"chap-21" - читать интересную книгу автора (Biggle Lloyd Jr. - All The Colours Of Darkness)

21

Alice lifted Ysaye as an adult lifts a child, and was gone, leaving only a swirling of dead air to mark her passage.

She returned before Darzek could comprehend the manner of her going, stepping from a shimmering nothingness, from a mere trickery of optics that played delicately near the ladder. Xerxes followed, and then Zachary, and she had uttered no sound, had not even glanced at Darzek.

Not until she attempted to lift Gwendolyn’s huge form did she falter. Darzek sprang to her assistance, seizing the legs. Gwendolyn seemed ridiculously light, to him, but her weight plainly distressed Alice, who hauled pantingly at the shoulders as she edged her way backwards. Darzek never saw exactly where it was that he went. One instant he was breathing the lifeless air of the capsule; the next instant, in mid-breath, as it were, the air he sucked in became cooly delicious, and Gwendolyn’s weight was staggering.

The laboring Alice had sunk to her knees, but even so she allowed Gwendolyn to drop the last few inches to the floor. Darzek slowly lowered the legs, and straightened up to look about him. The shock of recognition left him blinking. The room appeared to be an exact replica of the wrecked Moon base. It had the same curved and glowing walls and ceiling, the same ledges with sleeping pads, the instrument board, the transmitter frame from which he had just stepped.

In his exhausted state the sudden change to Earth’s stronger gravity left him with a frightful sensation of fatigue and weakness, and he needed no further proof to convince himself that he really had returned to Earth.

He seated himself on a ledge, and watched Alice minister to the unconscious aliens. Except for Gwendolyn, they lay on sleeping pads on the opposite ledge, and Alice moved tirelessly from one to another, giving them oxygen through a queerly flat face mask. They revived one by one, and sat up, but continued to gulp greedily at the oxygen when it was offered.

For a long time they spoke in hushed tones among themselves, and seemed to be studiously avoiding so much as a glance in Darzek’s direction. It was Ysaye who finally got to his feet and moved falteringly across the room.

"Well, Jan Darzek—"

His hand clutched Darzek’s arm. His other hand wiped the bubbling saliva from his mouth, wiped it again and again, and Darzek felt an overwhelming, incomprehensible surge of affection for this hideously faced, dry-eyed creature who was thus sobbing out his alien gratitude.

When the others, even Alice and Gwendolyn, began to display the same disconcerting emotional symptoms, the embarrassed Darzek felt constrained to divert their attention to more practical matters. He announced, "I’m hungry."

The five of them stared at him.

"I can’t remember when I ate last," -he said. "It certainly wasn’t today—now that we’re back on Earth I suppose I can start thinking of time in terms of days. I don’t accuse you of intentionally mistreating me, since you had no advance notice that you were going to have a guest of my gastronomic inclinations, and I don’t doubt that the predigested sawdust you’ve been feeding me contains enough food value to sustain life, but if you have anything on hand that a native of this planet would loosely classify as food, I’d like to see if I still have a stomach."

Much to his bewilderment, this intensified their distress. Ysaye bubbled apologies. The others engaged in an agitated exchange that resulted in Zachary’s darting from the room through one of the camouflaged collapsing doors. He was gone for some time, and he returned, not with the food Darzek expected, but attired as the alluring, blond Miss X of the Universal Trans terminal.

"What would you like me to bring you?" he asked.

"I’d like a steak with french-fried potatoes and various other trimmings, lots of coffee, and blueberry pie а la mode. But my stomach has probably shrunk to the size of a golf ball, and it would kill me to see all that food, and smell it, and taste some of it, and not be able to eat it. Let’s start out with coffee and a couple of sandwiches. Any kind of sandwiches will do."

Zachary departed, and the other aliens suddenly rediscovered their own appetites and broke out a set of their triangular utensils. Darzek declined a portion with a shake of his head, wondering if his food was equally distasteful to them. Zachary returned in a surprisingly short time with an enormous tray of a dozen kinds of individually wrapped sandwiches and six cartons of coffee, and Darzek ate slowly, savoring every delectable bite, sampling all of the sandwiches and finishing none.

While he ate, he listened to the aliens.

They were laughing.

The unpleasant hisses and buzzes of their language had unaccountably acquired musical overtones. There were quavers, lilting inflections, that he had never heard on the Moon. Every clipped, strident utterance vibrated with hilarity. They laughed at themselves, individually and collectively. They laughed at Darzek, at the tasteless fodder he was chewing with so much relish, at his perplexed reaction to their laughter. No condemned man suddenly granted a pardon ever found life so magnificently delightful.

Darzek reluctantly pushed the sandwiches aside. "I’ve mangled all of them beyond repair, but I can’t eat any of them," he said sadly. "Never mind. Tomorrow is another day. If you have a refrigerator, stow them away and I’ll have another crack at them for breakfast."

"Is there anything wrong with the sandwiches?" Xerxes asked, his voice consumed by laughter. "Do you wish for something else?"

"The trouble is with my stomach, and only time and a steady diet can correct that. What I would like now is some sleep. In a genuine bed. It seems ages since I had any, and I can’t remember my last really restful sleep."

The laughter tapered off as unaccountably as it had begun. "We should talk," Zachary said, "but there is no reason why you should not sleep first. We have much else that must be done.

"I will show you the way," Ysaye said. "Come."

He rippled open a doorway, revealing a tunnel that slanted upwards. Another doorway, and Darzek followed him out into a quite ordinary basement. The squat furnace and its insulated hot-air pipes, and the one dimly burning electric bulb, were comforting monuments to a reality Darzek had almost forgotten. The basement windows were covered, but even in the feeble light of the one bulb Darzek could see that the place was conspicuously clean and quite empty.

Ysaye led him up the basement stairs to the first floor, then along a lighted hallway. The windows they passed were heavily curtained; the doors closed—but otherwise Darzek’s impression was of an altogether ordinary house.

They climbed to the second floor, and at the end of the hallway Ysaye opened a door and turned on the light. "This room should be quietest," he said. "The bathroom is opposite. Can you find your way down to us again if you need anything?"

Darzek sniffed the air. The bedroom, like the rest of the house, was hot and stuffy, as though it had long been vacant and closed up. "I don’t know," he said.

"You need only to go as far as the basement and call. I wish you a pleasant rest, Jan Darzek."

"Thank you," Darzek said.

The door closed, and Ysaye’s light footsteps receded.

Darzek went immediately to the window, raised the shade and opened it. Sounds drifted in from outside—passing autos, children being called in from their play. It was dusk, and he looked out onto a well-kept cement courtyard, set amid a quiet neighborhood of well-kept yards and cheerfully lighted brick houses: The spire of the Chrysler Building loomed conspicuously above the trees. After a moment’s reflection he knew almost precisely where he was.

He cautiously opened the bedroom door. The silence within the house was absolute. He tiptoed carefully along the hallway and down the stairs. He tried the front door.

It opened.

Gently he nudged it shut until the lock clicked. He went back to the second floor, and quietly investigated the other rooms there. All of the bedrooms were tastefully furnished. The beds were made up, the rooms ready for occupancy. The polished bureau tops were not even dusty. He hazarded a guess that none of this furniture had ever been used, and wondered if the aliens had a maid, a human maid, who came twice weekly and was delighted with the immaculately tidy habits of her employers.

He returned to his own room, turned off the light, and stripped the swathing cloth from his body. The bed was comfortable, he was more exhausted than he had ever thought possible, and yet for a long time he could not fall asleep.

He had, since he dove into the transmitter in Brussels, observed and been a party to many miracles, but these seemed trivial compared with the miracle he had just witnessed.

The aliens trusted him.

21

Alice lifted Ysaye as an adult lifts a child, and was gone, leaving only a swirling of dead air to mark her passage.

She returned before Darzek could comprehend the manner of her going, stepping from a shimmering nothingness, from a mere trickery of optics that played delicately near the ladder. Xerxes followed, and then Zachary, and she had uttered no sound, had not even glanced at Darzek.

Not until she attempted to lift Gwendolyn’s huge form did she falter. Darzek sprang to her assistance, seizing the legs. Gwendolyn seemed ridiculously light, to him, but her weight plainly distressed Alice, who hauled pantingly at the shoulders as she edged her way backwards. Darzek never saw exactly where it was that he went. One instant he was breathing the lifeless air of the capsule; the next instant, in mid-breath, as it were, the air he sucked in became cooly delicious, and Gwendolyn’s weight was staggering.

The laboring Alice had sunk to her knees, but even so she allowed Gwendolyn to drop the last few inches to the floor. Darzek slowly lowered the legs, and straightened up to look about him. The shock of recognition left him blinking. The room appeared to be an exact replica of the wrecked Moon base. It had the same curved and glowing walls and ceiling, the same ledges with sleeping pads, the instrument board, the transmitter frame from which he had just stepped.

In his exhausted state the sudden change to Earth’s stronger gravity left him with a frightful sensation of fatigue and weakness, and he needed no further proof to convince himself that he really had returned to Earth.

He seated himself on a ledge, and watched Alice minister to the unconscious aliens. Except for Gwendolyn, they lay on sleeping pads on the opposite ledge, and Alice moved tirelessly from one to another, giving them oxygen through a queerly flat face mask. They revived one by one, and sat up, but continued to gulp greedily at the oxygen when it was offered.

For a long time they spoke in hushed tones among themselves, and seemed to be studiously avoiding so much as a glance in Darzek’s direction. It was Ysaye who finally got to his feet and moved falteringly across the room.

"Well, Jan Darzek—"

His hand clutched Darzek’s arm. His other hand wiped the bubbling saliva from his mouth, wiped it again and again, and Darzek felt an overwhelming, incomprehensible surge of affection for this hideously faced, dry-eyed creature who was thus sobbing out his alien gratitude.

When the others, even Alice and Gwendolyn, began to display the same disconcerting emotional symptoms, the embarrassed Darzek felt constrained to divert their attention to more practical matters. He announced, "I’m hungry."

The five of them stared at him.

"I can’t remember when I ate last," -he said. "It certainly wasn’t today—now that we’re back on Earth I suppose I can start thinking of time in terms of days. I don’t accuse you of intentionally mistreating me, since you had no advance notice that you were going to have a guest of my gastronomic inclinations, and I don’t doubt that the predigested sawdust you’ve been feeding me contains enough food value to sustain life, but if you have anything on hand that a native of this planet would loosely classify as food, I’d like to see if I still have a stomach."

Much to his bewilderment, this intensified their distress. Ysaye bubbled apologies. The others engaged in an agitated exchange that resulted in Zachary’s darting from the room through one of the camouflaged collapsing doors. He was gone for some time, and he returned, not with the food Darzek expected, but attired as the alluring, blond Miss X of the Universal Trans terminal.

"What would you like me to bring you?" he asked.

"I’d like a steak with french-fried potatoes and various other trimmings, lots of coffee, and blueberry pie а la mode. But my stomach has probably shrunk to the size of a golf ball, and it would kill me to see all that food, and smell it, and taste some of it, and not be able to eat it. Let’s start out with coffee and a couple of sandwiches. Any kind of sandwiches will do."

Zachary departed, and the other aliens suddenly rediscovered their own appetites and broke out a set of their triangular utensils. Darzek declined a portion with a shake of his head, wondering if his food was equally distasteful to them. Zachary returned in a surprisingly short time with an enormous tray of a dozen kinds of individually wrapped sandwiches and six cartons of coffee, and Darzek ate slowly, savoring every delectable bite, sampling all of the sandwiches and finishing none.

While he ate, he listened to the aliens.

They were laughing.

The unpleasant hisses and buzzes of their language had unaccountably acquired musical overtones. There were quavers, lilting inflections, that he had never heard on the Moon. Every clipped, strident utterance vibrated with hilarity. They laughed at themselves, individually and collectively. They laughed at Darzek, at the tasteless fodder he was chewing with so much relish, at his perplexed reaction to their laughter. No condemned man suddenly granted a pardon ever found life so magnificently delightful.

Darzek reluctantly pushed the sandwiches aside. "I’ve mangled all of them beyond repair, but I can’t eat any of them," he said sadly. "Never mind. Tomorrow is another day. If you have a refrigerator, stow them away and I’ll have another crack at them for breakfast."

"Is there anything wrong with the sandwiches?" Xerxes asked, his voice consumed by laughter. "Do you wish for something else?"

"The trouble is with my stomach, and only time and a steady diet can correct that. What I would like now is some sleep. In a genuine bed. It seems ages since I had any, and I can’t remember my last really restful sleep."

The laughter tapered off as unaccountably as it had begun. "We should talk," Zachary said, "but there is no reason why you should not sleep first. We have much else that must be done.

"I will show you the way," Ysaye said. "Come."

He rippled open a doorway, revealing a tunnel that slanted upwards. Another doorway, and Darzek followed him out into a quite ordinary basement. The squat furnace and its insulated hot-air pipes, and the one dimly burning electric bulb, were comforting monuments to a reality Darzek had almost forgotten. The basement windows were covered, but even in the feeble light of the one bulb Darzek could see that the place was conspicuously clean and quite empty.

Ysaye led him up the basement stairs to the first floor, then along a lighted hallway. The windows they passed were heavily curtained; the doors closed—but otherwise Darzek’s impression was of an altogether ordinary house.

They climbed to the second floor, and at the end of the hallway Ysaye opened a door and turned on the light. "This room should be quietest," he said. "The bathroom is opposite. Can you find your way down to us again if you need anything?"

Darzek sniffed the air. The bedroom, like the rest of the house, was hot and stuffy, as though it had long been vacant and closed up. "I don’t know," he said.

"You need only to go as far as the basement and call. I wish you a pleasant rest, Jan Darzek."

"Thank you," Darzek said.

The door closed, and Ysaye’s light footsteps receded.

Darzek went immediately to the window, raised the shade and opened it. Sounds drifted in from outside—passing autos, children being called in from their play. It was dusk, and he looked out onto a well-kept cement courtyard, set amid a quiet neighborhood of well-kept yards and cheerfully lighted brick houses: The spire of the Chrysler Building loomed conspicuously above the trees. After a moment’s reflection he knew almost precisely where he was.

He cautiously opened the bedroom door. The silence within the house was absolute. He tiptoed carefully along the hallway and down the stairs. He tried the front door.

It opened.

Gently he nudged it shut until the lock clicked. He went back to the second floor, and quietly investigated the other rooms there. All of the bedrooms were tastefully furnished. The beds were made up, the rooms ready for occupancy. The polished bureau tops were not even dusty. He hazarded a guess that none of this furniture had ever been used, and wondered if the aliens had a maid, a human maid, who came twice weekly and was delighted with the immaculately tidy habits of her employers.

He returned to his own room, turned off the light, and stripped the swathing cloth from his body. The bed was comfortable, he was more exhausted than he had ever thought possible, and yet for a long time he could not fall asleep.

He had, since he dove into the transmitter in Brussels, observed and been a party to many miracles, but these seemed trivial compared with the miracle he had just witnessed.

The aliens trusted him.