after all. On the contrary, our task is to stay in the shade. When you, dear Emily, start working with me, I’ll explain the rules to you in detail. Will six hundred thousand credits a year be sufficient for you?”
The girl’s eyes dilated. “Six hundred thousand? Legally?”
“Yes. Absolutely legally.”
“Of course it will!” She took a squint at Andrew for a second. “Well, on condition that we fulfill our mission first, that I’ll be free and the planet will not freeze or melt in the meantime. What will I have to do?”
“I’ll explain later. So, once again: do you accept?”
“Yes!”
“Excellent. In this case, my friends, let’s get down to your problem first. You were interested in some secret documents, weren’t you? Something about a refuge for the government?”
“Yes,” answered Andrew.
“What for?”
“I want to find out if the President told the truth about consequences of the planet’s core braking.”
“To what end?”
“To know what future awaits us. And to get ready.”
Lorenzetti laughed again. “To know the future? Do you think the President or any other mortal beings know God’s ways? And how can you get ready for what you have no idea about? My opinion is as follows: if the planet is fated to destruction, it will be destroyed. I’ll give you a simpler example: if you are fated to get smashed up in a road accident, you won’t drown in a swamp! Do you think you are able to change the march of time?”
If Andrew hadn’t known who he was talking to, he would have decided that this was an orthodox priest.
“I’m willing to try.”
The hacker laughed haughtily. “I pity you, but I won’t impose my opinion on you. One day you will realize your fundamental mistake. Follow me!”
Going through the open doors, he stopped in the middle of the next room. This room was twice as small. There were no windows in it, but it was lit up brightly by built-in lamps on the ceiling.
“This is my home office,” Lorenzetti said proudly as he spread his arms. “No sounds penetrate here from outside. An ideal place for work, isn’t it?”
Barkov glanced back. The doors shut behind them. This side of them seemed to be made of a white material equal to the material of the walls. No gap shown between the door panels. Were it not for a pair of metal door handles, one could have thought that the wall itself closed.
Is it a trap?
“A strange office,” Andrew said trying not to manifest his uneasiness. “Where are the tables and chairs?”
“I don’t use them as I prefer to work in the standing position. But I’ll let you sit down.” He raised his voice. “Computer! Lift two chairs!”
A part of the floor moved apart before his feet. From the square opening, two light brown spheres resembling large balls of wool emerged. Coming abreast with the floor surface, the spheres rolled to the wall on the left. Meanwhile, the floor closed.
Having stopped at the wall, the balls flattened. A hollow appeared on one side of them while the other side stretched up and bent. This resulted in two armchairs.
“Self-moving transformers,” Lorenzetti explained. “They can take the form of a table, a sofa, a carpet or, as in this case, an armchair. Have a seat!”
Andrew had seen advertisements of such goods, but had never bought them because of their high price. Lippo has lots of money. With his kind of work, it’s natural that he’d earn big fees. But what else might Lippo be involved in? What if legal work for various companies is just a cover, and Lippo is an ordinary crook with extraordinary abilities? If I wasn’t going to leave my job, it would be interesting to conduct an investigation.
He and Emily went to the armchairs and sat down.
“Is it comfortable?” the hacker asked with a pleased smile looking at the girl.
“Yes,” she said.
“If the seat is too hard, I can make is softer. If it’s too soft, vice versa. What would you like?”
“Nothing. Everything is absolutely perfect,” Emily said with some irony.
“That’s great. Let’s get down to business then. Here’s the globe!”
The planet appeared in the air in front of Lorenzetti. Its lower part floated several centimeters above the floor and the top almost reached the ceiling. The Earth looked like an absolutely real object. The sphere started spinning slowly. When the waters of the Atlantic Ocean passed by and the shores of the North America showed up, the sphere stopped. The hacker’s face was directly opposite Washington DC.
“Bull’s-eye!” he exclaimed with satisfaction.
Barkov knew that such realistic images could be created not in the air but directly in a viewer’s mind by a new game computer that cost more than fifty thousand credits. I wonder if this man pays taxes.
“Are you going to play a geography game with us?”
Lorenzetti looked at Andrew with astonishment. “Do you think it’s a game?”
“Of course.”
“You are mistaken. This is how our planet looks at the moment. The image is transmitted from satellites that remained intact after the asteroid attack. We are online!”
Andrew smiled wryly. Yes, he knew the government had devices such as this, with the ability to transmit images and sounds to a human brain in real time. The devices could be controlled by their owners who were able to select game modes and give commands mentally without lifting a hand or even stirring a finger.. But holographic representations like this one were beyond the means of anyone outside the government; only gamers with thick wallets could afford something that even resembled the real thing. “Give me a break!”
The hacker’s face became stern, almost angry. “I guess you have no idea who you have come to see. All right, I’ll prove it to you. Let’s start not with the President but with your mother. Is she home now?”
Andrew bristled at the mention of his mother – and Lippo’s threatening tone.
“Why do you want to know that?”
“I want you to make sure that this isn’t a recording of past events or an imitation of the present ones, but a reality. Is your mother’s address 1237, Southwest Street, Miami?”
Barkov nodded unwillingly. Really, Lorenzetti had studied his dossier thoroughly!
The globe turned down, then started to scale up. The North Pole disappeared somewhere under the ceiling and the South Pole, under the floor. The western and eastern parts went into the walls. The image shielded the part of the room that was behind it. It seemed that
