins breathed easier. Hell,
was anyone--even a gas-attendant, in a trade that encouraged paranoia-going to
turn him in for a little free-lifting? Of course not!
And then his stomach filled with ice-cubes. There was a cop rolling into
the gas-station, masked and armored, like a mere extension of the single-seat
racer that he rode.
Patrolman Clough yawned hugely as he dismounted. That was a slow job,
involving a thorough survey of the vicinity, then the folding back of four
light-alloy bullet deflectors. But finally he freed himself, stood upright,
and stretched and yawned again. The quick dash of midnight had worn off, and
he was having to pull in more and more often to rest up. The endless
concentration tired the brain. Police racers had no governors on them, only a
red line at the hundred-fifty mark that the rider was forbidden to exceed
except in emergency. Something to boast about in company-"they don't turn
loose any but the picked best on the superway without a governor!"-but on the
job, not so much fun.
Only one car in the station. Banshee. Cheapjack make. Slick lines, sure,
but inside-well, built-in obsolescence. of course. Trouble being they
sometimes guessed wrong, the obsolescence progressed too quickly, and then he
or someone was picking bits of people out of the wreckage.
Not this one, though. A last-month's model, red and gold.
Driver sort of nervy . . Wonder if he's disconnected his governor. Sort
of thing the guy who buys a Banshee might do. Easy to short the governor
circuits on one of these. Not a bad idea to have him lift the hood, take a
quick squint.
He snapped back the visor of his helmet and strode towards the car.
Rollins rubbed sweaty palms inconspicuously on the sides of his thighs.
"Morning officer!" he exclaimed, and damned his voice for skating up towards
the treble.
The patrolman gave a neutral nod. Rollins told himself he couldn't
possibly have seen the disreputable passenger, and whatever was bothering him
with luck he'd guess wrong and be away before Danty emerged from the washroom.
In fact it might be a good idea to get back on the road without Danty, if he
could. What in the world could have possessed him to stop for a free-lifter?
And a reb at that, more than likely!
The gas-pipe withdrew to its hook. A cash-drawer shot out of the side of
the pump within easy reach of him. But he was so intent on the patrolman that
at first he didn't notice, and the attendant had to parp on his hooter.
Damnation. Now the pig will know I'm rattled. He fumbled a credit card
from his pocket and laid it in the tray. The patrolman followed every move,
,and when the drawer had clicked shut he said, "Mind lifting your hood,
mister?"
"Uh . . .° Well, there was no help for it. He flipped the release and
the hood ascended three feet on lazy-tongs mountings. sighing. Look, officer,
l have a clean license ten years old, everyone eases the governor control a
bit, it's not as though 1'd been in an accident ....
But the patrolman only glanced at the engine, nodded, and made to turn
away. Rollins exhaled gratefully.
Must have thought the governor was cut out completely. Who but a damned
fool-?
And Danty re-appeared.
He'd washed, and wiped the stubble of beard from his chin with Depilide,
but even so he didn't match a brand-new Banshee. And here he was opening the
passenger door. You could almost hear the tumblers clicking in the pig's head,
like a fruit machine.
"Hah!" he said after a tense pause. "Let's see your redbook, you!"
Danty shrugged, unzipped his hip-pocket, and held out his red-covered
identity papers. The silence stretched as the patrolman seemed to be reading
every single word. Finally Rollins could bear it no longer.
"Is something wrong, officer?"
The cop didn't glance up. He said, "Friend of yours, mister?"
"Sure! Of course he is!"
"Tell me more." The machine-like helmet still bent over the redbook.
"Uh . . ." Rollins' mind reacted. "Why, Danty's from Cowville. Close to
where I live. We just been night-riding a bit, that's all."
Though if he asks what this radiated reb's other name is . I
The patrolman slapped shut and returned the redbook. "Okay," was all he
said, but under his voice, clear as shouting, he was adding: So, a couple
fruits most likely. I should arrest that kind on suspicion? 1'd be at it all
dory. Anyway, they'd jump bail and head for a state where it's allowed.
Frantically Rollins started the engine again, eager to get away from
here.
"Your credit card," Danty said, and pointed. Rollins snarled, snatched
it from the cash-drawer, and trod on the gas. Danty was amused to see that he
must have worked out what the pig was thinking. He was blushing scarlet clear
down to his collar.
Behind them, Patrolman Clough made a routine entry in his tape-recorded
log. But, two or three minutes later, as he was emerging from the men's room,
a car howled past at far above the legal limit, and he scrambled back on his
racer and took out after it, yelling for assistance on his radio. In the
excitement of the chase he clean forgot about Danty and Rollins.
Turpin was plainly ill at ease and could not make up his mind how to open a
conversation. For the time being that suited Sheklov. He wanted to get the
feel of America, hammering home on the automatic level what he had learned on
the conscious. Already he had noticed a contradiction. From the radio that
Turpin had switched on, as though by reflex, music was emanating of a kind
that he himself had barely encountered since his teens, when his generation
still thought it "progressive" and "liberal" to imitate the example of Western
rock-groups. The sound was imbued with curious nostalgia. Then, between items,
an announcer resolved the paradox by saying that the program was aimed at the
eternally youthful and proceeding to advertise a skin-food.
For men, as well as women. He sniffed. Yes, he wasn't mistaken; Turpin
was heavily perfumed with something that hadn't been detectable in the open
air, but had built up in the closed metal box of the car, despite the
conditioning, until it was overpowering. He thought of asking for a window to
be opened, but changed his mind. He was going to have to adjust.
To things like this superway, for instance. Back home, the roads he knew
were typically two or at most three lanes wide, laid with geometrical
exactitude across the landscape, carrying far more trucks and hundred-
passenger buses than private cars, and had control cables laid under the
surface so that no mere human being should be called on to avert an accident
at 200 k.p.h.
But roads weren't really important. You could use less land and shift
more people with a hover train riding concrete pylons, or for long distances
you would fly.
When this road, with its opulent curves, came to a rise in the ground,
its builders had contrived to give the impression that it eased itself up to
let the hill pass beneath. Elegant, certainly. Yet so wasteful Eight lanes in
each direction, not because there was so much traffic, only because that much
margin must be allowed for human error!
Thinking of speed . . . . He repressed a start as he looked at the
speedometer. Oh. yes. Not k.p.h., but m.p.h; the Americans had resolutely
clung to their antiquated feet. yards and miles just as they had clung to
Fahrenheit when the rest of the world abandoned it. Even so, he hoped that
Tuipin was a reasonably competent driver. He himself had never attempted to
guide a land-vehicle at such velocity.
Now. finally, Turpin was addressing him: "Cigarette?"
"Please." It would be interesting to try American tobacco. But he found
it hot, dry, and lacking in aroma.
Ahead, a lighted beacon warned traffic to merge into the left lanes, and
shortly, as the car slowed, he saw something that confirmed his worst fears: a
wreck involving two trucks and a private car around which a gang of black men
were busy with chains, jacks, and cutting torches. On the center divide an
ambulance-crew waited anxiously to be offered a cargo.
When was someone last killed on the roads, Back There?
He watched Turpin covertly as they passed the spot, and read no emotion
whatever on his face.
Well, to sustain his pretense for so long, obviously he must have had to
repress his natural reactions . . .
Yet Sheklov found the explanation too glib to be convincing.
Then, a little farther on, they encountered another gang of workmen,
also black. being issued with tools from a truck on the hard shoulder. Some of
them were setting up more beacons. That was a phenomenon Sheklov had been
briefed about: a "working welfare" project Obviously they were here to repair
the road; equally obviously, the road didn't need repairing. But it conformed
to the American ideal: You don't work, you don't eat.
He felt a surge of pride as he reflected on the superior efficiency of a
planned economy. Then, sternly, he dismissed the thought. The system must
work. otherwise human beings could not tolerate it. It was not for him to say
that it oughtn't to work. Enclosed isolated, offensively conceited, the
Americans were still human, and what they did among themselves was ipso facto
to be respected as part of the vast repertoire of human potential.
Drawing a deep breath. he closed his eyes for a moment. Words formed in
memory; they said, "O Dhananjaya,
abandoning attachment and regarding success and failure alike, be steadfast in
Yoga and perform thy duties."
And his duty at present was to be Donald Paton Holtzer, who had never
heard of the Blessed Lord's Song.
There was considerable traffic on the move. He saw hundreds of cars,
mostly as they were left behind. because Turpin had clearance for the fastest
lanes, but two or three times howling monsters tore past them illegally on the
inside, and once they were overtaken by a patrolman on a racer with his siren
howling like a soul in torment.
The roads, while still in usable condition, were being torn up and re-
made. So too the cars were destined for a short, short life. Everything about
this silent limousine of Turpin's was ultra-modern, including its schedule of
obsolescence. Approximately six months old, it was already as close to the
scrap yard as to the factory.
And from the scrap yard its elements would go to the factory again.
Talk about taking in each other's washing .... But he slapped that down
in his mind, too.
Now and then they passed-in sight of enormous housing developments, and
Sheklov also studied these carefully. Apartments stacked in towering blocks.
Gardens around them, or parks. Trees in neat lines, force-grown with Para
gibberellins. He found them attractive, but somehow flawed-perhaps by the way
they resembled one another, as though they had been mass-produced complete
with occupants. They were becoming shabby. His briefings had included a
thorough conspectus of the cycle of American fads and fashions, and he was
able to date them as having been built about twenty-five years ago-just about
the time, indeed, that Turpin was planted in the States. ,
Reminded of his companion, he turned his head. Turpin's eyes were on
him.
"You're very quiet," Sheklov said.
Turpin gave a plump-jowled grin. "I figured you'd start talking in your
own good time. Make the most of this ride, though. I do have a bug-free room
at home, of course, but this car is even safer. And we're coming pretty close
to Lakonia now."
He seemed to have recovered completely from his earlier nervousness.
"Frankly," Sheklov said, "I was expecting you to ask
what brought me here. I gather you weren't informed of the details." He spoke
easily in the language he had practiced non-stop during his briefing period.
"I didn't question the decision," Turpin said stiffly. "After all, I've
been thoroughly absorbed by now, and your people" He bit something back.
"Go on," Sheklov encouraged.
"All right I'll have to get around to it sooner or later. Your people
don't seem to set much store by me nowadays."
Sheklov displayed genuine surprise. "I don't know where you got that
impression! I've always heard that your complete assimilation has made you the
most valuable single agent we've ever had here. Why else would they have
called on you to cushion my arrival?"
Turpin didn't answer but pressed his lips together in a thin line.
Sheklov could gloss that expression easily enough. Because you'd have been
told I was good, to bolster your own confidence; or because I'm to be
eliminated and you're to replace me; or because you're expendable yourself,
and meant to bring about our joint downfall; or because I'm suspect and you've
been assigned to investigate me .
Turpin sighed. "Oh, what's the point of worrying? I do as I'm told.
that's all. I laid on exactly the cover for you that was requested-you're
Canadian, timber-salesman, been down here sounding out a new pulp contract,
recommended to Energetics General by your parent firm, looking for a supplier
of- plastic glue for bonding chipboard, staying with me at Lakonia because
we're very eager to close that deal. Which is true: we're short of foreign
currency, as you know. There's a bag in the trunk for you, with clothes,
ticket-stubs, hotel bills, a raft of genuine material. Anyway, the fact that I
speak for you will protect you from security."
That sounded too pat. Sheklov was about to voice a question, when Turpin
added, "And for extra insurance I'll have you photographed with Prexy."
He tossed that off casually also, but if it was a promise he could keep.
Sheklov felt, he was entitled to be proud of his record. They had told him
over and over how well established Turpin was, and though he reserved the
right to doubt it until he saw it happen he was prepared to
believe that Turpin could indeed invoke the President to reinforce his cover.
"You brought up the purpose of your visit," Turpin went on. "I imagine
it's to check me out. Don't think I'll be offended if you tell me." .
There was overt bitterness in his tone. Sheklov saw in that a reason why
the people Back There might have downgraded this man in their minds. But if
they had, none of them had let slip the slightest suggestion of the fact.
"It's nothing to do with you at all," he grunted. "We've run into a
problem we can't solve. We're at our wits' end. And since we've looked
everywhere else for ideas, we're finally being driven to look for some over
here."
He wondered if his own skepticism showed in his voice.
He was thinking: Pluto! Hell! Half the people in this
country probably never heard of it, and the rest must be
old enough to remember Disney's dog!
Turpin took a fresh cigarette. "Hah! It must be quite a problem, then.
Explain! I want to know what's so important that I have to risk everything
I've built up in twenty-five years."
Sheklov marshaled his words carefully. He'd rehearsed this introductory
exposition many times, of course. He said, "As a senior vice-president of
Energetics General, you must know as much as any one man about the defense
system of this continent. Right?"
"Why not? We designed most of it. We still contract for its servicing.
And have I ever failed to notify your people of our newest developments?"
"No, you haven't," Sheklov said fervently, and felt a shiver go down his
spine. In a sense, the fact that Earth had not long ago dissolved into a
nuclear holocaust was due to this man at his side. It was awe-inspiring to
reflect on that.
"So tell me," he continued when he had recovered from his brief access
of wonder, "what would happen if -say-New York were wiped off the map by a
total conversion reaction?"
"A-what?" Turpin jerked in his seat. Ash fell from his cigarette to his
thigh. He brushed at it, and missed.
"Total-conversion, I said. Well?"
"Well! Uh . . ." Turpin licked his lips. "Well, it would depend on
whether anything had been detected coming down from orbit."
"Something would have." -
"Well, them Uh. . : Well, everything in the sky not accounted for by the
flight-plan at Aerospace HQ would be taken out by ground missiles. That's
automatic. Then the orbital hardware would be activated, and you'd lose the
tovs."
"Tobs?"
"Tovs. Didn't they give you that? Careless! Short for tovarich. That's
what we call your manned satellites."
You: we. Force of habit probably. Camouflage. But Sheklov found himself
wondering how deep the camouflage went in Turpin's mind after a quarter of a
century.
"Is there a lot of orbital hardware?"
"Enough," Turpin said, and gave a thin smile. "Sorry, but you might let
slip something you're not supposed to know."
Sheklov allowed him the petty victory. He said, "And then. . ?"
"Within about two minutes, the Nightsticks would be homing on their
targets. They're solid-fuelled inertial guided missiles with-"
"Yes, we know about those. Thanks to you."
He said it deliberately, to determine how much the reminder would affect
Turpin. The answer was-severely. He stuttered for several seconds.
"Anyway(" he pursued. "Within eight minutes and thirty seconds, twelve
thousand megatons would go down on East Bloc territory. And if there were
another-"
Sheklov held up his hand. "The world's most perfect defensive system.
Yes. We've taken great care for many years to avoid tripping this country's
deadly burglar alarms, but they still exist. which means that people must
think they're still necessary."
"We're doing our best to cure that!" Turpin said with a hint of anxiety.
"Though naturally in my position I daren't "
"Daren't do anything that might cast suspicion on your cover," Sheklov
cut in. "Sure, we understand just how tough security can be over here. But
what's your response to the news that some American city may well be converted
into raw energy in the near future?"
A haunted expression came and went on Turpin's face, as though for the
first time in years he was reviewing the implications of setting off twelve
thousand megatons of
nuclear explosive. He said, "You mean the Chinese have-"
"Chinese, hell. The Chinese don't have a total-conversion reaction(
Nobody has it, down here."
Understanding began to turn Turpin's cheeks to gray.
"Yes," Sheklov said with a nod. "Out near Pluto we've met-someone else."
Who?
Well, one thing-so Sheklov had been told-was definite. They couldn't be
from this part of the galaxy, or even from this part of the cosmos. Because
their ship sparkled. Even at the orbit of Pluto it was continually being
touched by dust particles. On contact, they vanished into energy. Which
demonstrated that the vessel, and hence by logic the system where it
originated, must be contra terrene.
The aliens didn't seem to mind. Apparently they could take care of that
problem. They could take care of the human race just as easily, if they chose.
Or, more precisely: They could arrange for the human race to take care
of itself.
"They're far ahead of us," Sheklov said when Turpin's gray face had
started back towards its normal color. "We're afraid of them. So far we
haven't managed to communicate anything to them, although we've been trying
for more than three years. Somehow or other we must establish rapport, because
if we can't convince them we're fit to get along with they're not only able
but apparently willing to set us back a thousand years. In the way I
suggested-by turning an American city into energy."
"If you can't communicate with them, how do you know?" Turpin snapped.
"The problem is strictly one-sided. They proved that they know a great
deal about us, by projecting pictures in a gas-cloud floating in space. The
experts say they must have generated localized artificial gravity-fields to
create their images, then excited them to radiate in appropriate colors. We
aren't within centuries of such techniques."
Contra terrene . . . implying that anything they launched at Earth would
摘要：

VERSION0.5dtd040100THEWRONGENDOFTIMEBYJOHNBRUNNERAbsolutecalm,thoughnotabsolutestillness.Theseashiftedlazilyagainstthesandybeach,itsmotionindexednotbythewhitecrestsofripples-thewaterwastoooilyforwavestobreak-butbythepalespotsofimperishableplasticrubbish.Tangledgreenerygrewdowntowithinashortdistanceo...

展开>> 收起<<
John Brunner - Wrong End of Time.pdf

共88页,预览18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！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：88 页 大小：252.08KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-15

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

高考理综 人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 88
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注