To Ride Pegasus
- Автор: Маккефри Энн
- Серия: Talents #1
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «To Ride Pegasus». Краткое содержание книги:
“I didn’t want to worry you unnecessarily, Daffyd,” Pat went on apologetically.
Daffyd suppressed a tart rejoinder and sighed instead.
“Pat, it’s easier to pull a weed if it’s small.”
“A weed? That’s a good one. Greenfield ’s a weed all right.” Pat sounded unusually acerbic. “I’ll tell Julian you called and that you’re worried.”
“No. I’m not worried, Pat. Not yet.”
“I would be if I were you,” she said, all gloom.
“Is there a precog?”
“No specific ones. But frankly, Dave, I’m far more worried about the city’s climate than anything old Aaron Leftfield perpetrates. And so is Julian. He’s street-walking today.” She gave a reassuring wave of her hand. “Oh, I sent one of the LEO sensitives with him. I can’t move so fast these days.” She glanced down at her gravid abdomen. “You’ve seen my report?”
“You sent one in?” Daffyd began riffling through the tapes.
“It should be on your desk. It’d better be on your desk.”
Daffyd found the purple-backed City Admin tape and waved it at her.
“It is. Lester Welch had first crack at me.”
“And he didn’t mention our tape?” She made an exasperated noise. “Look, Dave, listen to it now because, believe me, it’s more important than Greenfield even if Lester doesn’t think so.”
“Is that a precog, Pat?”
“You tell me it’s my condition,” she said, suddenly angry, “the way Julian does or a vitamin deficiency like my OB and I’ll resign.” The anger as suddenly drained from her face. “God, don’t I just wish I could!”
“Pat, d’you want a few weeks relief?”
Daffyd op Owen caught the shifting emotions on her face: sullen resentment giving way to hope, instantly replaced by resignation. “Don’t, Dave.”
“I wouldn’t and you know it. I can send out a may-day…”
“And overwork some other poor Talent?” Pat’s chin lifted. “I’ll be all right,
Dave. Honest! It’s just that…well, hell, listen to the report. And remember, it’s a pan-ethnic problem this year.”
“This year?” Another loaded phrase. Daffyd op Owen inserted the City Admin tape and his concern over the Greenfield proposal faded to insignificance as he recognized the more imminent danger of a disturbed City. He began to wonder who else had thought to save their dear Director trouble by not reporting the grim facts he now heard. Because if the Correlation Staff had slipped up on reading precogs, he’d downgrade the lot.
Brief, violent inter-ethnic quarrels over contract employment during the winter had been mediated but, within the City’s ethnic sectors, the truce had been uneasy: each segment certain that another had received what plums existed. (Most of the spot employment during the winter had been make-work, paid for by funds pared from other pressing needs to give the proud their sop.) Most of the agitation could be traced to a young Pan-Slavic leader, Vsevolod Roznine. The report noted that Roznine was more feared than popular with his constituents and, although several attempts had been made to cool or placate the agitator, he had neatly avoided the traps. The report closed with the note that Roznine might have latent Talent. However, the only mental contact made had been so distasteful to the Talent that he had broken it off before he could implant any suggestion to go to the Center for testing.
“The man’s public mind is a sewer,” was the final comment.
Daffyd op Owen made a steeple of his fingers and, twirling his swivel chair, gazed out his window to the orderly grounds below. He felt unaccountably depressed yet he could be justifiably proud of what Talent in general and Eastern American Center in particular had been able to accomplish in the past decades. Op Owen could appreciate, and it was no precog, how much more had to be done on numerous levels: public, private, civic, clinical, military, spatial, and most important, inner. No matter what the dominant Talent, precog, telepath, tele-port, kinetic, empathic, the Talented were still very human people, above and beyond their special gifts which so often complicated adjustment therapy.
They had professional immunity at long last, for all registered Talents. Another giant step forward. They had had acceptance on a commercial level for many years where Talent could steadily show profit to management. Since the first body Talents had been able to point out assassins in crowds (even before precogs were accepted and acted on by key personnel), they’d been accepted by intelligent people. But the suspicious were the majority and they still had to be convinced that the Talented were not dangerously different.
He’d ruminated on this many times and it wasn’t solving the other pressing problems before him. A city torn by the very ethnic strife that had once been hailed as a bonding compromise to the late twentieth century’s lack of basic life-style values: summer was a-coming and, despite advances in weather controls, a hot dry spell which could cut the power available for city air-conditioning would only produce riot-breeding conditions.
So far, no major precogs of disasters had been recorded and for such a large unit as Jerhattan, a trouble precog was statistically more probable than one dealing with a small number of people or a single citizen. Scant reassurance, however.
And thank god, Talent was pan-ethnic, thought Daffyd. He didn’t have to worry about that ugly head rising against the Center.
He did tape an All-Talent alert on the city’s climate. The great minds would now have a single thought. Perhaps they’d also have an answer.
When he picked Sally Iselin up at nine at the Clinic door, she gave him a quick appraising look. Then her anxious-puppy expression changed to a radiant smile.
“I knew it. I knew it.” And she all but war-danced a circle as she inspected his costume.
“What?” he asked, turning to keep her face in view.
“You dressed just right. How’d you know? I’m sure I didn’t clue you. Are you positive you’re not a precog, too, Daffyd?”
“I’d rather not be.”
Her vivacity faded instantly. She put a hand out, aborting the sympathetic gesture before she actually made a contact. He touched her fingers lightly in reassurance.
“Not to worry. I just had a tedious day. Felt like wearing glad threads.”
Sally’s eyes crinkled and her mouth tilted up as she cocked her head to one side. “You are indeed joyous,” she said saucily as her glance took in his royal blue black-trimmed coverall.
“Look who’s talking,” and Daffyd grinned down at Sally in lime green and black swing tunic and matching high boots. Sally’s puppy charm was a tonic and he wondered, as he often did in her company, why he didn’t make more opportunities to enjoy it.
As he put a helping hand under her elbow to assist her up to the passenger side of the two-spot copter, she gave him a startled sideways glance. He caught the echo of mental astonishment before she started to chatter about the day’s hopeful applicants.
“They come, Daffyd, swearing oaths that they’d had this or that perception.
Dorotea doesn’t tap a one. We go through the routine but even with maximum perception, they come over dead dumb and stone blind.”
Sally was a compulsive talker but Daffyd became aware that her present garrulity was a shield. He wondered what Sally would need to obscure. Propriety prohibited his making a quick probe but undoubtedly there’d be clues later on. Sally was entirely too open to be devious for very long.
She directed him to Sector K, northwest of the Center, where the worn hills struggled up from old swamplands: not a salubrious area despite reclamation and renovation efforts. There were still ruins of early twentieth-century factories and it was by one such structure, a sprawling half-glass and brick affair, that
Sally directed him to land.
“The place seems popular enough,” Daffyd said as he had to circle several times to find a site for the copter.