"Eric Frank Russel - The Ultimate Invader" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russell Eric Frank)

"Your suspicions are ill-founded," the alien told him. "How-ever, I would rather
explain myself higher up."
"You will do just that," promised the officer. "And the explanation had better be
satisfactory. "
He did not care for the slow smile he got in reply. It ir-resistibly suggested that
someone was being dogmatic and someone else knew better. Neither had he any
difficulty in identifying the respective someones. The alien's apparently baseless
show of quiet confidence unsettled him far more than he cared to reveal, especially
with a dopey guard standing nearby and a truckload of brass looking on.
It would have been nice to attribute the two-legger 's sang-froid to the usual
imbecility of another life-form too dim-witted to know when its scalp was in danger.
There were plenty of creatures like that: seemingly brave because unable to realize a
predicament even when they were in it up to the neck. Many of the lower ranks of his
own forces had that kind of guts. Nevertheless he could not shake off the uneasy
feeling that this case was different. The alien looked too alert, too sharp-eyed to
make like a cow.
Another and smaller truck came along the road. Waving it to a stop, he picked
four two-comet officers to act as escort, shooed them into the new vehicle along
with the biped who entered without comment or protest.
Through the side window he said to the officers, "T hold you personally
responsible for his safe arrival at the interroga-tion center. Tell them I've gone on to
the ship to see whether there's any more where he came from."
He stood watching on the verge while the truck reversed its direction, saw it roll
rapidly toward the city. Then he ' clambered into his own vehicle which at once
departed for the source of all the trouble.
Devoid of instructions to proceed toward town, return to the ship, stand on his
head or do anything else, Yadiz leaned on his gun and patiently awaited the passing
of somebody qualified to tell him.
The interrogation center viewed the alien's advent as less sensational than the
arrival of a Joppelan five-eared munkster at the zoo. Data drawn from a galaxy was
at the disposal of its large staff and the said information included descriptions of
four hundred separate and distinct life-forms, a few of them so fantastic that the
cogent material was more deductive than demonstrative. So far as they were
concerned this sample brought the record up to four hundred and one. In another
century's time it might be four hundred twenty-one or fifty-one. Listing the lesser
lifes was so much routine.
 Interviews were equally a matter of established rigmarole. They had created a
standard technique involving questions to be answered, forms to be filled,
conclusions to be drawn. Their ways of dealing with recalcitrants were, however, a
good deal more flexible, demanding various alternative methods and a modicum of
imagination. Some life-forms responded with pleasing alacrity to means of
persuasion that other life-forms could not so much as sense. The only difficulty they
could have with this specimen was that of thinking up an entirely new way of making
him see reason.
So they directed him to a desk, giving him a chair with four arm-rests and six
inches too high, and a bored official took his place opposite. The latter accepted in
advance that the subject could already speak the local tongue or communi-cate in
some other understandable manner. Nobody was sent to this place until educated
sufficiently to give the required responses.
Switching his tiny desk-recorder, the interviewer started with, "What is your