"Blish, James - A Hero's Life" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

Something abruptly cut off his view of the palace. He snatched his binoculars away from his eyes in alarm.

The object that had come between him and the Gulf was a mounted man - or rather, the idiot-headed apteryx the man was sitting on. Simon was surrounded by a ring of them, their lance-points aimed at his chest, pennons trailing in the dusty sareh-grass. The pennons bore the device of the Rood-Prince; but every lancer in the force was a vombis.

Simon rose resignedly, with a token snarl intended more for himself than for the impassive protean creatures and their fat birds. He wondered why it had never occurred to him before that the vombis might be as sensitive to him as he was to them.

But the answer to that no longer mattered. Sloppiness was about to win its long-postponed reward.

IV

They put him naked into a wet cell a narrow closet completely clad in yellow alabaster, down the sides of which water oozed and beaded all day long, running out into gutters at the edges. He was able to judge when it was day, because there were clouded bull's-eye lenses in each of the four walls which waxed and waned at him with any outside light; the wet cell was a sort of inverted oubliette, thrust high up into Boadicea's air, probably a hypertrophied merlon on one of the towers of the Traitors' Hall. At night, a fifth lens, backed by a sodium vapour lamp, glared down from the ceiling, surrounded by a faint haze of steam where the dew tried to condense on it.

Escape was a useless fantasy. Erected into the sky as it was, the wet cell did not even partake of the usual character of the building's walls, except for one stain in the alabaster which might have been the under side of a child's footprint; otherwise the veinings were mockingly meaningless. The only exit was down, an orifice through which they had inserted him as though he were being born, and now plugged like the bottom of a stopped toilet. Could he have broken through one of the lenses with his bare hands, he would have found himself naked and torn on the highest point in Druidsfall, with no place to go.

Naked he was. Not only had they pulled all his teeth in search of more poisons, but of course they had also taken his Clasp. He hoped they would fool with the Clasp - it would make a clean death for everybody - but doubtless they had better sense. As for the teeth, they would regrow if he lived, that was one of the few positive advantages of the transduction serum, but in the meantime his bare jaws ached abominably.

They had missed the antidote, which was in a tiny gel capsule in his left earlobe, masquerading as a sebaceous cyst - left, because it is automatic to neglect that side of a man, as though it were only a mirror image of the examiner's right - and that was some comfort. In a few more days now, the gel would dissolve, he would lose his multiple disguise, and then he would have to con

fess, but in the meantime he could manage to be content despite the slimy glaring cold of the cell.

And in the meantime, he practised making virtues of deficiencies : in this instance, calling upon his only inner resources - the diverting mutterings of his other personalities - and trying to guess what they might once have meant. Some said:

'But I mean, like, you know -'

'Wheah they goin'?'

'Yeah.'

'Led's gehdahda heah - he-he-he!'

'Wheah?'

'So anyway, so uh.'

Others:

'It's hard not to recognize a pigeon.'

'But Mother's birthday is July 20.'

'So he knew that the inevitable might happen -'

'It made my scalp creak and my blood curl.'

'Where do you get those crazy ideas?'

And others:

'Acquit Socrates!'