"William Morrison & Frederik Pohl - Stepping Stone" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morrison William)

and the voice was odd. Not metallic. Not foreign. Not any of the words that people use to describe the
voices of people. It sounded non-peoplish; it sounded strange.
Out of the corner of his eye Chesley saw commotion, and realized that some people were fainting.
But not him. He did choke a little on the last of his ice cream cone, but he managed to get it down. Still
and all, he did have a sick feeling in his stomach. It wasn't from the hot dogs.
The man said: "I am not a man."
 A muffled moan from eighty thousand voices. Chesley only nodded.
"I take the form of a man in order to permit you to see me," boomed the voice. "I am your Viceroy."
A couple of hundred people, near the exits, had had all they could take. No mere five dollars was
enough to make them stay. But the Viceroy was. The desperate ones jumped up from their seats, ran
shouting toward the guards; and maybe the guards couldn't have stopped them, but the Viceroy could; he
pointed his finger. They stopped. In fact, they were frozen. Most of them toppled over, rigid.
Arthur Chesley thought that this was very interesting.
Living with his wife had done things to his temperament; he was so unused to strong emotion that he
didn't recognize it when it came. He was scared to death. His heart was beating wildly; he had violent
cramps in his stomach. But since he had never been terribly afraid before, he didn't realize it.
He even tried to order a bottle of soda pop. But apparently the vendor knew more about his
emotions than Chesley did; because he had disappeared.
The Viceroy went on: "I have been sent by my people to prepare this planet for their habitation."
Moans again, and another nod from Chesley. That figured, he thought; it would have to be something
like that. He began to shake, and wondered why.
"I have been sent alone," boomed the voice, "because I need no aid. I myself can cope with any
force your puny Earth can send against me. Singlehanded I can destroy every Army."
The audience had stopped moaning; it was stunned, or most of it was. Then the first shock began to
wear off and Chesley began to hear voices. "Fake!" cried someone, and "Who're you kidding?"
screamed someone else. And there were uglier noises than that, too.
"I can do some things that you do not even suspect!" cried the Viceroy in a terrible voice. "Watch,
Earthlings! Watch me and see!"
He began to grow.
The eighty thousand throats rasped in unison as every person present caught his breath. The Viceroy
lengthened, like a stretched string. Ten feet tall? He became fifteen feet tallтАФtwenty feetтАФthirty. Not an
inch broader, but he towered as high as the top of the stands themselves before he was through. "See!"
he bellowed, and the giant organ voice, nowhere near the microphones now, made the concrete walls of
the Stadium shudder. "Watch now!" he commanded; and he began to broaden. Now he was a giant, not
a string man; still thirty feet tall, but nearly ten feet across the shoulders, too. And then he began to
shrinkтАФonly downwards, until he was a squashed butter-man, pressed down to a height that was less
than his thickness, an oblate spheroid with a gross flat head at the top and gross chunky legs underneath.
And then he shrank his width, until he was the same size and shape as at first.
The halo flashed orange sparks. Mirrors? Chesley wondered. Probably it was mirrors. All the same,
it was a good thing that he hadn't been able to buy that soda pop, because it would have gone down his
windpipe.
The Viceroy thundered in a far-more-than-human voice: "I shall inform certain of you of what their
duties will be. The rest of you may continue with your piddling little human livesтАФfor the time being."
The halo flared violet. "Meanwhile," rumbled the enormous voice, "do not think of resistance. It
cannot succeed. I shall prove to you that I am invulnerable. Absolutely invulnerable! To weaponsтАФ"
A barrage of machine-gun fire from a battery at the side of the speaker's stand. Bright yellowish
tracers ricocheted up and out over the cringing audience.
"To poison gasтАФ"
A man in a blue uniform climbed onto the stand and directed a flexible hose at the Viceroy. Chesley
shrugged; what difference did it make? The machine-gun bullets had been all the evidence anyone really