Читать книгу The Walking Shadow - Brian Stableford - Страница 16

CHAPTER NINE

The wrangling had reached such a pitch of frustration and pointlessness that Lindenbaum was glad when the telephone at his side began to bleep. He didn’t wait for the aide to pick it up, but snatched it up himself. For the call to have been put through to the conference room it had to be important.

“Yes,” he said, incisively. He let his voice identify himself.

Diehl, who was sitting back from the argument, trying to balance out his seething anxiety with a feeling of contempt for those who couldn’t help showing their fear and frustration, saw the president’s face change as the caller said his piece. Before a quarter of a minute had passed he knew that it was something bad. He sat up straight. One by one, the others realized that something was on, and closed down the chatter.

“Who the hell is this?” said Lindenbaum, not loudly, but with a hint of a snarl. Diehl knew immediately that something weird was happening. It wasn’t the kind of question the president should have needed to ask. What was more, the president obviously didn’t get an answer. When he laid the receiver down his face was dark with gathering fury.

Lindenbaum’s eyes roamed the faces that were silently watching him, and finally settled on Diehl’s. “How does it happen,” he said, “that at a time like this some crazy can reach me on a top security line?”

Diehl did his best to look surprised, but in truth he was not. He was growing used to things happening that had never happened before, and which ought not to happen, from a logical viewpoint.

“What did he say?” he asked, quietly.

“He said that there’s a fleet of goddam spaceships somewhere beyond the moon.”

Diehl blinked. Someone down the other end of the table laughed, but stifled the laughter very quickly.

“That’s crazy,” someone said.

Diehl was busy trying to work it out—not how, but why.

“If that’s supposed to distract our attention from the immediate problem,” said Marcangelo, slowly, “it’s the weirdest play I ever heard of.”

Lindenbaum was still staring at Diehl, waiting for some kind of an answer.

“I don’t know how they do it,” said Diehl. “But someone scrambled a warning call to Wishart, and now they’ve hooked into your priority line. They can do things with telephones that we can’t, and they knew exactly when Heisenberg was due out. Why play practical jokes?”

“Is there a radio telescope still functioning, anywhere in the Reunion?” asked the president. “Or even in Australia, come to that?”

“There hasn’t been a radio telescope in use since the war,” replied the Secretary of State, as if mystified that the question should have been asked.

“Is there an instrument that can be made to work?”

No one could answer that.

“He says that we can prove it,” added Lindenbaum, by way of explanation. “We can tap into their communications. He told me the frequency...but he says we’ll need more than an ordinary receiver. A radio telescope.”

“It has to be a hoax,” said the Secretary of State. There was a murmur of agreement.

“It’s been tried before,” said Diehl, ruminatively. “But it’s too far-fetched to work. Unless we can get proof. Or unless we can fake proof.”

Lindenbaum looked at him as if he had gone mad. Then comprehension dawned. “It would never work,” he said. “We aren’t going to be able to keep control by inventing an imaginary emergency. No one would believe us.”

Most of the faces around the table still had not yet caught on to what Diehl was suggesting, although the more Machiavellian minds were tracing it through.

“If you’re going to tell lies,” said Diehl, “you might as well tell bold ones. And this is one hell of a lie.”

“It’s crazy,” said the president.

“And what if it’s true?” put in Marcangelo.

Lindenbaum just shook his head in bewilderment.

Diehl picked up his own phone, and spoke into the mouthpiece. “Get me the University,” he said. “I want to talk to the closest thing to an astronomer they have on the staff.”