"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 19 - Looters of Tharn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

tricks yet. He crouched and waited to see what it would try next.

He did not have long to wait. The light on the end of the other arm began blinking in a steady pattern.
Flick-flick-flick-flick. It was becoming monotonous, boring, almost hypnotic.
 Hypnotic. That was it. The light was set to a pattern designed to have a hypnotic effect on anyone who
watched it for long. Such as anybody who was already half-paralyzed with fear induced by the
subsonics? Probably.

It was certainly a waste of time to try that trick on Blade. He wasn't half-paralyzed with anything. The
subsonics were only making him mildly nervous now, like a man sitting in a dentist's waiting room. He
was also nearly impossible to hypnotize. This wasn't a boast, it was a fact, tested by many psychiatrists
over many years.

So far so good. The war machine hadn't come up with anything Blade didn't think he could handle. But
he was quite sure there was still more to come. Again he settled down to wait for the machine to show its
hand-or whatever else it used for finishing off its victims.

The turret kept turning as the subsonics and the blinking light went on. Blade noticed that it turned not
only slowly but irregularly, as though, it were badly lubricated or had an unreliable power source.

Blade lay motionless in the grass until he felt one foot beginning to go to sleep. Cautiously he shifted
position until the foot was comfortable again. The machine paid no more attention to his movement than if
he had been a mosquito whining about the turret.

Blade realized that if he had been carrying that antitank rocket or even a hand grenade, he could have hit
the machine easily. It seemed to have nothing except the subsonics and the hypnotic light to keep
somebody from lying in wait and attacking it. But this war machine was too big, too powerful, too
complex to be so weakly armed. It must have other weapons.

But what the devil were they? Blade realized that at the present rate he and the machine might sit here on
the plain outside the city until winter came and covered them with a foot of snow, without his finding out
anything. He was going to have to move into action, and find out what the machine's other weapons might
be.

He reached down and cautiously pulled off the belts he had tied into an improvised loinguard. Lifting one
that was all strips of leather and teksinlike plastic, he gathered his legs under him. Then he exploded
upward in a mighty leap, throwing the belt as hard as he could toward the machine. It soared thirty feet
into the air and halfway to the machine before dropping into the grass. Before it hit, Blade dropped down
flat on his stomach, once again not daring to move and hardly daring to breathe.

The turret swung toward the place where the belt fell, the long tube jutting out like an elephant's trunk
feeling the air. The turret swung like the head of a man with a bad case of arthritis in his neck. Blade
realized that if things got really tight, he could probably run faster than the turret could turn.

The turret swung until the tube was pointing at the spot where the belt had fallen. The purple lens at the
muzzle lit up and blinked three times. Blade waited for something to shoot out of the muzzle-laser beam,
death-ray, rocket, shell, whatever. But nothing happened.

For a moment Blade wondered if the weapon in the turret had stopped working. The machine looked
old enough. But he wasn't going to make that dangerous assumption on the basis of one test. He would