Watchers of the Dark. Lloyd Biggle jr.

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СКАЧАТЬ him for it, but it could not be helped. They hated him anyway, and he did not dare to wait for darkness.

      He sprinted from dome to dome. The few proprietors who responded snapped low to snarl into his face; and then slammed their doors. He wondered how long it would be before one of them summoned the proctors.

      He had worked three-quarters of the way around the oval before he thought to vary his approach. As the next door opened he said breathlessly, “Cown, I need your help!”

      And pushed inside.

      For a moment the Quarmer was too thunderstruck to protest. Biag-n faced him desperately. “I’ll have to leave soon. You know that?”

      Cown grunted.

      “Look at this,” Biag-n said, offering the sample.

      Cown’s rooty fingers moved forward, touched, jerked back. “What do you want?”

      “I have a hundred gios of this in limited-time storage. If I don’t sell it before I leave Quarm, I’ll lose it all. It’s one of the best bargains I ever happened onto, and you can have it for half what it cost me.”

      “Get out!” Cown snarled.

      Biag-n regarded him steadily. “Cown, have I ever done you an unkindness?”

      The Quarmer looked away.

      “The order means a big profit for you,” Biag-n urged, “and it lets me salvage something form a certain loss.”

      He searched Cown’s face uneasily. The Quarmer must have been aware that ships already at the transfer stations were not unloading, and that no merchandise ordered from Quarm on this day would ever be consigned.

      Cown continued to avoid Biag-n’s eyes. He said nothing.

      “I’ll write it up,” Biag-n said tremulously, and fed a message strip into his pocket inditer.

      He was rather long about it. He had to make the message look like an ordinary order for textiles, and still code as much information into it as possible. He muttered numbers to himself, concentrating fiercely.

      Cown continued to look away, but when Biag-n had finished he handed over his seal without a murmur. Biag-n marked the order with a sigh of relief.

      “May you prosper,” he said gravely.

      Cown did not reply.

      Biag-n turned to the door, which was still open, and gasped with dismay. The abrupt Quarmian dusk was upon them; the yapping of the mobs was closer, and terrifyingly distinct. “Grilf! Grilf!”

      He was too late. There had never been more than a wisp of a chance that he could get a message off, that the clerks would accept it from a despised foreigner. Now there was no chance at all. He could never reach a jramp safely.

      He took a step toward the door, head bent under the bitter burden of a near-success that had ended in total failure. Suddenly he whirled. “Cown! You send the order!”

      Cown stared at him.

      “I’ll pay, of course. It’s already coded for my solvency credential. They’ll accept it from you. They might even send it.” He added softly, “It’s the last thing I’ll ever ask of you. I pledge that.”

      Cown’s rooty fingers closed on the message strip. He gazed at it dazedly. Behind the tinted hood his face was an expressionless mask of scaly tissue. From somewhere in the circular room came the steady drip, drip, drip of the clepsydra. Biag-n shuddered. He needed no reminder that the fast-moving Quarmer time was running out on him.

      Without a word Cown turned and strode toward the door. Biag-n drifted back into the shadows, away from the open doorway and the menace of prying eyes. He counted the clepsydra’s drips and cursed this primitive world where one could not dispatch a message, or travel from one place to another, without walking to the nearest jramp.

      The dusk hardened quickly and became night. The mobs were close by, now, and full-throated. Natives were stirring in the neighboring domes.

      Finally Cown returned. “You sent it?” Biag-n demanded. “Was it accepted? Was it really transmitted?”

      “Of course,” Cown said tonelessly. “I waited for a confirmation. That was what took so long. It also cost you extra.”

      “May you prosper,” Biag-n murmured, with a sweeping genuflection. He clutched his sample case and darted into the night. The one way he could show his gratitude was to leave immediately.

      Cown’s door crashed shut behind him, and he hunched his shoulders against hostile stares from the neighboring domes as he stumbled off through the thick darkness. He could hear the mobs yapping on all sides of him, and the polished tips of the cupolas dimly reflected the flicker of fires that burned beyond the horizon. More warehouses had been touched off; one was an oil storage, and suddenly it exploded long tongues of flame into the night sky.

      None of it mattered now. His message had been transmitted. He could begin his wearisome trek home with a light step, humming triumphantly to himself.

      He knew that he would never get there, but he had nowhere else to go.

      * * * *

      In its first month of operation the Universal Transmitting Company killed the commercial airlines. Railroads and bus companies lasted longer, but both were doomed. Subways were doomed. A few taxicabs still prowled the streets of New York City in search of those rare individuals who were unwilling to walk a block to a trans-local; but an overwhelming majority of travelers, whether their destinations were the other side of Manhattan or the other side of the planet, preferred the step through a transmitter frame to a tedious and in varying degrees dangerous ride on plane, ship, train, bus, subway, or taxi.

      Jan Darzek’s fortunate investment in Universal Transmitting Company stock ruined his private detective business by making him independently wealthy. His reaction to affluence was the one long-practiced by doctors, lawyers, and other professional men: he raised his prices. A stampede of customers followed. They seemed to think that a man who charged so exorbitantly must be very good—which of course he was—but he found to his chagrin that the clients who could afford his new fees were no more likely to have really interesting problems than those who could not.

      He learned something about the detective business that had not been apparent to him while he was earning his living at it. Very few jobs held out much promise at the beginning. The obstruse complications that so delighted him rarely became evident until he had methodically cleared away dead wood and underbrush and probed the problem’s root system. He had to accept ten cases to find one that genuinely interested him; and the tediousness of laboring through nine routine cases he did not care about, for fees that he did not need, destroyed his savor of that exceptional tenth.

      He loved his work too much to retire, but he found it impossible to keep occupied with the sort of work he loved. He planned exotic vacations to escape the boredom of unwanted cases, and his vacations were invariably ruined by his impatience to get back to his office in quest of the elusive exception.

      He was just beginning to realize that he was an unhappy man.

      But Tahiti, now. He wondered how he had managed to overlook Tahiti.

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