"Judith Merril - Beyond Human Ken" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merril Judith)

Paul slapped his back. "Come inside and I'll explain it over a couple of glasses of beer I just got
thirsty enough to think about."

Five beers later, Dr. Connor Kuntz used the black beads he had in place of eyes to watch his host
shimmer from the uni-form of the Coldstream Guards to a sharply cut tuxedo.
"Of course I believe it. Since it is so, it is so. You have a liv-ing house here. Now we must decide
what we are to do with it."
Paul Marquis looked up, halfway into a white gabardine suit. The lapels, still tuxedo, hesitated; then
gathered their energies and blended into a loose summer outfit.
"What we are to do with it?"
Kuntz rose and wrapped his hands behind his back, slapping the knuckles of one into the palm of the
other. "You're quite right about keeping the information secret from the men in the development; a
careless word and you would be undergoing swarms of dangerously inquisitive tourists. I must get in
touch with Dr. Dufayel in Quebec; this is very much his province. Although there's a young man at Johns
Hopkins . . . How much have you learned of its basic, let us say its personal com-position?"
The young physicist's face lost its grip on resentment. "Well, the wood feels like wood, the metal like
metal, the plastic like plastic. And when the house produces a glass-like object, it's real glass so far as I
can determine without a chemical analysis. Es, here, took . . ."
"That's one of the reasons I decided to bring Connor along. Biologically. and chemically, the water is
safeтАФtoo safe. It's absolutely "pure H 20. What do you think of my chlorophyll-roof theory, doctor ?"
He ducked his head at her. "Possibly. Some form of solar-energy transformation in any case. But
chlorophyll would argue a botanical nature, while it has distinct and varied means of locomotionтАФinternal
and external. Furthermore, the manipula-tion of metals which do not exist in any quantities in this region
suggests subatomic reorganization of materials. Esther, we must prepare some slides from this creature.
Suppose you run out to the plane like a good girl and get my kit. For that matter, you can prepare slides
yourself, can't you? I want to explore a bit."
"Slides?" Paul Marquis asked uncertainly as the bacteriol-ogist started for the open door. "It's a living
thing, you know."
"Ah, we'll just take a small area from anтАФa nonvital spot. Much like scraping a bit of skin off the
human hand. Tell me," the doctor requested, thumping on the table experimentally, "you no doubt have
some vague theories as to origin?"
Marquis settled himself back in a gleaming chair. "As a mat-ter of fact, they're a little more than that. I
remembered the ore in Pit Fourteen gave out suddenly after showing a lot of promise. Pit Fourteen's the
closest to here from Little Fermi. Adler, the geologist in charge, commented at the time that it seemed as
if Pit Fourteen had been worked beforeтАФabout six thousand years ago. Either that or glacial scraping.
But since there was little evidence of glacial scraping in the neighbor-hood, and no evidence of a
previous, prehistoric pitchblende mine, he dropped the matter. I think this house is the rest of the proof of
that prehistoric mine. I also think we'll find radioactive ore all the way from this site to the edge of Pit
Fourteen."
"Comfortable situation for you if they do," Kuntz observed, moving into the kitchen. Paul Marquis
rose and followed him. "How would this peculiar domicile enter into the situation?"
"Well, unless your archaeology still has to grow out of its diapers, nobody on earth was interested in
pitchblende six thou-sand years ago. That would leave the whole wide field of extra-terrestialsтАФfrom a
planet of our sun or one of the other stars. This could have been a fueling station for their ships, a
regu-larly worked mine, or an unforeseen landing to make repairs or take on fuel."
"And the house?"
"The house was their dwelling----probably a makeshift, tem-porary jobтАФwhile they worked the
mine. When they went, they left it here as humans will leave deserted wood and metal shacks when they
move out of Little Fermi one day. It lay here waiting for somethingтАФsay the thought of ownership or the
desire for a servitor-dwellingтАФto release a telepathic trigger that would enable it to assume its function of