To Ride Pegasus
- Автор: Маккефри Энн
- Серия: Talents #1
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «To Ride Pegasus». Краткое содержание книги:
Said her healing hands would turn the trick. Give him the minute he needs.
Goddamn old bastard!”
“Cool it, Gus. It’s what he needed to keep him alive.” Henry chuckled and straightened his tunic jacket, poked at his softly tied scarf.
Gus made a disgusted noise in his throat. “You’re so damned sure?”
“Not at all. Unfortunately.”
“Unfortunately? With the future of the Center at stake on one man’s heart beat?”
“I’ve seen that we do get the property. I regret that it has to be validated by the death of an old and valued friend. I could almost wish that he does live past the appointed minute…”
“Minute…” Molnar corrected him. “Bastard’s got a huge alarm clock rigged, to the Greenwich-mean-time minute!”
“C’mon, Gus. Let’s go to the wake and cheer the corpse on!”
“My God, Darrow, how do you do it?”
The Death Party was assembling, reluctantly, in the vault-roofed lounge of the Beechwoods mansion. George had invited a select few to be “in at the death.”
Indeed, as he said himself, he had outlasted most of his contemporaries and those three represented today were more enemies than friends. George quipped that business enemies had a reputation of being in at the death. He was dressed in his Vietnam campaign battle dress, remarking that he’d cheated Him then as a twenty-year old, so it behooved him to keep the appointment now suitably attired. Most of those present were Talents or connected with the Center. Young
Daffyd op Owen was present. So were LEO Commissioner Mailer, trying hard not to look uncomfortable, Governor Lawson, several Senators, representatives from four charitable organizations (probably benefiting under the will, Henry decided when he saw the guest list), and the four physicians who’d been chosen at random from the AMA directory by George and flown into Jerhattan for the event. That was George’s way of solving any medical question. With a touch of ghoulish humor, George had decreed-not that he didn’t trust the Talents implicitly, but one had to protect oneself-that the autopsy would be performed on his corpse immediately after death had been assumed.
The party consequently generated little joviality despite the abundance of liquor and exotic foods on the sideboard. George ate sparingly, drank slowly.
Anything he consumed these days, he complained, tasted sour or flat or insipid and caused heartburn.
Conversations were conducted in sepulchral tones and languished easily. The occasional laugh was quickly suppressed. Only Henry Darrow contrived to look at ease though Molly knew, by the way he rubbed his thumb and index finger together constantly, that he was in a highly nervous condition. She didn’t dare touch him since she was not a whit less distraught herself, and would only double Henry’s tension. The person who was suffering most was young Daffyd op Owen. She had become very fond of the sensitive young man and wished that he didn’t have to be present. He’d not had tune to learn to shield himself, certainly not in such an emotionally loaded situation as this. Daffyd was visibly sweating, yet gamely trying to simulate proper party behavior as he chatted with another young
Talent, a precog named Mara Canning.
As the appointed time drew nearer, any semblance of normality dwindled: efforts to keep party talk going faltered. Everyone had one eye on the clock and the other on George Henner.
“You’re supposed to be happy,” George Henner complained when the current silence remained unbroken for sixty-four seconds. “My death means you’re all safely ensconced here.” His scowl was ambiguous. Then he pointed a finger at Henry. “So tell me, Hank, if you lose the wager, where will you go? I…” and he laughed hollowly, “or my executors expect you to vacate the premises…immediately.”
“And we will. I’ve assembled every telekinetic we’ve got…and a flock of physical muscle men. We can clear the premises in an hour, I’m told. You will grant us that much time?”
Henner grunted, then brightly asked where the new Center would be located.
“I’ve a site upstate seventy miles: woods, a small lake, very pastoral. The disadvantage being the distance to commute. You know what copter traffic is like over the City and the Talents are contracted to be at work on time…no matter what.”
Henner’s chair had been wired to monitor his life-systems, and the results were broadcast on a screen visible anywhere in the room. George glanced up at it incuriously.
“All systems still go?” he asked, swinging around to the nearest medical man who, startled, nodded. “Three minutes and counting, Henry?”
“George, may I remind you that this excitement is bad for you?” Henry said.
“Excitement bad for me? Goddamn you, Darrow, it’s kept me alive months past the estimate those jokers gave me. You’ve kept me alive, damn your eyes.”
“Damn ‘em?” Henry laughed. “That was the point, George, and you’ve admitted it before impartial witnesses, too.”
Henner pursed his thin, bloodless lips, glaring at various people in the room, unsatisfied with his present victim’s reactions and unable to vent his feelings on anyone better suited than Henry. His restless, probing glance fell briefly on Molly.
“Having to leave here will put your program back, won’t it?”
Henry shrugged. “For this decade, perhaps yes. The new location will be too far for prospective Talents in the subbie class to come for the test. We can have mobile units…once we have the personnel. Trouble is the units have to be especially constructed…”
“Yes, yes, you’ve told me all that.” George flounced around in his chair, seeking a new or comfortable position as well as another victim. But he returned to Henry. “You’ll be sorry you’ve kept me alive. In exactly two minutes and four seconds…”
“No, George, I won’t ever be sorry for your life. Only sorry for your death.”
“I can believe that!”
“Indeed you can!” cried Molly, unable to bear George’s taunting acrimony.
“Molly…” George’s voice entreated her and she instinctively stepped toward him, her hands outstretched to give the comfort which had often eased him. But he leaned away, suddenly suspicious even of her. Her hands flew to her mouth as the rebuff wounded her. But his reaction broke Henry’s tight control.
“Damn it, George, she only wants to help.”
“Help me? Live? Or die!?”
Molly began to cry, turning towards the wall. But Henry took her in his arms, for once the comforter.
“Molly didn’t deserve that from you, George. The wager was with me!”
“He didn’t mean it that way, Henry,” said young op Owen, the words bursting from his lips, as if he’d been holding back for some time the desire to speak out.
Henner nodded, his face flushed with what Dai op Owen afterwards said was remorse. But the monitors began flashing warning signals.
“Hell, Molly,” George began in a choked voice, “I don’t distrust you.” Then the death alarm went off. “Ha! The appointed minute…And I’m alive! You’re wrong, Henry Darrow. You and all your tea-leaf, table-tipping crystal-gazing…”
At precisely 9:00:30, George Henner’s heart gave a massive contraction and stopped. Cameras on the dead man recorded that his hand raised slightly, towards Henry and Molly before the dead body collapsed.
Accustomed as they were to the death processes, the physicians in attendance were held motionless by the dramatic circumstances. Gus Molnar reacted first, hand moving towards the adrenalin syringe.
“No!” cried Dai op Owen, stepping forward, his hand outstretched. “He wants to die. He doesn’t want to win the wager.”
“My God,” cried one of the physicians, pointing to the screen. “Look at the Goosegg. It’s gone wild. The mind’s still alive…No. Consciousness has gone. But God, look at the graph.”