"Last Castle, The by Jack Vance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Award Stories 2)

the warehouse. But in view of the limited mental capacity of
the Peasants, nothing was done and the whole plan to restore
the energy-cannon came to naught.
The gentlefolk of Janeil watched in fascination as the dirt
piled higher and higher around them, in a circular mound like
a crater. Summer neared its end, and on one stormy day dirt
and rubble rose above the parapets, and began to spill over
into the courts and piazzas. Janeil must soon be buried and 'all
within suffocated.
It was then that a group of impulsive young cadets, with
more elan than dignity, took up weapons and charged up the
slope. The Meks dumped dirt and stone upon them, but a
handful gained the ridge where they fought in a kind of
dreadful exaltation.
Fifteen minutes the fight raged and the earth became
sodden with rain and blood. For one glorious moment the
cadets swept the ridge clean. Had not most of their fellows
been lost under the rubble anything might have occurred. But
the Meks regrouped, thrust forward. Ten men were left,-then
six, then four, then one, then none. The Meks marched down
the slope, swarmed over the battlements, and with somber
intensity killed all within. Janeil, for seven hundred years the
abode of gallant gentlemen and gracious ladies, had become a
lifeless hulk.
The Mek, standing as if a specimen in a museum case, was
a man-like creature native, in his original version, to a planet
of Etamin. His tough rusty-bronze hide glistened metallically
as if oiled or waxed. The spines thrusting back from scalp and
neck shone like gold, and indeed they were coated with a
conductive copper-chrome film. His sense organs were gath-
ered in clusters at the site of a man's ears; his visageit was
often a shock, walking the lower corridors, to come suddenly
upon a Mekwas corrugated muscle, not dissimilar to the
look of an uncovered human brain. His maw, a vertical
irregular cleft at the base of his 'face', was an obsolete organ
by reason of the syrup sac which had been introduced under
the skin of the shoulders, and the digestive organs, originally
used to extract nutrition from decayed swamp vegetation and
coelenterates, had atrophied. The Mek typically wore no
garment except possibly a work apron or a tool-belt, and in
the sunlight his rust-bronze skin made a handsome display.
This was the Mek solitary, a creature intrinsically as effective
as manperhaps more by virtue of his superb brain which
also functioned as a radio transceiver. Working in the mass,
by the teeming thousands, he seemed less admirable, less
competent: a hybrid of sun-man and cockroach.
Certain savants, notably Morninglight's D. R. Jardine and
Salonson of Tuang, considered the Mek bland and phlegmat-
ic, but the profound Claghorn of Castle Hagedorn asserted
otherwise. The emotions of the Mek, said Claghorn, were