"Dickson, Gordon - Dragon And The George Txt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

A dead silence greeted this remark. Finally Bryagh retorted.

"Who ever heard of a dragon sneezing?"

"Who? Who?" snorted Smrgol. "I heard of a dragon sneezing. Before your time, of course. Old Malgu, my mother's sister's third cousin, once removed, sneezed twice on one day a hundred and eighty-three years ago. Don't tell me you never heard of a dragon sneez- ing. Sneezing runs in our family. It's a sign of brains."

"That's right," put in Jim hastily. "A sign my brains are working. Busy brains make your nose itch."

"You tell 'em, boy!" Smrgol rumbled, in the second dubious silence following this remark.

"I'll bet!" roared Bryagh. He turned to the rest of the assembly. "You all know Gorbash. Mooning around aboveground half the time, making friends with hedgehogs and wolves and what all! Smrgol here's been talking up his grand-nephew for years, but Gorbash's never showed anything yet that I know of -least of all, brains! Shut up, Gorbash!"

"Why should I?" Jim shouted, hastily. "I've got as good a right to talk as anyone else here. About this- uh-george, here-"

"Kill it!" "Bum it alive!" "Hold a raffle, and the winning diamond gets to eat it," a roar of suggestions interrupted him.

"No!" he thundered. "Listen to me-"

'Wo, is right," trumpeted Bryagh. "I found this george. If anybody gets to eat it, it'll be me." He glared around the cave. "But I got a better use for this george. I say, let's stake it out where the other georges can see it. Then, when some of them come to get it back, we'll jump them when they aren't expecting it and grab the lot of them. Then we'll sell them all back to the rest of the georges for a lot of gold."

When Bryagh said the word "gold," Jim saw all the dragon eyes around him light up and glitter; and he also felt a hot bite of avarice warming his own veins. The thought of gold rang in his head like the thought of a fountain of water to a man dying of thirst in the desert. Gold... A slow, swelling murmur of approval, like the surf of a distant sea storm, rose up in the cave.

Jim fought down the gold hunger in his own dragon- breast, and felt panic rising in its stead. Somehow he had to turn them all from this plan of Bryagh's. For a moment he toyed with the wild idea of snatching up Angie, cage and all, and making a run for it. Even as he thought this, it came to him that it was not such a wild idea after all. Until he was able to see Angie close to Bryagh-and Bryagh was about his own size-he had not realized how big he was. Even squatting on his haunches, as he was not, his head was in the neigh- borhood of nine feet off the floor of the cave. Standing upright on all four feet, he would probably measure six feet or better at a front shoulder, with as much as half that length again of powerful, limber tail. If he could catch the other dragons all looking the other way for a moment...

But then it sank in on him that he did not know the way out of this underground place. He had to assume that a further opening dimly seen at the cave's far end led to a passage which would take him to the surface. Some faint, Gorbash-memory seemed to assure him this was so. But he could not count on the subcon- scious memories of this body he was inhabiting. If he should lose his way-be trapped with his back against some wall, or in some blind passage-the other drag- ons might well tear him apart; and Angie, even if she survived that battle, would lose her only possible res- cuer. There had to be another way.

"Wait a minute," he called out. "Hold on!"

"Shut up, Gorbash!" thundered Bryagh.

"Shut up, yourself!" Jim bellowed back. "I told you my brains were busy. They just came up with the best idea yet."

Out of the comer of his eyes he saw Angie sitting up in her cage with a dazed expression, and felt relief. The sight gave him courage and he doubled the vol- ume of his voice.

"This is a female george you've got here. Maybe that didn't strike any of you as something important; but I've been aboveground often enough to learn a thing or two. Sometimes female georges are especially val- uable-"

At Jim's shoulder, Smrgol cleared his throat with a sound like an airhammer biting into particularly stub- born concrete.

"Absolutely correct!" he boomed. "It might even be a princess we've got. Looks to me something like a princess. Now, a lot of you nowadays don't know what princesses are; but in the old days many a dragon found a whole pack of georges after him because the george he picked up turned out to be a princess. When I fought the ogre of Gormely Keep, he had a princess locked up along with his pack of other female georges. And you ought to have seen the georges when they got that princess back. Now, if we stake this one out, they might send a regular army against us to try and get it back... No, staking it out's too risky. Might as well just cut our losses and eat-"

"On the other hand," shouted Jim, quickly, "if we treat her well and hold her-'it,' I mean-for a hos- tage, then we can make the georges do anything we want-"

"No!" roared Bryagh. "It's my george. I won't stand for-"

"By my tail and wings!" The tremendous lung power of Smrgol cut the other dragon off. "Are we a community, or a tribe of mere-dragons? If this george is actually a princess and can be used to stop these shelled georges from hunting us all over the landscape, then it's a community property. Oh yes, I see some of you with the gold-lust still in your eyes; but just stop and think that the life-lust is maybe something just a little bit more important. How many of you here would like to face just a single george in his shell, with his hom aimed at you? Eh? We've had enough of this nonsense. The boy here's got a real idea-surprised I didn't think of it myself. But then my nose wasn't itch- ing; his was. I vote we hold the george here hostage until young Gorbash can go find out what it's worth to the other ones. How about it?"

Slowly at first, and then with mounting enthusiasms, the dragon community voted to do as Smrgol had sug- gested. Bryagh completely lost his temper, swore for forty straight seconds at near full dragon-volume, and stamped out of the meeting. Seeing the excite- ment was over, other members of the community began to drift off.

"Come, my boy," Smrgol puffed, leading the way to the cage, and covering it once more with the tap- estry. "Pick up the whole thing, there. Careful! Not too quickly. You don't want to shake the george around too much. Now, follow me. We'll take it up to one of the topside caves opening on the cliff face. Georges can't fly, so it'll be safe enough there. We can even let it out of the cage and it'll get some light and air. Georges need that."