"C. L. Moore - The Cold Gray God" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore C. L)

opening. To all appearances it was not a box at all, but a block of carved
ivory. He shook it, and something within shifted slightly, as if it were
packed in loose wrappings. But there was no opening anywhere. He turned it
over and over, peering and prying, but to no avail. Finally he shrugged and
wrapped the canvas back about the
enigma.
"What do you make of it?" he asked.
Mhici shook his head.
' 'Great Shar alone can tell," he murmured half in derision, for Shar is the
Venusian god, a friendly deity whose name rises constantly to the lips of the
Hot Planet's dwellers. The god whom Mars worships, openly or in secret, is
never named aloud.
They discussed the puzzle of it off and on the rest of the afternoon. Smith
spent the hours restlessly, for he dared not
smoke nuari nor drink much, with the interview so close ahead. When the
shadows were lengthening along the Lakklan he got into his deerhide coat again
and tucked the ivory box into an inner pocket. It was bulky, but not
betray-ingly so. And he made sure his flame-gun was charged and ready.
In the late afternoon sun that sparkled blindingly upon the snow crystals
blowing along the wind', he went down the Lakklan again with his right hand hi
his pocket and his eyes raking the street warily under the shadow of his cap.
Evidently the pursuers of that box had not traced it, for he was not followed.
Judai's house squatted dark and low at the edge of the Lakklan .Smith fought
down a rising revulsion as he lifted his hand to knock, but the door swung
open before his knuckles had touched the panel. That same shadowy servant
beckoned him in. This time he did not put his gun away when he shifted it from
his coat pocket. He took the canvas-wrapped box in one hand and the
flame-pistol in the other, and the servant opened the door he had passed last
night upon the room where Judai was waiting.
She 'stood exactly as he had left her in the center of the floor, white and
scarlet against the queer traceries on the wall beyond. He had the curious
notion that she had not stirred since he left her last night. She moved a
little sluggishly as she turned her head and saw him, but it was a lethargy
which she quickly overcame. She motioned him toward the divan, taking her seat
at his side with the flowing, feline ease of every true Venusian. And as
before, he shrank involuntarily from the contact of that fragrant,
velvet-sheathed body, with an inner revulsion he could not understand.
She said nothing, but she held out her two hands cupped up in entreaty, and
she did not lift her eyes to his face as she did so. He laid the box in her
upturned palm. At that moment for Ihe first time it occurred to him that not
once had he met her eyes. She had never lifted those veiling lashes and looked
into his. Wondering, he watched.
She was unwrapping the canvas with quick, delicate mo-lions of her
pink-stained fingers. When the box lay bare in her
hands she sat quite motionless for a while, her lowered eyes fixed upon the
carven block of the thing which had cost at least one life. And her quiet was
unnatural, trance-like. He thought she must have ceased to breathe. Not a lash
fluttered, ; not a pulse stirred in her round white wrists as she held the
little symbol-traced box up. There was something indescrib- ^ ably horrid in
her quiet as she sat and stared, all her being I centered in one vast, still