"David A. Kyle - Lensman 10 - Z- Lensman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kyle David A)

time, he felt
something else, a cyclonic hole of emptiness into which his mental probing
sank and was
annihilated.
He attempted to reach out, back to the galaxy, beyond Dingwall, for contact
with another
wearer of the Lens. It was, however, as if he were in a prison, surrounded by
movable yet
impenetrable, invisible walls.
"Bovreck. Ymkzex. Bovreck. Ymkzex."
He sensed the mind screen more strongly now. There was a lifeform,
overpoweringly
strong, nauseatingly evil, undeniably Boskonian. He had never met the worst of
the villains,
an Eich, and only once had he felt its devilish mind, but intuitively he knew
that this mind
was far, far worse.
Armstrong tried to connect and unify every cellular particle of his central
nervous system
through the instrument of his Lens to discover the source of the mind screen
through that
whirling hole. Instead, he felt the presence of a different life form. It was
coming through the
maelstrom.
It was then that he began to see his first Palainian. The figure materialized
as a barely
perceptible luminosity out in the void, a mile or more away. It was rushing
rapidly at him,
emitting a mental humming that grew louder as the form increased in size. It
was on a line
between the bows of his freighter and the silent pirate ship. At first he
believed it to be a
projection, but it wasn't. It was solid. It was real:
From a faint wraith, it solidified into pieces of a creature, fifty feet away
from the open port
in which Armstrong stood. The Lensman, never before having drawn a gun for
self-defense, but nonetheless perfectly trained, unholstered his hand weapon
and leveled it
at the floating jumble of organic parts. That the precaution might be futile
did not
discourage him. The slender fingers on his thinner and longer right arm were
firmly
wrapped around the gun butt; his hand was steady, and with a flick of his
thumb, he
released the safety catch.
Armstrong had seen many aliens and nonhumanoids in his half century at Prime
Base, but
all entities, although many had been very strange, had either mingled freely
as equals or
moved restrictedly encased in functional life-support dress. He had seen