"03 - Time Streams" - читать интересную книгу автора (McGough Scott)

walked and spoken before. He had occupied this enormous body

of metal, peered out of its silvery eyes, and lifted things

in its massive hands. Before it had been always as if in a

dream. Now he was awake. Now he was alive.

The laboratory around him was bright and clean. Master

Malzra liked it clean-clean but cluttered. One wall held

hundreds of sketches and refinements of sketches, some in

ink, some in lead, some in chalk. Another bristled with

specialized implements- metal lathes, beam saws, injection

molds, presses, rollers, bellows, drills. A third wall bore

racks of cogs and struts and other mechanical castings. A

fourth held ranks of assembled mechanisms. A fifth-very few

of the school's rooms were square-allowed egress into the

room. In the center of the space, a great black forge rose.

Its smokestack climbed up and away through the dome above. A

second-floor gallery ringed the fringes of the room. Up in

those balconies even now, young eyes peered down on the

result of Master Malzra's latest experiment. They peered

down on the silver man.

The silver man peered back. He felt frightened, awkward,

shy. He wondered what they thought about him-wondered and

cared in a way he never had before. Everything was like

that. He had seen this laboratory many times before, but he

never would have used terms like clean and cluttered and

bright to describe it or the man who had created it. Now the