Читать книгу The Walking Shadow - Brian Stableford - Страница 12

CHAPTER FIVE

The phone rang.

The sound pulled Wishart back from deep sleep. A dream exploded briefly into consciousness and dissolved quickly as his mind hastened through the phases of sleep towards wakefulness. At the fourth ring he snatched the receiver from its cradle.

“Yes?” he said.

There was a moment of silence, and then a curious crackling hum. A voice spoke over the hum, sounding smooth and sexless; not loud, but quite distinct. He recognized it immediately—he had no idea whose voice it was, but he had heard it before.

“Paul’s awake,” it said. “The alarm didn’t go off but one of the policemen at the stadium managed to call for help. There’ll be a full alert any minute, and they’ll send a car to pick you up. Get out quickly.”

There was a click, and the phone went dead, before Wishart even had time to draw back the breath that had caught in his throat. He swallowed, and was uncomfortably conscious of the fact that he was suddenly sweating.

He eased his bulk over the edge of the bed and reached for his clothes, then switched on the bedside lamp. His hand was shaking.

A hundred and twenty-seven years, he thought. The new world record.

It was, of course, inevitable that Paul should come out of stasis as the record-holder, simply because he had been the first to go in. Wishart himself, on his own leap through time, had managed only a hundred and eight years. He was nineteen years older now than when he had last seen Paul. He was over seventy, and in spite of the kilos he’d shed, he was still overweight and lucky enough to be alive. It was only now, though, that he realized quite how desperate his fear had been that he might not last out until Paul’s return. The relief was almost painful, drowning all anxiety and all thought, not letting him begin the business of planning what to do next.

Mechanically, he dressed himself; it was not until he had finished that the peculiarity of his own situation was brought home to him.

His eyes rested on the silent phone.

The speaker knew that Paul was awake, and also knew that someone at the stadium had called for help. How? He had warned Wishart to get out quickly, before the whole police force was mobilized, and Diehl’s security men with them. Why?

There had been other phone calls warning him of threats to the Movement, mostly from the investigations of Diehl’s men. Without those warnings, Diehl might have infiltrated his forces to a much greater extent, and might be ready to close him down by now. Instead...it seemed that his mysterious ally might take a hand in the chaos that was sure to follow the news of Paul’s awakening.

Wishart turned off the lamp again, and made his way out into the corridor. He didn’t need the light in the stairwell to guide him as he moved quickly through the darkness down three flights of stairs to the basement. He used the service stairs to get out of the building at the rear, emerging among the big plastic drums where the refuse was stored. He paused there for a few seconds to allow his eyes to readjust to the light.

There was no street-lamp in the alley but there was a reddish glow in the sky where airborne dust and water vapor reflected the lights of the city. The stars were hidden behind the colored haze. The coldness of the night air seeped through his coat and into his flesh, and he tensed himself to prevent shivering. Eventually, he moved out into the shadows, feeling his way and making hardly any sound. There was a rustling among the garbage that was piled up in a culvert, waiting to be lifted into one of the drums, but it was only a rat. It was not unduly worried by his proximity.

He threaded his way through a network of back streets, staying clear of the lighted roads. He listened for the sound of a car, but there was nothing nearby.

The thought that it might be a hoax niggled away at the back of his mind, but it was not a doubt that worried him unduly. His informant had been reliable in the past, and there could be no motive for the lie. Paul’s return was due, and perhaps overdue: the cult had been anticipating the imminent return of its prophet for nearly forty years, always convinced that the corrupt world could hardly endure through one more generation, and always certain that Paul, in some way no one could imagine, held the key to its rebirth. There were a great many people expecting the impossible from Paul, and they were the ones upon whom Wishart had to rely if he was going to save his protégé from Diehl and Lindenbaum. It wasn’t going to be easy.

The excitement was already growing inside him—the excitement of having something to sell again, a chance to manipulate the public, to control their ideas and their hopes, to milk them of their support. This time, he knew, there was more than a fortune at stake. This time, a whole nation was up for grabs. Maybe a whole world.

A hundred and twenty-seven years had added very considerably to Paul Heisenberg’s stock as a prophet and potential savior. Handled right—handled by Adam Wishart—he could inherit the world.