"Ardath Mayhar - Khi to Freedom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mayhar Ardath)

contracted with them, even to learn a profession and to get away from Big
Sandy. They were offering good terms, guaranteed by the Contract
Commission of our system, to youngsters of Primate descent. They offered
a good education, albeit strictly slanted toward their own purposes. It had
looked like a wonderful deal to a boy who had spent his entire life battling
the wind and the sand and the cantankerous beasts we grow on my home
planet.
After IтАЩd gone through most of my training and had devoured their
micro-library from end to end, I understood a lot more than I had. But it
was too late. I owed them the term of my ten-year contract, and the only
thing my prideful people had given me was a stubborn insistence on
paying my debts. Only when I found them dissecting the Fleer did I decide
to jump, and that couldnтАЩt be called a rational decision. Just the logical
outgrowth of my instinctive reaction to their activities.
So here I sat in a tree, watching what could easily be my last sunset. In
a fairly peaceful state of mind, I might add. Somewhere, away off in the
increasingly dark sky, the Ginli lab-ship waited for the scoutship to report
me safely dead in the wreckage of the lifeboatтАФor elsewhere.
That might come about by means other than Ginli, I thought, scanning
the dark distances. IтАЩd learned to manage on all sorts of strange worlds as I
went about the GinliтАЩs business, but that didnтАЩt mean that I hadnтАЩt missed
being eaten or inhaled or otherwise ingested by local fauna (or flora) by
narrow margins. And that was on planets that had been catalogued
enough for me to study them in advance in the library. This place wasnтАЩt
even marked on the computer-charts in the lifeboat. I had no way of
guessing what it heldтАФbesides, of course, Ginli.
It got darker. Reds faded into grays as the sun went down beyond the
reaches of forest. The stillness that had disturbed me was now broken by
rustlings, squeaks, hisses, and muffled roars. It was reassuring.
There was no hint of the terrible racket that accompanied a Ginli
expedition in wooded countryside. Their inflexible method of progress was
the exact reason they needed Scouts from among the тАЬlesserтАЭ Primates,
who could not, of course, be considered the equals of Ginli. Nothing alive
that had ears could be sighted, much less caught, by any band of Ginli
that ever had been sent out to hunt for specimens. In addition to a lack of
humor, they lacked imagination. They did everything тАЬby the book,тАЭ and
their book had been written by other Ginli. Adapting method to
circumstance wasnтАЩt even a minor footnote. Still, if some accident or
carelessness should betray me to them, I would be just as dead as if they
improvised brilliantly, laughing all the while.
 So I made myself comfortable in the tree, closed my eyes, and tried
meditation to quiet my growling interior. At that instant I became aware
of something inside my head that had never been there before. It was a
sort of subliminal murmurтАж something like a radio transmission picked
up so faintly that you could hear the voices but you couldnтАЩt make out the
words, which seemed to be in a foreign language, anyway. There was no
feeling of urgency or immediacy, though. In fact, I had the strong feeling
that whatever it was didnтАЩt concern me at all. Whereupon I went
peacefully to sleep.
I woke with the feeling that I was being watched. That being the last