Читать книгу Shock Wave - Walt Richmond - Страница 5

THE FEEL OF THE transmitter key under his fingers brought Terry’s gaze back to it, and from there it wandered down the short length of copper antenna wire, now trailing on the ground; only about twenty-five feet of it before it was cut off abruptly.

With a real effort he stifled the impulse to touch the key again. Perhaps it would mean instant return, but perhaps it might bring about any of a dozen other transformations. “Check your premises before you act on them,” he seemed to hear Cal’s voice saying, an axiom that had brought Terry up abruptly more than once in mutual experimental work.

Terry moved well back from the edge of the slab of stone and turned to survey the building behind him again. Just as he focused fully on it, a crack appeared in the solid gray wall and expanded rapidly in a doorway. The voice that issued from the doorway spoke a strange and unintelligible language, but it was not sufficiently outlandish that Terry could not recognize the basic quality of the sound, the slightly unreal and artificial nature of even the best of electro-acoustical instruments.

“Hello, I guess,” he said tentatively, surveying the door without moving.

There was a very brief pause, then the voice spoke up again—somewhat more intelligible this time, though still hollowly artificial. “Grata be you, Citizen Galactica. Thy numero est needful unto me.”

Terry stood for a moment in his turn, pondering the evident greeting and request. You might call it English. Archaic, or anyhow approximately archaic English, with a few tags that pointed toward Latin. But the response wanted was obviously a number, so he called off the one that was most immediately in his consciousness: his ham operator’s call letters.

Finally the mechanical voice clacked once and sputtered: “Numeros no-numeros. Numeros offered stand not within my ordering, young sire. Prithee, step within yon door. So doing, thou’lt hight a . . . a . . . glowing board, upon which thou’lt place thy right hand. Thy meantime . . . temporary . . . status will be offered thee till this confusion clears.”

A plaintive note seemed to creep into the voice after Terry said a cheerful, “All right, if you say so.” The volume decreased for all the world (But what world? Terry wondered, with a momentary surge of panic) as if the machine were thinking aloud. “So few opportunities to render service in accord with my instructions. Yet beseems that when a service can be rendered the charge is gai unusual. . . .”

Terry advanced somewhat hesitantly through the door. He noted with another, sharper impulse of apprehension that it began closing almost immediately behind him. The “glowing board” of which the coder had spoken stood just to his right as he entered. Though there was a generalized light in the room, the glowing board was the only brightly lighted object visible.

“An it please thee, approach the . . . the scanning panel,” urged the voice.

Sol It was a scanning panel, now that the machine had located the proper term in English. It was just a solid-looking pane of luminous, milky quartz, or something very like quartz, nearly eighteen inches square.

As he approached it, it rose from its position near the floor to a level appropriate to his own height. A person of another era might have been awed by such phenomena, but Terry was used to various forms of automation, and it didn’t startle him. Something new in scanning plates, he thought, recalling one that he had investigated not long ago. That one had been a fiber-optic gadget that had successfully identified his written name sixteen times in a row by cross comparison with a blurred random image printed on the check stubs that went with it.

Terry somewhat diffidently offered his hand to the plate’s inspection. Shortly a symbol appeared on the scanning plate, and in the far wall a corridor outlined itself in light. Across the top of the doorway the same symbol appeared simultaneously.

“Subject classed but not identified. Prithee . . . please . . . proceed along left-hand corridor to orientation room displaying symbol.”

Terry did as instructed. He wondered at the voice’s strange English, yet he felt real admiration for the designer of such a well-functioning device, and he began to have the curious itch that he always called the “take-it-apart” feeling. Any complex mechanism aroused his desire to know the internal structure and operation that produced the results.

He stepped into the “orientation room.” It was bare, except for a single piece of furniture: a padded slab which was still adjusting itself to his proper height.

“The citizen is requested to lie prone on the couch.”

Terry did so, more out of curiosity than a desire to be obliging, he told himself, as he fought to keep on believing that this was just an elaborate gag. He was immediately aware of a swirl of color that turned into a driving bombardment of all the sensory channels simultaneously. It seemed to go on and on, although in reality he was aware that it ended in a matter of seconds.

“My apologies for the inconvenience.” The voice was stiff now, and speaking in a clipped machine-like language which Terry understood. He recognized it as his language. It had searched into its files for the specific type of English he used.

And in the same instant he realized, too, with an almost physical blow of recognition, that this was for real; that there was no longer any possible way he could convince himself otherwise.

Through a sea of conflicting emotions that threatened to overwhelm him, Terry heard the voice continuing. “You have now received a basic orientation as Galactic Citizen. The status of your orientation is and will remain General Citizen until such time as your numeric classification data are located and a more suitable orientation can be arranged. I could not determine your citizenship ratings from the available data in your memory banks since they have obviously been badly scrambled by some traumatic incident. You don’t even seem to recall basic galactic symbolism. However, therapy will necessarily be postponed for a more opportune time.

“This is the standard citizen’s survival orientation recording. You will now please scan the current orientation for familiarity and checking.”

Terry forced himself back from the sea of confusion and with an abrupt mental gesture discarded it. If this was real—since this was real, he told himself sternly—he’d better confront it. “You will now please scan . . .” the voice had said, and he wrenched his attention to the problem of just what, and with what tools, he was supposed to “scan,” and precisely what was meant by the word “scan,” anyhow. To his amazement he found that his own mind was presenting him with an orderly flood of information that seemed to flow on and on.

Surprise was almost immediately replaced with an intense startled interest as he realized that he was now thinking totally in terms of the galactic speech pattern. English, his very own tongue, he could recall perfectly after a slight initial flurry of puzzlement—as if it were a possession he had mislaid on a high shelf. It wasn’t where he would have looked for it, and yet it was all there. The difference was that it was now his secondary tongue.

Quite an orientation, he decided. And perhaps the voice—the computer, he noted instantly—was right; that he was a galactic citizen and that some traumatic incident . . .

“No!” His whole being surged into the single word that exploded, in English, from his lips. In his brain the new patterns seemed to retreat before the explosion, to coalesce into a separateness, then tentatively to return to the forefront to continue a hesitant, and then more positive presentation of information; and slowly Terry relaxed and again became intent.

There were whole new sets of behavior patterns, strange and familiar at the same time; there were abilities and knowingnesses . . . and that little section marked “survival data”—it came to him with a shock of pleasure that he had learned such odd abilities as staying underwater for twenty minutes (or a very little longer, if necessary) at a time. He gulped. And now his mind was telling him how to regrow—he paused and examined the concept more closely—rebuild was the more apt phrase—any part of his body.

“Yet I’m a whole new me!” he continued his earlier thought, but this time in Galactic. “I’m Terry Ferman, and yet . . .”

“The citizen—Terry Ferman?—has now been restored to the level of competence of Grade One Galactic Citizen, and will realize that the illegal possession of unauthorized electronic gear is detrimental to the general welfare and will therefore report and place into the hands of customs any such gadgetry in his possession.”

This demand, Terry realized instantly, was aimed at surrender of the small field transmitter to which he was still clinging.

“It isn’t an illegal possession,” he returned. “Being an amateur radio operator, authorized by the government of the United States . . .” He trailed off, overruled by the new information in his own head as much as by the machine.

“No outworld agency can authorize the possession of illegal electronics equipment by a galactic citizen except under off world circumstances. Since you are no longer within the domain of any Terran government, no such authorization may be considered valid.”

“But . . . but . . .” The new orientation data was telling him it would be quite useless to argue the point. On some subjects these customs computer sections were quite obdurate, and one such subject was the emission of any type of random or spurious electro-magnetic signal in or near such a computer arrangement. It had not been made clear to him exactly what his transmitter could do, but that its use in this vicinity could quite possibly derange the computer was obvious. And a deranged computer, he realized with a shudder, was nothing he wanted to tackle at this time.

Nonetheless, he clutched the little transmitter closer to him instinctively. It was his last link to his own world. “This is all very well,” he said, grinning as he always did when a joke had gone far enough, “but I want to get back to Berkeley.”

“The citizen’s desire is unclear.”

“Don’t you understand? I’m lost and I want to stamp my feet on good old terra firma, and I want to do it right now!”

There was a pause that was more than a pause. Total silence set in. A red light went on in the far wall. A wave of fear swept away the momentary homesickness, as the new data in his own head calmly informed him that the next thing that would happen would be a “restraining paralysis for the subject’s own good.”

“Psycho!” said the computer.

“No, no, no,” cried Terry. “It’s more like, ah, poetry. Look in your Latin banks! Terra firma is solid ground. I’m perfectly oriented but I must retain the transmitter. It’s the only link I have with the planet I just arrived from. Anyhow, you have no authority to confiscate outworld scientific data or objects from a qualified explorer.”

The computer resumed buzzing, busily. And the feeling of imminent disaster disappeared as the red light on the wall blinked off. The silence stretched on and on.

Finally, with the effect of a baffled policeman returning to the real issue, the computer said, “Illegal electronics equipment.”

Terry felt his hand tremble a little, but made no reply.

“The citizen is, of course, entitled to the possession and use of standard items of Galactic Citizen’s gear, which will be issued on a loan basis by this terminal, since the citizen appears to have lost all the essentials. In addition the citizen will realize that possession of other equipment is dependent upon the classification level of achievement of the citizen as determined by due testing processes. Whenever the citizen can produce evidence to indicate a knowledge of the use and restrictions of use of this instrument within Galactic territory and according to Galactic law, the instrument will be returned. The citizen is now requested to place the electronic device in the slot on the left-hand wall, and follow the directional arrows to the stores area, where new equipment will be issued.”

Reluctantly, Terry turned and placed the little transmitter in the slot as directed. He must, he decided, play the game on the computer’s terms. It rankled, but the darn thing had all the cards on its side now. The transmitter was not only useless to him on his Quarantine World, but dangerous as well—Quarantine? Even as he wondered how he knew he realized how he knew. The orientation had been quite good.

The thought crossed his mind to double talk the computer into returning him, but he rejected the thought. It wouldn’t do. Another indication of “psychotic” behavior would result in “restraint for the subject’s own good” until a Galactic Supervisor intervened, and, he realized, that might be a long time. There hadn’t been anyone of that level here in nearly four hundred galactic years.

With a grin and a shrug he turned to find the arrow trail—and that was when the habit of talking to himself tripped him up. “Just wait until I get a meter on your insides. . . .” he found himself muttering.

He staved off the silence even as it was falling. “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” he said, “it’s only wishful thinking. Aren’t Galactic Citizens allowed to wish? Anyhow, you talk to yourself, too. I heard you.”

It was a full second before the intense silence lessened and the light humming of the computer resumed, and Terry realized that any conversation he held, with himself or with the computer, would be taken literally in computer-style and could be as dangerous to him as any possible signal from the little transmitter might have been for the computer. The kind of bantering half-humor that he was used to “thinking aloud” while working would be translated in context and not in intent by the humorless machine and would inevitably cause it to classify him as deranged. He shuddered and made a point of not expressing his next thought aloud.

Well, there was much he now knew that he hadn’t known before, and the vistas of unknown information that stretched beyond the brief orientation were dizzying to contemplate. For each bit of data he had received, there were a thousand channels of speculation opening in front of him.

In the meantime, the machine was waiting; not politely, just impassively. He turned again—quietly this time—and followed the arrows away from the orientation room and farther into the huge building.

He now knew the structure was an outpost Galactic receiving station. And he suddenly realized that it was not capable of returning him to his native world, nor did he even know where Earth was in relation to this world.

Terry Ferman was a Galactic Citizen, like it or not.