The Second Science Fiction MEGAPACK®. Robert Silverberg

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      “People’s Manufacturing Corporation Ey-yut Seven Tha-ree,” said a recorded voice. “Your desire, pu-leeze?”

      “This is Commodore Jack Latrobe,” Morgan said gently. “I’m getting tired of this place, and if you don’t let me out I will blow the whole place to Kingdom Come. Good bye-eye-eye.”

      He hung up without waiting for an answer.

      Then he looked around the hotel suite he had rented. It was an expensive one—very expensive. It consisted of an outer room—a “sitting room” as it might have been called two centuries before—and a bedroom. Plus a bathroom.

      Harry Morgan, a piratical smile on his face, opened the bathroom door and left it that way. Then he went into the bedroom. His luggage had already been delivered by the lift tube, and was sitting on the floor. He put both suitcases on the bed, where they would be in plain sight from the sitting room. Then he made certain preparations for invaders.

      He left the door between the sitting room and the bedroom open and left the suite.

      Fifteen minutes later, he was walking down 42nd Street toward Sixth Avenue. On his left was the ancient Public Library Building. In the middle of the block, somebody shoved something hard into his left kidney and said. “Keep walking, commodore. But do what you’re told.”

      Harry Morgan obeyed, with an utterly happy smile on his lips.

      CHAPTER IV

      In the Grand Central Hotel, a man moved down the hallway toward Suite 7426. He stopped at the door and inserted the key he held in his hand, twisting it as it entered the keyhole. The electronic locks chuckled, and the door swung open.

      The man closed it behind him.

      He was not a big man, but neither was he undersized. He was five-ten and weighed perhaps a hundred and sixty-five pounds. His face was dark of skin and had a hard, determined expression on it. He looked as though he had spent the last thirty of his thirty-five years of life stealing from his family and cheating his friends.

      He looked around the sitting room. Nothing. He tossed the key in his hand and then shoved it into his pocket. He walked over to the nearest couch and prodded at it. He took an instrument out of his inside jacket pocket and looked at it.

      “Nothin’,” he said to himself. “Nothin’.” His detector showed that there were no electronic devices hidden in the room—at least, none that he did not already know about.

      He prowled around the sitting room for several minutes, looking at everything—chairs, desk, windows, floor—everything. He found nothing. He had not expected to, since the occupant, a Belt man named Harry Morgan, had only been in the suite a few minutes.

      Then he walked over to the door that separated the sitting room from the bedroom. Through it, he could see the suitcases sitting temptingly on the bed.

      Again he took his detector out of his pocket. After a full minute, he was satisfied that there was no sign of any complex gadgetry that could warn the occupant that anyone had entered the room. Certainly there was nothing deadly around.

      Then a half-grin came over the man’s cunning face. There was always the chance that the occupant of the suite had rigged up a really old-fashioned trap.

      He looked carefully at the hinges of the door. Nothing. There were no tiny bits of paper that would fall if he pushed the door open any further, no little threads that would be broken.

      It hadn’t really seemed likely, after all. The door was open wide enough for a man to walk through without moving it.

      Still grinning, the man reached out toward the door.

      He was quite astonished when his hand didn’t reach the door itself.

      There was a sharp feeling of pain when his hand fell to the floor, severed at the wrist.

      The man stared at his twitching hand on the floor. He blinked stupidly while his wrist gushed blood. Then, almost automatically, he stepped forward to pick up his hand.

      As he shuffled forward, he felt a snick! snick! of pain in his ankles while all sensation from his feet went dead.

      It was not until he began toppling forward that he realized that his feet were still sitting calmly on the floor in their shoes and that he was no longer connected to them.

      It was too late. He was already falling.

      He felt a stinging sensation in his throat and then nothing more as the drop in blood pressure rendered him unconscious.

      His hand lay, where it had fallen. His feet remained standing. His body fell to the floor with a resounding thud! His head bounced once and then rolled under the bed.

      When his heart quit pumping, the blood quit spurting.

      A tiny device on the doorjamb, down near the floor, went zzzt! and then there was silence.

      CHAPTER V

      When Representative Edway Tarnhorst cut off the call that had come from Harry Morgan, he turned around and faced the other man in the room. “Satisfactory?” he said.

      “Yes. Yes, of course,” said the other. He was a tall, hearty-looking man with a reddish face and a friendly smile. “You said just the right thing, Edway. Just the right thing. You’re pretty smart, you know that? You got what it takes.” He chuckled. “They’ll never figure anything out now.” He waved a hand toward the chair. “Sit down, Edway. Want a drink?”

      Tarnhorst sat down and folded his hands. He looked down at them as if he were really interested in the flat, unfaceted diamond, engraved with the Tarnhorst arms, that gleamed on the ring on his finger.

      “A little glass of whiskey wouldn’t hurt much, Sam,” he said, looking up from his hands. He smiled. “As you say, there isn’t much to worry about now. If Morgan goes to the police, they’ll give him the same information.”

      Sam Fergus handed Tarnhorst a drink. “Damn right. Who’s to know?” He chuckled again and sat down. “That was pretty good. Yes sir, pretty good. Just because he thought that when you voted for the Belt Cities you were on their side, he believed what you said. Hell, I’ve voted on their side when it was the right thing to do. Haven’t I now, Ed? Haven’t I?”

      “Sure you have,” said Tarnhorst with an easy smile. “So have a lot of us.”

      “Sure we have,” Fergus repeated. His grin was huge. Then it changed to a frown. “I don’t figure them sometimes. Those Belt people are crazy. Why wouldn’t they give us the process for making that cable of theirs? Why?” He looked up at Tarnhorst with a genuinely puzzled look on his face. “I mean, you’d think they thought that the laws of nature were private property or something. They don’t have the right outlook. A man finds out something like that, he ought to give it to the human race, hadn’t he, Edway? How come those Belt people want to keep something like that secret?”

      Edway Tarnhorst massaged the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger, his eyes closed. “I don’t know, Sam. I really don’t know. Selfish, is all I can say.”

      Selfish? he thought. Is it really selfish? Where СКАЧАТЬ