"Charles L. Harness - The Rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

contemplation of his goatish features, and oblivious to the mounting gaiety about him. In reality, he was
almost completely lost in a soundless, sardonic glee over the triangular death-struggle that was nearing its
climax beyond the inner wall of his studio, and which was magnified in his remarkable mind to an
incredible degree by the paraboloid mirror of the illuminator.

Bell's low urgent voice began hacking at him again. "Her blood will be on your head. All you need to do
is to go in there. Your wife wouldn't permit any shooting with you around."

The artist twitched his misshapen shoulders irritably.

" Maybe. But why should I risk my skin for a silly little nightingale?"

"Can it be that your growth beyond sapiens has served simply to sharpen your objectivity, to accentuate
your inherent egregious want of identity with even the best of your fellow creatures? Is the indifference
that has driven Martha nearly insane in a bare decade now too ingrained to respond to the first known
female of your own unique breed?" Bell sighed heavily. "You don't have to answer. The very
senselessness of her impending murder amuses you. Your nightingale is about to be impaled on her
thornтАФfor nothingтАФas always. Your sole regret at the moment is that you can't twit her with the
assurance that you will study her corpse diligently to find there the rose you seek."
"Such unfeeling heartlessness," said Jacques in regretful agreement, "is only to be expected in one of
Martha's blunderings. I mean The Cork, of course. Doesn't he realize that Anna hasn't finished the score
of her ballet? Evidently has no musical sense at all. I'll bet he was even turned down for the policemen's
charity quarter. You're right, as usual, doc. We must punish such philistinism." He tugged at his chin, then
rose from the folding stool.

"What are you going to do?" demanded the other sharply.

The artist weaved toward the phono cabinet. "Play a certain selection from Tchaikovsky's Sixth. If
Anna's half the girl you think, she and Peter Ilyitch will soon have Mart eating out of their hands."

Bell watching him in anxious, yet half-trusting frustration as the other selected a spool from his library of
electronic recordings and inserted it into the playback sprocket. In mounting mystification, he saw
Jacques turn up the volume control as far as it would go.

Chapter Thirteen
Murder, a one-act play directed by Mrs. Jacques, thought Anna. With sound effects by Mr. Jacques,
But the facts didn't fit. It was unthinkable that Ruy would do anything to accommodate his wife. If
anything, he would try to thwart Martha. But what was his purpose in starting off in the finale of the first
movement of the Sixth? Was there some message there that he was trying to get across to her?

There was. She had it. She was going to live. IfтАФ

"In a moment," she told The Cork in a tight voice, "you are going to snap off the safety catch of your
pistol, revise slightly your estimated line of fire, and squeeze the trigger. Ordinarily you could accomplish
all three acts in almost instantaneous sequence. At the present moment, if I tried to turn the table over on
you, you could put a bullet in my head before I could get well started. But in another sixty seconds you
will no longer have that advantage, because your motor nervous system will be laboring under the,
superimposed pattern of the extraordinary Second Movement of the symphony that we now hear from
the studio."