The Walking Shadow. Brian Stableford

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ have been where he was today—but now that the long-expected crisis was at his door he found that he was just a little too tired to attack the problems with the right degree of desperation. Instead of rejoicing with Diehl, he could only think: Suppose someone screws it up again? Suppose we can’t take him—or can’t hold him—even now?

      “He’s not going to be in a co-operative frame of mind,” he said. “This whole chase scene is going to make us look bad, from his point of view. It doesn’t do our image any good at all.”

      Diehl shrugged. “There’s nothing we can do about that now. At least we stopped him reaching Wishart.”

      “Unless it was Wishart’s people that got him out.”

      “It wasn’t,” said Diehl, flatly.

      “Then who was it?”

      “We’ve been through all that. It was whoever hooked into your phone. I don’t know who, but not Wishart. They warned Wishart to get out, and they tried to spring Heisenberg...but if it was the Movement, I’d know about it. Believe me.”

      “How can I believe you? What the hell’s the alternative, if it wasn’t Wishart? The Australians? Phantoms from the old Communist bloc? Aliens from outer space?”

      “The phone call was just to show us they can do it,” said Diehl, with a confidence that was only partly assumed. “The message meant nothing...just a comic line to stick a finger in your eye. I think it’s someone a damn sight closer to us than Wishart. We ought to face that possibility.”

      Lindenbaum glared at him, half-angry and half-contemptuous. “And how did they know he was going to come out tonight?”

      That was the question that stopped all the theories. But Diehl had figured out a way to sidestep even that.

      “He did know,” he replied. “Therefore it can be known—calculated. There must be some way of measuring something that we don’t know about. There are people at the University who’ve been working on the problem for years, trying to figure out how the jump-length can be calculated. Obviously someone managed to find out. They didn’t tell us. But they didn’t tell the Movement, either. If they had, I’d have known about it. This thing surprised Wishart as much as it surprised us—I’m sure of that.”

      “What about that car—the one that crashed the barrier?”

      “Marcangelo’s following that up. They’re going through the wreckage with a fine-toothed comb...everything that they could scrape up from the roadway. I don’t think they’ll find anything significant.”

      Lindenbaum ground out the butt of his cigarette, and promptly lit another.

      “I have a feeling,” he said, “that we’re more out of our depth than you care to think. And prayer isn’t going to help—God’s not on our side this time.”

      Diehl curled his lip. Lindenbaum, staring into space, couldn’t see the small change of expression, but he didn’t really need to. He knew that Diehl didn’t like him, and would seize upon any opportunity to feel contemptuous of him. Diehl was that way about everyone. It was almost a necessary qualification for his post. To be what he was you had to hate the enemy, and in his job, the enemy was everybody and anybody.

      “You’d better get back on the job,” said the president, wearily. “When you get him, tell me. I want to know everything that happens. Don’t use the phone.”

      Diehl nodded, rose to his feet, and went to the door. When it closed behind him, Lindenbaum blew out a cloud of grey smoke and watched it dissipate into the warm air. His gaze wandered for a few moments, and then lingered on the silent telephone. After a few seconds’ hesitation he picked it up and dialed.

      When the call was answered, he said: “If we were attacked from space, could we put up any kind of a defensive show at all?”

      He received the answer that he expected, said: “That’s what I thought,” and replaced the receiver in the cradle.

      Hell, he murmured, inaudibly. If it came to a fight we couldn’t even beat the Australians. But who wants to fight for a wrecked world?

      CHAPTER TWELVE

      “I’m sorry,” whispered Paul, “but I just can’t go any further.” The words came in gasps, punctuated by long pauses. Drawing breath seemed to be a struggle. His face, illuminated by the sky that was growing silver with the dawn, seemed to be ashen grey. Rebecca, too, felt as if she had come to the end. There was no more running in her, and soon there would be no more shadows in which to hide.

      They were hiding among the corpses of long-dead cars, in what had once been a salvage-yard but was now no more than a dump. Scavengers had long ago stripped the wrecks of anything that was worth taking, and there was nothing left now but rusted skeletons, crushed and cracked, piled up in rotting heaps. Even the soil was red-brown, too heavily impregnated with metallic oxides to allow anything but a few ragged clumps of squill and a little coarse grass to grow in it.

      They were crouched beside what had once been a transcontinental bus, but which was now no longer solid enough to allow them to crawl inside.

      “Leave me,” said Paul. “You don’t have to run. They don’t want you.”

      “I can’t,” she said.

      They could hear the sound of voices calling to one another. The streets around the yard were patrolled, now, and there were men picking their way through it. There was no way out. Rebecca huddled close to Paul, trying to keep away from the jagged shards of rotting metalwork. She wasn’t trying to escape the cold so much as making an ineffectual attempt to protect him from it.

      “Why do they want me?” asked Paul. “What do they want me to do?”

      “Everybody’s waiting for you,” she whispered. “They think you can tell us what to do, because nobody else can. They think you can give them reasons, because nobody else can. The government want you to put your name to their plans...half a dozen other groups would ask you to put your name to theirs. People will listen to you, but they won’t listen to anybody else. It’s as simple as that.”

      “And if I don’t?”

      “I don’t know. They wouldn’t dare to hurt you. I don’t know what they could do. But there might be fighting, against the Movement There could be a revolution. There are people who hate your name enough to want you dead. I don’t know.”

      Her voice was thin and urgent, and she talked as if talking were the only thing that could hold back the tears. They had been running for nearly an hour, with nowhere to run to and nothing to gain. All the while she had been driven on by the terror of responsibility, by the knowledge that she had been hurled into the vortex of important events without the means to do anything that would seem, at some later time, to be what she ought to have done.

      Paul was shivering now, too weak to resist. She tried to wrap her arms around him, to surround him and keep the cold at bay. There was no way to do even that.

      The voices were getting closer.

      “Run,” said Paul. “It’s all right.”

      “I won’t leave you,” she said, as the sobs finally broke through and the tears began to flow. “I won’t...not СКАЧАТЬ