Sprague de Camp's New Anthology
- Автор: Де Камп Лайон Спрэг
- Год: 1953
- Язык: английский
- Год: Panther
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Sprague de Camp's New Anthology». Краткое содержание книги:
"Claude Godwin! If you wish help in achieving your objective of escaping from Greenland, hide the chocolate bar in the parachron tomorrow morning and leave it there. That is all for the present."
Godwin sighed. Everybody seemed anxious to help him to escape except Kaalund and Gram, the ones who really mattered. And why should they want him to leave a chocolate bar in the time-viewing machine? Was Thor Thomsen trying to sneak a message to the Bruuns too? Or was it a bomb to blow up the machine? That seemed unlikely. If Viggo Bruun were a man of any sense, he would have at least one complete set of plans of the parachron in a safe place. He might even have filed applications for patents, in which case the machine's principles of operation would eventually become public knowledge. There was no such thing as a secret invention any more. Even if there were, why should Thomsen wish to blow up such a marvellous machine?
Anyway, Thomsen had been the only one to sign off at the end of his message so that Godwin would not have to eat all the other gumdrops to make sure they had no capsules in them. Accordingly Godwin removed the chocolate bar from the bag and tendered the rest of the gumdrops to Kaalund, saying:
"Like some?"
"Tank you."
"Keep the whole bag."
"Tanks. I told you you vould not feel good if you ate too many."
The detective went through the rest of the gumdrops like a devouring flame. In a few minutes they were all gone. An orderly came in and spoke. Kaalund said:
"He vants to know vat you vish for lunch."
"Tell him thanks, but I don't want any lunch."
"I told you! But dat is no reason vy I am starving." He spoke at length in Danish to the orderly, who went out and returned with a tray heaped with enough food for two ordinary men. Kaalund fell to with his free hand while Godwin, bored and restless, stared gloomily out the window.
"Sven," Godwin asked, "if the climatic engineers had such success in melting the ice-cap off Greenland, why don't they do the same with Antarctica? That's a lot bigger than Greenland."
"Sure," said Kaalund with his mouth full of Smorrebrod, "but so much vater vould de level of the de oceans raise maybe ten, tvelve metres, and vat vould happen to all de seaports? De melting of the Gronland cap raised it about a metre and a half, and some cities like New Orleans raised an awful stink."
Kaalund finished and summoned the orderly to remove the tray.
"You know, Claude," he said, "I am not feeling so good neither. Maybe I should not be eating on top of dose candies ..."
The orderly removed the tray. Godwin, glancing at Kaalund, felt a shock of alarm. The man's ruddy round face had taken on a mottled hue, and sweat glistened on his forehead.
"I got a fordomme belly-ache," muttered the sufferer. "I must telephone for my relief to come qvick so I can ... Ow!" The big man grunted and doubled over. "Hey, Claude, push de button! Somebody is poisoning me!"
With a bellow of pain the detective rolled out of his chair to the floor.
THEY took the moaning Kaalund away, and presently another detective came in and picked up the hand-grip on the other end of Godwin's handcuff. This was a smaller man, black-haired and flat-faced, who introduced himself as Niels Kirdlavik.
"Is that an Eskimo name?" said Godwin.
"Yes."
"Are you Sven's regular relief on this job?"
"Yes."
"What's gonna happen next?"
"Do not know."
"Do they know what's wrong with Sven yet?"
"Do not know."
The man was not a sprightly conversationalist. Presently another detective and a couple of uniformed cops came in and poked around the room. They gathered up the remains of the gumdrops and retrieved the empty bags that had contained the first two lots from the waste-basket. The detective asked Godwin a lot of questions that brought out the stories of the three bags of gumdrops, though Godwin refrained from telling about the message capsules.
Godwin finally asked: "Was he poisoned? How is he now?"
"He vas. Ve think it vas meant for you, whom it vould have killed qvick, but he is so big it vill not hurt him much. He vill be back at vork in a couple days."
"Who's trying to poison me?"
"That is vat ve are trying to find out. It might have been your last visitor, or any of the people who prepared and brought the lunch."
Godwin did not know of any motive for Thomson's trying to murder him, though never having met the man he was in no position to judge. The name of Werner von Wittelsbach had entered his mind at once. The man did have a motive, even though a screwy one. But while Godwin hesitated to tell about this, the detective bustled out.
The afternoon was dull. In answer to his loud protests the hospital personnel finally dug a battered book in English out of their library: The Theory and Practice of Chicken Farming, by John H. Pappakostas, N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, 2097, 347 pp. $49.50.
Claude Godwin groaned and covered his eyes with his free hand.
Next morning he was awakened by a tug on his wrist, and Kirdlavik's voice: "Hey, Mr. Godvin, vake up! The doctors is examining you to see if you can go out!"
Examination showed that the effect of the drug that had kept him unconscious during his transportation to Greenland had wholly worn off. Kirdlavik unlocked his handcuff long enough for him to dress.
"Where am I going?" he asked.
"To the palace. They got a room there for you."
"Yesterday Gram said I could visit the lab where Bruun's got his parachron. Why couldn't I stop there on my way?"
"I vill see." Kirdlavik spoke Danish into the telephone, then said: "You may." While the policeman had been telephoning, Godwin slipped the seeming chocolate-bar into his pants pocket.
When Godwin had finished dressing and had eaten his breakfast, still another detective arrived to take the place of Kirdlavik, who was yawning from his all-night vigil. Otto Malling, a tall, thin, knobby man with faded blue eyes and a handlebar moustache, proved more communicative than the dourly silent Kirdlavik, and started off with a lecture on the beauties of Greenland in general and the Julianehaab region in particular:
"... and you must take a ride out to the Oster-Bygt, where is the ruins of the houses Eric the Red and his people made when they came here in 982 ..."
Godwin was not overly impressed by Julianehaab, where the bicycles outnumbered the automobiles, though it did have a quaint, old-fashioned air with its field-stone houses with small windows and steeply-gabled roofs. The taxi purred up a winding street towards an academic-looking group of buildings.
"The University of Greenland," said Malling. "The laboratory is this building separate from the rest. You understand, I suppose, that the parachron is a secret yet. You must not talk about it to anybody except those like Doctor Bruun, who know already."
"If it's so important, wouldn't the news leak out?"
Malling shrugged. "Plenty of rumours is floating about, but so long as nobody knows exactly, no harm is doing."
Malling showed his identification to the uniformed cop at the front door of the laboratory building. Inside they waited in a small, front office, where Malling exchanged chaff in Danish with a girl secretary. Presently two men entered: Karl Bruun and an older man with a white goatee, introduced as Viggo Bruun. Both Bruuns had their sleeves rolled up and were dirty from tinkering They wiped their hands on pieces of waste and shook hands.
Godwin said: "The gumdrops were superb."
"Good," said the elder Bruun. "You wish to see the parachron, do you not?"
He led the way through featureless concrete halls to an automatic elevator, where another policeman stood guard. On the second floor of the building he led them from the elevator to a large room at whose door stood still another gendarme.