"Damon Knight - Four in one (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Knight Damon)

high gear. He had grown stalks for his eyes, all right, but they'd been limp-just extensions of
the jellylike mass of his body, without a stiffening cell structure or muscular tissue to move
them. Then, when the voice had startled him, he'd got the stiffening and the muscles in a hurry.
That must have been what had happened the previous night. Probably the process would have been
completed, but much more slowly, if he hadn't been frightened. A protective mechanism, obviously.
As for the voice--George rotated once more, slowly, looking all around him. There was no question
about it: he was alone. The voice, which had seemed to come from someone or something standing
just behind him, must in fact have issued from his own body.
The voice started again, at a less frantic volume. It burbled a few times, then said quite
clearly in a high tenor, "Whass happen'? Wheh am I?"
George was floundering in a sea of bewilderment. He was in no condition to adapt quickly to more


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new circumstances, and when a large, desiccated lump fell from a nearby bush and bounced
soundlessly to within a meter of him, he simply stared at it.
He looked at the hard-shelled object, and then at the laden bush from which it had dropped.
Slowly, painfully, he worked his way through to a logical conclusion. The dried fruit had fallen
without a sound. This was natural, because he had been totally deaf ever since his
metamorphosis. But--he had heard a voice!
Ergo, hallucination, or telepathy.
The voice began again. "He-elp! Oh, dear, I wish someone would answer!"
Vivian Bellis. Gumbs, even if he affected that tenor voice, wouldn't say, "Oh, dear." Neither
would McCarty.
George's shaken nerves were returning to normal. He thought intently, _I get scared, grow legs.
Bellis gets scared, grows a telepathic voice. That's reasonable, I guess--her first and only
instinct would he to yell._
George tried to put himself into a yelling mood. He shut his eyes and imagined himself cooped up
in a terrifyingly alien medium, without any control or knowledge of his predicament. He tried to
shout: "Vivian!"
He kept on trying, while the girl's voice continued at intervals. Finally she stopped abruptly
in the middle of a sentence. George said, "Can you hear me?"
"Who's that--what do you want?"
"This is George Meister, Vivian. Can you understand what I'm saying?"
"What--"
George kept at it. His pseudo-voice, he judged, was a little garbled, just as Bellis's had been
at first. At least the girl said, "Oh, George--I mean Mr. Meister! Oh, I've been so frightened.
Where are you?"
George explained, apparently not very tactfully, because Bellis shrieked when he was through and
then went back to burbling. George sighed, and said, "Is there anyone else on the premises? Major
Gumbs? Miss McCarty?"
A few minutes later two sets of weird sounds began almost simultaneously. When they became
coherent, it was no trouble to identify the voices. Gumbs, the big, red-faced professional
soldier, shouted, "Why the hell don't you watch where you're going, Meister? If you hadn't started
that rock slide we wouldn't be in this mess!"
Miss McCarty, who had had a seamed white face, a jutting jaw, and eyes the color of mud, said
coldly, ''Meister, all of this will be reported. _All_ of it."