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

It was simply a black metal box with a few dials and buttons. The scientist held it lightly in her lap as she
sat at the side of the table.

His eyes passed slowly from it to her face, and he knew that in a matter of minutes Anna van TuylтАФand
all Via Rosa beyond herтАФwould be soot floating in the night wind.

Martha Jacques' face was sublime with hate. "Sit down," she said quietly.

He felt the blood leaving his cheeks. Yet he grinned with a fair show of geniality as he dropped into the
chair. "Certainly. I've got to kill time somehow until the end of Act III."
She pressed a button on the box surface.

His volition vanished. His muscles were locked, immobile. He could not breathe.

Just as he was convinced that she planned to suffocate him, her finger made another swift motion toward
the box, and he sucked in a great gulp of air. His eyes could move a little, but his larynx was still
paralyzed.

Then the moments began to pass, endlessly, it seemed to him.

The table at which they sat was on the right wing of the stage. The woman sat facing into the stage, while
his back was to it. She followed the preparations of the troupe for Act II with moody, silent eyes, he was
straining ears and metal-emphatic sense.

Only when he heard the curtain sweeping across the street-stage to open the second act did the woman
speak.

"She is beautiful. And so graceful with those piano-wire wings, just as if they were part of her. I don't
wonder she's the first woman who ever really interested you. Not that you really love her. You'll never
love anyone."

From the depths of his paralysis he studied the etched bitterness of the face across the table. His lips
were parched, and his throat a desert.

She thrust a sheet of paper at him, and her lip curled. "Are you still looking for that rose? Search no
further, my ignorant friend. There it isтАФSciomnia, complete, with its nineteen sub-equations."

The lines of unreadable symbols dug like nineteen relentless harpoons ever deeper into his twisting, racing
mind.

The woman's face grimaced in fleeting despair. "Your own wife solves Sciomnia and you condescend to
keep her company until you go on again at the end of Act III. I wish I had a sense of humor. All I knew
was to paralyze your spinal column. Oh, don't worry. It's purely temporary. I just didn't want you to
warn her. And I know what torture it is for you not to be able to talk." She bent over and turned a
knurled knob on the side of the black steel box. "There, at least you can whisper. You'll be completely
free after the weapon fires."

His lips moved in a rapid slur. "Let us bargain, Martha. Don't kill her. I swear never to see her again."