The Second Randall Garrett Megapack. Randall Garrett

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СКАЧАТЬ remaining eleven Overseers,” Bor Mellistos was saying, “will be along shortly. You will then be able to draw fully on the machine. You need merely follow world events and make sure that any—ah—regrettably final decisions are not made. Your actions will, of course, be very much undercover.”

      Forrester nodded. “This mass arrest of the Gods is going to cause an upheaval all by itself.”

      “Quite true, sir. But that will be worked out. I’m afraid I don’t really know the details, but doubtless the other eleven who are coming will inform you more thoroughly on that score.”

      Forrester sighed. “About the Gods—what kind of punishment will they receive?”

      “Well, sir,” Bor Mellistos said, “it varies. Vulcan, for in­stance—the person who called himself Vulcan, or Hephaes­tus—will probably get off with a lighter sentence than the others. He was a mechanic, brought along under some duress to service the machine. But the sentences will be severe, you may be sure. Very severe.”

      Forrester didn’t feel like asking any more questions about that. There was a pause. He looked at Diana again, and she looked back at him.

      “Do you accept?” Bor Mellistos said.

      Forrester and the others nodded.

      Bor Mellistos said: “Very well. In that case, I will inform the other eleven Overseers already picked that they will be met by you here, on Mount Olympus, and that—”

      But Forrester wasn’t listening.

      He had begun whistling, very softly.

      The song he was whistling was Tenting Tonight.

      VIEWPOINT (1960)

      There was a dizzy, sickening whirl of mental blackness—not true blackness, but a mind-enveloping darkness that was filled with the multi-colored little sparks of thoughts and memories that scattered through the darkness like tiny glowing mice, fleeing from something unknown, fleeing outwards and away toward a somewhere that was equally unknown; scurrying, moving, changing—each half recognizable as it passed, but leaving only a vague impression behind.

      Memories were shattered into their component data bits in that maelstrom of not-quite-darkness, and scattered throughout infinity and eternity. Then the pseudo-dark stopped its violent motion and became still, no longer scattering the fleeing memories, but merely blanketing them. And slowly—ever so slowly—the powerful cohesive forces that existed between the data-bits began pulling them back together again as the not-blackness faded. The associative powers of the mind began putting the frightened little things together as they drifted back in from vast distances, trying to fit them together again in an ordered whole. Like a vast jigsaw puzzle in five dimensions, little clots and patches formed as the bits were snuggled into place here and there.

      The process was far from complete when Broom regained consciousness.

      * * * *

      Broom sat up abruptly and looked around him. The room was totally unfamiliar. For a moment, that seemed perfectly understandable. Why shouldn’t the room look odd, after he had gone through—

      What?

      He rubbed his head and looked around more carefully. It was not just that the room itself was unfamiliar as a whole; the effect was greater than that. It was not the first time in his life he had regained consciousness in unfamiliar surroundings, but always before he had been aware that only the pattern was different, not the details.

      He sat there on the floor and took stock of himself and his surroundings.

      He was a big man—six feet tall when he stood up, and proportionately heavy, a big-boned frame covered with hard, well-trained muscles. His hair and beard were a dark blond, and rather shaggy because of the time he’d spent in prison.

      Prison!

      Yes, he’d been in prison. The rough clothing he was wearing was certainly nothing like the type of dress he was used to.

      He tried to force his memory to give him the information he was looking for, but it wouldn’t come. A face flickered in his mind for a moment, and a name. Contarini. He seemed to remember a startled look on the Italian’s face, but he could neither remember the reason for it nor when it had been. But it would come back; he was sure of that.

      Meanwhile, where the devil was he?

      From where he was sitting, he could see that the room was fairly large, but not extraordinarily so. A door in one wall led into another room of about the same size. But they were like no other rooms he had ever seen before. He looked down at the floor. It was soft, almost as soft as a bed, covered with a thick, even, resilient layer of fine material of some kind. It was some sort of carpeting that covered the floor from wall to wall, but no carpet had ever felt like this.

      He lifted himself gingerly to his feet. He wasn’t hurt, at least. He felt fine, except for the gaps in his memory.

      The room was well lit. The illumination came from the ceiling, which seemed to be made of some glowing, semitranslucent metal that cast a shadowless glow over everything. There was a large, bulky table near the wall away from the door; it looked almost normal, except that the objects on it were like nothing that had ever existed. Their purposes were unknown, and their shapes meaningless.

      He jerked his head away, not wanting to look at the things on the table.

      The walls, at least, looked familiar. They seemed to be paneled in some fine wood. He walked over and touched it.

      And knew immediately that, no matter what it looked like, it wasn’t wood. The illusion was there to the eye, but no wood ever had such a hard, smooth, glasslike surface as this. He jerked his fingertips away.

      He recognized, then, the emotion that had made him turn away from the objects on the table and pull his hand away from the unnatural wall. It was fear.

      Fear? Nonsense! He put his hand out suddenly and slapped the wall with his palm and held it there. There was nothing to be afraid of!

      He laughed at himself softly. He’d faced death a hundred times during the war without showing fear; this was no time to start. What would his men think of him if they saw him getting shaky over the mere touch of a woodlike wall?

      The memories were coming back. This time, he didn’t try to probe for them; he just let them flow.

      He turned around again and looked deliberately at the big, bulky table. There was a faint humming noise coming from it which had escaped his notice before. He walked over to it and looked at the queerly-shaped things that lay on its shining surface. He had already decided that the table was no more wood than the wall, and a touch of a finger to the surface verified the decision.

      The only thing that looked at all familiar on the table was a sheaf of written material. He picked it up and glanced over the pages, noticing the neat characters, so unlike any that he knew. He couldn’t read a word of it. He grinned and put the sheets back down on the smooth table top.

      The humming appeared to be coming from a metal box on the other side of the table. He circled around and took a look at the thing. It had levers and knobs and other projections, but their functions were not immediately discernible. There were several rows of studs with various unrecognizable symbols on them.

      This СКАЧАТЬ