"Eric Frank Russel - Mechanistria" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russell Eric Frank)

тАЬ Kli Dreen; Kli Morg, Kli . . . whereтАЩs Kli Dreen? тАЬ
We stared around, the whole bunch of us. Not a Martian among those present. Not one. Kli
Yang, Sug Farn and the rest-nine in all-were missing. Neither could anyone remember seeing them
after the struggle in the Marathon. The last man out of the vessel had been Murdoch, a government
expert, and he swore that when he got snatched the Martians were still aboard and still fighting.
Leastways, none of them had been tossed into his vehicle, the last of the line.
We could think up no satisfactory explanation of Martian escape from durance vile, nor hazard a
guess at their present state. Perhaps their enormous strength had pre-vailed against the metal
monstrosities, though that didnтАЩt seem likely. My private notion, which I kept strictly to myself,
was that theyтАЩd managed to get the foe crazy about chess and right now both sides were waiting
breathlessly for someone to jump a bishop two squares. The Martians were fully capable of a stunt
as lopsided as that.
Marking all the Red Planet names, MeNulty continued to the bottom of his list, omitting Sixth
Engineer Zeigler in the same way that heтАЩd omitted Chief Andrews, and for the same season. Those
two were known to be dead.
TheyтАЩd succumbed to that first onslaught through the stern. Summing up, McNulty found seven
dead, five missing, not counting the Martians. The missing consisted of Haines and his two men in
the lifeboat, also Brennand and Wilson. This was a serious loss to our small company and our only
comfort lay in the thought that the missing ones nevertheless might be alive.
I took stock of our prison while the skipper mooned sadly at the roll. We were in a metal barn, a
great, bare place a hundred feet long by sixty wide by forty high. Its walls were smooth, drab-
coloured, windowless. The deeply curved roof, equally drab, was devoid of any opening, but from
its apex hung three large spheres of translucent plastic that glowed with orange light. Closely as I
examined the walls I could not find upon their dead flat surface a single line or solitary flaw
suggestive of a butt weld or any other kind of joint.
тАЬWell, men--тАЬ began McNulty.
He got no further. Thinly, eerily, a long-drawn scream trickled through the thin cracks around
the buildingтАЩs only door: It was a high-pitched sound thrust up to the very peak of agony and it had
many reverberations as if escaping through a long, metal corridor. Above all, it was a human voice-
or the voice of what was left of something human.
 The men milled around, their foreheads glossy with perspiration. Murdoch looked sheet-white.
Sam HignettтАЩs black fingers opened and closed as they itched to go to the aid of the sufferer. The
engineer with the spanner had rolled up his sleeves and revealed a tattooed nautch dancer on the
muscle of his lower left arm. The dancer shimmied as he changed and tightened his grip on the
spanner. His face still looked like hell, but his eyes were hard.
Slowly, Jay Score expressed the general feeling by saying,
тАЬIf we had the handling of one of these automatons weтАЩd pull it to pieces to see what makes its
cuckoo call the hours.тАЭ He stared at nobody in particular. тАЬIn that respect, they may resemble us,
much as I hate to admit it. Any man who doesnтАЩt fancy being picked to bits to satisfy alien curiosity
had better take care that they never get him out of here alive!тАЭ
Again the terrible scream. It broke off abruptly the moment it reached its top note and ensuing
silence seemed as horrible as the noise. I could imagine them now, clickcould bear his six. I could
see no point in trying for the roof, anyway. All the same, this futile effort served to occupy our
hands and minds for a short while.
Blaine tried his needle-ray on the wall with the obvious idea of cutting a series of foot-holds, but
this stuff proved much different from that with which the vehicles were built. It heated up quite
normally, turning primrose colour at maximum temperature, but flatly refused to melt or be cut.
This attempt with the ray gave the skipper the notion of making an inventory of available
weapons. Between the lot of us there were seven ray guns, one ancient vest-pocket automatic pistol
the owner of which claimed that it had been used by his father in the Final War, one four-foot