The Little Friend полностью

And Danny too had bugs—except his thank Heavens weren’t burrowing bugs, crawling bugs, maggots and termites of the soul—but fireflies. Even now, in broad daylight, they flickered at the corner of his vision. Dust flecks, experienced as electronic pops: twinkle, twinkle everywhere. The chemicals had possessed him, they had the upper hand now; it was chemicals—pure, metallic, precise—that boiled up vaporous to the surface and did the thinking and talking and even the seeing now.

That’s why I’m thinking like a chemist, he thought, and was dazed by the clarity of this simple proposition.

He was resting in the snowy fallout of sparks which showered about him at this epiphany when, with a start, he became aware that Farish was talking to him—had been talking to him, actually, for some time.

“What?” he said, with a guilty jump.

“I said, you do know what that middle D in Radar stands for,” said Farish. Though he was smiling, his face was stony red and congested with blood.

Danny—aghast at this weird challenge, at the horror which had wormed its way so deep into even the most innocuous contact with his own kind—sat up and spasmodically twisted his body away, rooting in his pocket for a cigarette he knew he did not have.

“Detection. Radio Detecting And Ranging.” Farish unscrewed a hollow part from the can opener, and held it up to the light and looked through it before he tossed it away. “Here you’ve got one of the most sophisticated surveillance tools available—standard equipment in every law-enforcement vehicle—and anybody tells you that the police use it to trap speeders is full of shit.”

Detection? thought Danny. What was he getting at?

“Radar was a wartime development, top secret, for military purposes—and now every single damn police department in the country uses it to monitor the movements of the American populace in peacetime. All that expense? All that training? You’re telling me that’s just to know who’s going five miles over the speed limit?” Farish snorted. “Bullshit.”

Was it his imagination, or was Farish giving him an extremely pointed look? He’s messing with me, thought Danny. Wants to see what I’ll say. The hell of it was: he wanted to tell Farish about the girl, but he couldn’t admit he’d been at the tower. What reason did he have to be there? He was tempted to mention the girl anyway, though he knew he shouldn’t; no matter how carefully he brought it up, Farish would get suspicious.

No: he had to keep his mouth shut. Maybe Farish knew he was planning to steal the drugs. And maybe—Danny couldn’t quite figure this one out, but just maybe—Farish had something to do with the girl being down there in the first place.

“Those little short waves echo out—” Farish fanned his fingers—“then they ripple back in to report your exact position. It’s about supplying information.”

A test, thought Danny, in a quiet fever. That was how Farish went about things. For the past few days, he’d been leaving huge piles of dope and cash unsupervised around the laboratory, which of course Danny hadn’t touched. But possibly these recent events were part of a more complicated test. Was it just a coincidence that the girl had come to the door of the Mission the very night that Farish had insisted on going over there, the night the snakes were set loose? Something fishy about it from the get-go, her showing up at the door. But Farish hadn’t actually taken very much notice of her, had he?

“My point, is,” said Farish, inhaling heavily through his nostrils as a cascade of mechanical parts from the can opener fell tinkling to the ground, “if they’re beaming all these waves at us, there has to be somebody at the other end. Right?” At the top of his mustache—which was wet—clung a rock of amphetamine the size of a pea. “All this information is worthless without somebody receiving, somebody schooled, somebody trained. Right? Am I right?”

“Right,” said Danny, after a brief pause, trying hard to hit just the right note, falling a little flat. What was Farish getting at, with all this broken-record talk about surveillance and spying, unless he was using it to conceal his true suspicions?

Except he doesn’t know a thing, thought Danny in a sudden panic. He can’t. Farish didn’t even drive.

Farish cracked his neck and said, slyly: “Hell, you know it.”

“What?” said Danny, looking around; for a moment he thought he’d spoken aloud without meaning to. But before he could jump up and protest his innocence, Farish began to pace in a tight circle with his eyes fixed on the ground.