"Cordwainer Smith - The Best of Cordwainer Smith" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Cordwainer)

crnching wire?
She pulled the long gold-sheathed wire out of the pocket of her apron. She let its field sphere fall to
the carpeted floor. Swiftly, dutifully, with the deft obedience of a scanner's wife, she wound the cranching
wire around his head, spirally around his neck and chest. She avoided the instruments set in his chest.
She even avoided the radiating scars around the instruments, the stigmata of men who had gone up and
into the out. Mechanically he lifted a foot as she slipped the wire between his feet. She drew the wire
taut. She snapped the small plug into the high-burden control next to his heart-reader. She helped him to
sit down, arranging his hands for him, pushing his head back into the cup at the top of the chair. She
turned then, full-face toward him, so that he could read her lips easily. Her expression was composed.
She knelt, scooped up the sphere at the other end of the wire, stood erect calmly, her back to him.
He scanned her, and saw nothing in her posture but grief which would have escaped the eye of anyone
but a scanner. She spoke: he could see her chest-muscles moving. She realized that she was not facing
him, and turned so that he could see her lips.
"Ready at last?"
He smiled a yes.
She turned her back to him again. (Luci could never bear to watch him go under the wire.) She
tossed the wire-sphere into the air. It caught in the force-field, and hung there. Suddenly it glowed. That
was all. AllтАФexcept for the sudden red stinking roar of coming back to his senses. Coming back, across
the wild threshold of pain.
When he awakened, under the wire, he did not feel as though he had just cranched. Even though it
was the second cranching within the week, he felt fit. He lay in the chair. His ears drank in the sound of
air touching things in the room. He heard Luci breathing in the next room, where she was hanging up the
wire to cool. He smelt the thousand and one smells that are in anybody's room: the crisp freshness of the
germ-burner, the sour-sweet tang of the humidifier, the odor of the dinner they had just eaten, the smells
of clothes, furniture, of people themselves. All these were pure delight. He sang a phrase or two of his
favorite song:
"Here's to the haberman, Up-and-out!
"Up-oh!-and out-oh!-up-and-out! ..
He heard Luci chuckle in the next room. He gloated over the sounds of her dress as she swished to
the doorway.
She gave him her crooked little smile. "You sound all right. Are you all right, really?"
Even with this luxury of senses, he scanned. He took the flash-quick inventory which constituted his
professional skill. His eyes swept in the news of the instruments. Nothing showed off scale, beyond the
nerve compression hanging in the edge of Danger. But he could not worry about the nerve-box. That
always came through cranching. You couldn't get under the wire without having it show on the
nerve-box. Some day the box would go to Overload and drop back down to Dead. That was the way a
haberman ended. But you couldn't have everything. People who went to the up-and-out had to pay the
price for space.
Anyhow, he should worry! He was a scanner. A good one, and he knew it. If he couldn't scan
himself, who could? This cranching wasn't too dangerous. Dangerous, but not too dangerous.
Luci put out her hand and ruffled his hair as if she had been reading his thoughts, instead of just
following them: "But you know you shouldn't have! You shouldn't!"
"But I did!" He grinned at her.
Her gaiety still forced, she said: "Come on, darling, let's have a good time. I have almost everything
there is in the iceboxтАФall your favorite tastes. And I have two new records just full of smells. I tried them
out myself, and even I liked them. And you know meтАФ"
"Which?"
"Which what, you old darling?"
He slipped his hand over her shoulders as he limped out of the room. (He could never go back to
feeling the floor beneath his feet, feeling the air against his face, without being bewildered and clumsy. As