"Henry Kuttner - Fury UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

"Even a two-week-old child has his civil rights," said

Raoul, who was thin, dark, elegantly tailored in so celoflex, and seemed wryly amused by the entire seem "But you've been careful not to admit anything, el Blaze?"

"Very careful."

Geoffery hunched his buffalo shoulders forward, me Blaze's eyes with his own cool blue ones, and saic "Where'stheboy?"

T don't know."

Zachariah said furiously, "My grandsonЧwell fini him! Be sure of thatl If he's in Delaware Keep well fine himЧor if he's on Venus!"

"Exactly," Raoul agreed. "The Harkers are rather pow erful, Blaze. You should know that. That's why you'v< been allowed to do exactly as you wanted all your Me But that's stopping now,"

1 don't think it is stopping," Blaze said. "I've a greal deal of money of my own. As for your finding . . . hirr, . . . have you thought that it might be difficult?"

"We're a powerful family," Geoffery said steadily.

"So we are," Blaze said. "But what if you can't recognize the boy when you find him?" He smiled.

The first thing they did was to give him a depilatory treatment. Blaze couldn't endure the possibility that dyed hair would grow back red. The baby's scanty growth of auburn fuzz was removed. It would never grow again.

A culture catering to hedonism has its perversions of science. And Blaze could pay well. More than one technician had been wrecked by pleasure-addiction; such men were usually capableЧwhen they were sober. But it was a woman Blaze found, finally, and she was capable only when alive. She lived when she was wearing the Happy Cloak. She wouldn't live long; Happy Cloak addicts lasted about two years, on the average. The thing was a biological adaptation of an organism found in the Venusian seas. It had been illegally developed, after its potentialities were first realized. In its native state, it got

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its prey by touching it. After that neuro-contact had been established, the prey was quite satisfied to be ingested.

It was a beautiful garment, a living white like the white of a pearl, shivering softly with rippling lights, stirring with a terrible, ecstatic movement of its own as the lethal symbiosis was established. It was beautiful as the woman technician wore it, as she moved about the bright, quiet room in a tranced concentration upon the task that would pay her enough to insure her death within two years. She was very capable. She knew endocrinology. When she had finished, Sam Harker had forever lost his heritage. The matrix had been setЧor, rather, altered from its original pattern.

Thalamus, thyroid, pinealЧtiny lumps of tissue, some already active, some waiting till the trigger of approaching maturity started the secretions. The infant was unformed, a somewhat larger lump of tissue, with cartilage for bones and his soft skull imperfectly sutured as yet.

"Not a monster," Blaze had said, thinking about Bessi all the time. "No, nothing extreme. Short, fleshyЧthick!"

The bandaged lump of tissue lay still on the operating table. Germicidal lamps focused on the anaesthetized form.

The woman, swimming in anticipated ecstasy, managed to touch a summoning signal-button. Then she lay down quietly on the floor, the shining pearly garment caressing her. Her tranced eyes looked up, flat and empty as mirrors. The man who came in gave the Happy Cloak a wide berth. He began the necessary post-operative routine.

The elder Harkers watched Blaze, hoping they could find the child through his father. But Blaze had refined his plan too thoroughly to leave such loopholes. In a secret place he had Sam's fingerprints and retina-prints, and he knew that through those he could locate his son at any time. He was in no hurry. What would happen would happen. It was inevitableЧnow. Given the basic

ingredients, and the stable environment there was no hope at all for Sam Harker.

Blaze set an alarm clock in his mind, an alarm that would not ring for many years. Meanwhile, having faced reality for the first time in his Me, he did his utmost to forget it again. He could never forget Bessi, though he tried. He plunged back into the bright, euphoric spin of hedonism in the Keeps.

The early years merged into the unremembered past. Time moved more slowly for Sam then. Days and hours dragged. The man and woman he knew as father and mother had nothing in common with him, even then. For the operation had not altered his mind; his intelligence, his ingenuity, he had inherited from half-mutant ancestors. Though the mutation was merely one of longevity, that trait had made it possible for the Harkers to rise to dominance on Venus. They were not the only long-lived ones, by any means; there were a few hundred others who had a life-expectancy of from two to seven hundred years, depending on various complicated factors. But the strain bred true. It was easy to identify them.

There was a carnival season once, he remembered, and his foster parents awkwardly donned finery and went to mingle with the rest. He was old enough to-be a reasoning animal by then. He had already seen glamour from a distance, but he had never seen it in operation.

Carnival was a respected custom. All Delaware Keep was shining. Colored perfumes hung like a haze above the moving Ways, clinging to the merrymakers as they passed. It was a time when all classes mingled. Technically there were no lower classes. ActuallyЧ He saw a womanЧthe loveliest woman he had ever seen. Her gown was blue. That does not describe its color in the least. It was a deep, rich, different blue, so velvety and smooth that the boy ached to touch it. He was too young to understand the subtlety of the gown's cut, its sharp, clean lines, the way it enhanced the woman's face and her corn-yellow hair. He saw her from