"Edmond Hamilton - Doomstar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

Doomstar
Edmond Hamilton

A BELMONT TOWER BOOK
Published by Tower Publications, Inc.
Two Park Avenue New York, N.Y. 10016
Copyright ┬й MCMLXVI by Edmond Hamilton


1

The dancers leaped and swayed in the circle of blue-green light. They wore stylized, semihumanoid
masks because their own faces might have been displeasing to the Earthly viewers, but otherwise their
silvery bodies were unadorned. There were seven of them. Angular and curiously jointed, their
movements seemed grotesque at first, and only gradually, as they wove their intricate patterns, did their
extreme grace become apparent.
Sandra shivered. "They give me the creeps," she muttered.
"Now, now," said Kettrick. "You're letting your species discrimination show."
"I don't care. I'm just a poor little Earthbound provincial, and I don't like people-sized things that
talk, but aren't peo-ple." She twirled her glass between tapering, perfectly mani-cured fingers. "I need
another drink, Johnny."
He ordered it, watching the dancers.
"You're really enjoying it," Sandra said, and shrugged her perfect shoulders. It was the fashion that
winter to be covered up, and her considerable stock of perfections were largely concealed beneath a sort
of ornate sack that fell to the floor and was buoyed out over the hips by a light hoop. Her hair, artificially
padded and stiffened, curved out in two sweeping circles over her ears, and in the centers of these circles
jeweled bells chimed and swung when she moved her head. "But then," she went on, "I guess you got
pretty used to the beastie types out there in the Hyades."
"Mm," said Kettrick. "Well, now. Australopithecus Africanus was a fine little fellow. He was my
grandfather, and I inherited a great deal from him. But he was just as much a beastie as any other
prototype, and I'll tell you something else, my pretty. They all think of themselves as human, and the rest
of us as not quite. So don't get too toplofty."
"All right, Johnny, don't get sore." She accepted a fresh glass from the waiter and sipped it. "I guess
you miss being out there a lot, don't you? I mean, every time I mention it you get all snappish."
Kettrick smiled. "The solution to that should be quite sim-ple, shouldn't it?"
"I don't know." Her eyes were a light blue, heavily outlined and shadowed under artificial brows of
white metal that glit-tered even in the dim light. "I used to think it was all that money you lost, and being
barred out and all, but now I don't think so. Not all of it, anyway. I've been going with you for two years,
and I still can't get through to you, not really, not to touch you, if you know what I mean. Johnny, was
there a woman out there in the Hyades?"
The dancers on the floor struck their final attitudes, bowed gracefully to the applause, and glided
away. The lights went up. The music started again and couples began to move out onto the floor. After a
while Kettrick reached over and pat-ted Sandra's hand with a curious gentleness.
"Don't try to think," he said. "It'll only get you a bad pain in the head. Just take things the way they
are, and if you aren't happy with them, you can always quit."
In a small choked voice she said, "Johnny, let's dance." And he realized that she was afraid of him,
that she had deliberately waited until they were in a public place to ask him that, and he was ashamed.
He stood up and held out his hand, and her big shiny eyes looked at him worriedly, and he suddenly
thought what a shabby trick he had done her, choos-ing her as he had because she was everything he
despised in a woman and so he could have both the present flesh and the untouched memory.