"(Brian Aldiss)-Outside" - читать интересную книгу автора (Aldiss Brian W)

Harley approached it and climbed clumsily down. He was shaking violently
with cold and fear. When his feet touched solid ground, he began to run.
Once he looked back: the house perched on its platform like a frog hunched
on top of a rat trap.
He stopped abruptly then, in almost dark. Abhorrence jerked up inside
him like retching. The high, crackling stars and the pale serration of the
mountains began to spin, and he clenched his fists to hold on to
consciousness. That house, whatever it was, was the embodiment of all the
coldness in his mind. Harley said to himself: "Whatever has been done to
me, I've been cheated. Someone has robbed me of something so thoroughly I
don't even know what it is. It's been a cheat, a cheat...." And he choked
on the idea of those years that had been pilfered from him. No thought:
thought scorched the synapses and ran like acid through the brain. Action
only! His leg muscles jerked into movement again.
Buildings loomed about him. He simply ran for the nearest light and
burst into the nearest door. Then he pulled up sharp, panting and blinking
the harsh illumination out of his pupils.
The walls of the room were covered with graphs and charts. In the
centre of the room was a wide desk with vision-screen and loudspeaker on
it. It was a business-like room with overloaded ashtrays and a state of
ordered untidiness. A thin man sat alertly at the desk; he had a thin
mouth.
Four other men stood in the room, all were armed, none seemed
surprised to see him. The man at the desk wore a neat suit; the others
were in uniform.
Harley leant on the door-jamb and sobbed. He could find no words to
say.
"It has taken you four years to get out of there," the thin man said.
He had a thin voice.
"Come and look at this," he said, indicating the screen before him.
With an effort, Harley complied; his legs worked like rickety crutches.
On the screen, clear and real, was Calvin's bedroom. The outer wall
gaped, and through it two uniformed men were dragging a strange creature,
a wiry, mechanical-looking being that had once been called Calvin.
"Calvin was a Nititian," Harley observed dully. He was conscious of a
sort of stupid surprise at his own observation.
The thin man nodded approvingly.
"Enemy infiltrations constituted quite a threat," he said. "Nowhere
on Earth was safe from them: they can kill a man, dispose of him and turn
into exact replicas of him. Makes things difficult.... We lost a lot of
state secrets that way. But Nititian ships have to land here to disembark
the Non-Men and to pick them up again after their work is done. That is
the weak link in their chain.
"We intercepted one such ship-load and bagged them singly after they
had assumed humanoid form. We subjected them to artificial amnesia and put
small groups of them into different environments for study. This is the
Army Institute for Investigation of Non-Men, by the way. We've learnt a
lot ... quite enough to combat the menace.... Your group, of course, was
one such."
Harley asked in a gritty voice: "Why did you put me in with them?"