"Edmond Hamilton - Captain Future 13 - The Face of the Deep" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

life on Cerberus."
"And you're going on a voyage of weeks with
scores of others like that homicidal maniac!" Curt
Newton said, with deepened dismay. "Some of
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THE FACE OF THE DEEP
them worse! I've seen the prisoner-list. Kim Ivan,
the Martian space-pirate, Moremos, that poisonous
Venusian murder-ring leader, Boraboll the Uranian,
the wiliest trickster in the System -- and dozens
more. Joan, I won't let you do it!"
Joan shook her dark head stubbornly. "It's too
late to argue about it now. All the prisoners are
aboard. We take off in five minutes."
A voice came from the darkness behind them --
a sightly hissing voice that was oddly alien in
timbre.
"What's the matter. Chief? it asked Curt.
"Haven't you talked reason into her yet?"
It was Otho, one of the three Futurmen. He and
Grag and the Brain were advancing into the circle
of light.
The three Futuremen made a spectacle so
strange that many people would have recoiled from
them in terror. But Joan was too well acpointed
with these three loyal comrades of Curt, to see any
strangeness about them.
Otho, the android, was perhaps the most human-
looking of the three. He looked, indeed, much like
an ordinary man except that his lithe body had a
curiously rubbery, boneless appearance, and his
chalk-white face and slanted green eyes held a
superhuman deviltry and mocking humor. Otho
was a man -- but a synthetic man. He had been
created in a laboratory, long ago.
Grag, the robot, had been created in that same
laboratory, in the long-dead past. But Grag had
been made of metal. He was a gigantic, manlike
metal figure, seven feet high. His metal torso and
limbs hinted his colossal strength. But the strange
face of his bulbous metal head, with its gleaming
photoelectric eyes and mechanical loudspeaker
voice-orifice, gave no sign of the intelligence and
loyalty of his complex mechanical brain.
The Brain, third of the Futuremen, was by far
the strangest. Yet he had been an ordinary human,
once. He had been Simon Wright, brilliant, aging
Earth scientist. Dying of an incurable ailment,
Wright's living brain had been removed from his