"Walter M. Miller - The Best of Walter M. Miller" - читать интересную книгу автора (Miller Walter M)

direction of the sphere in a semi-circle, as if inspecting the land, at times moving against the wind.
It was coming closer to the house.
It moved with purpose, and therefore was alive. This Lucey knew. It moved with its millions of spun
threads, finer than a spider's web, the patterns as ordered as a neural array.
It contracted suddenly and began to settle toward the house. Glittering opaquely, blotting out half the
cabin, it kept contracting and drawing itself in, becoming denser until it fell in the yard with a blinding flash
of incandes-cent light.
Lucey's flesh crawled. Her hands trembled on the gun, her breath came in shallow gasps.
Before her eyes it was changing into a manlike thing. Frozen, she waited, thinking swiftly. Could it be
that Doodie was right?
Could it be?тАФ

Doodle was still whimpering in the house, weary now, as he always was when the spasm had spent
itself. But the words still came, words addressed to his father.
The thing in the yard was assuming the shape of a manтАФand Lucey knew who the man would be.
She reared up quickly in the palmettos, like an enraged, hulking river animal breaking to the surface.
She came up shotgun-in-hand and bellowed across the clear-ing. "Hey theah! You triflin' skunk! Look at
me!"
Still groping for human shape, the creature froze.
Run off an' leave me with child!" Lucey shouted. "And no way to pay his keep!"
"


The creature kept coming toward her, and the pulsing grew stronger.
"Don't come any nearer, you hear?"
When it kept coming, Lucey grunted in a gathering rage and charged out of the palmettos to meet it,
shotgun raised, screaming insults. The thing wobbled to a stop, its face a shapeless blob with black
shadows for eyes.
She brought the gun to her shoulder and fired both barrels at once.
The thing tumbled to the ground. Crackling arcs danced about it, and a smell of ozone came on the
breeze. For one hideous moment it was lighted by a glow from within. Then the glow died, and it began
to expand. It grew erratically, and the moonlight danced in silvery fila-ments about it. A blob of its
substance broke loose from the rest, and windborne, sailed across the clearing and dashed itself to dust
in the palmettos.
A sudden gust took the rest of it, rolling it away in the grass, gauzy shreds tearing loose from the mass.
The gust blew it against the trunk of a pine. It lodged there briefly, quivering in the breeze and shimmering
palely under the moon. Then it broke into dust that scattered eastward across the land.
"Praised be the Lord," breathed Lucey, beginning to cry.
A high whining sound pierced the night, from the di-rection of the violet light. She whirled to stare. The
light grew brighter. Then the whine abruptly ceased. A lumi-nescent sphere, glowing with violet haze,
moved upward from the pines. It paused, then in stately majesty con-tinued the ascent, gathering speed
until it became a ghostly chariot that dwindled. Up, up, up toward thegleaming stars. She watched it until
it vanished from sight.
Then she straightened her shoulders, and glowered toward the dust traces that blew eastward over
the scrub.
"Ain't nothing worse than a triflin' man," she philos-ophized. "If he's human, or if he's not. "
Wearily she returned to the cabin. Doodle was sleeping peacefully. Smiling, she tucked him in, and
went to bed. There was corn to hoe, come dawn.
Report: Servopilot recon six, to fleet. Missionman caught in transition phase by native
organism, and dev-astated, thus destroying liaison with native analog. Sug-gest delay of invasion