"Smith, E E 'Doc' - Lensman 05 - Second Stage Lensman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

He spoke to the watchful Ralph, then he and the Aldebaranian left the hall, followed at a careful distance by the throng. The helicopter was on the ground, waiting. The man and the woman climbed aboard.
"Clear ether, persons!" The Lensman waved a salute to the crowd and the Tellurian craft shot into the air.
Thence to the Dauntless, which immediately did likewise, leaving behind her, upon the little airport, a fused blob of metal that had once been the zwilnik's speedster. Kinnison studied the white face of his captive, then handed her a tiny canister.
"Fresh battery for your thought-screen generator; yours is about shot." Since she made no motion to accept it, he made the exchange himself and tested the result. It worked. "What's the matter with you, kid, anyway? I'd say you were starved, if I hadn't caught you at a full table."
"I am starved," the girl said, simply. "I couldn't eat there. I knew they were going to kill me, and it... it sort of took away my appetite."
"Well, what are we waiting for? I'm hungry, tooЦlet's go eat."
"Not with you, either, any more than with them. I thanked you, Lensman, for saving my life there, and I meant it. I thought then and still think that I would rather have you kill me than those horrible, monstrous women, but I simply can't eat."
"But I'm not even thinking of killing youЦcan't you get that through your skull? I don't make war on women; you ought to know that by this time."
"You will have to." The girl's voice was low and level. "You didn't kill any of those Lyranians, no, but you didn't chase them a million parsecs, either. We have been taught ever since we were born that you Patrolmen always torture people to death. I don't quite believe that of you personally, since I have had a couple of glimpses into your mind, but you'll kill me before I'll talk. At least, I hope and I believe that I can hold out."
"Listen, girl." Kinnison was in deadly earnest. "You are in no danger whatever. You are just as safe as though you were in Klono's hip pocket. You have some information that I want, yes, and I will get it, but in the process I will neither hurt you nor do you mental or physical harm. The only torture you will undergo will be that which, as now, you give yourself."
"But you called me a... a zwilnik, and they always kill them," she protested.
"Not always. In battles and in raids, yes. Captured ones are tried in court. If found guilty, they used to go into the lethal chambers. Sometimes they do yet, but not usually. We have mental therapists now who can operate on a mind if there's anything there worth saving."
"And you think that I will wait to stand trial, in the entirely negligible hope that your bewhiskered, fossilized therapists will find something in me worth saving?"
"You won't have to," Kinnison laughed. "Your case has already been decidedЦin your favor. I am neither a policeman nor a Narcotics man; but I happen to be qualified as judge, jury, and executioner. I am a therapist to boot. I once saved a worse zwilnik than you are, even though she wasn't such a knockout. Now do we eat?"
"Really? You aren't just... just giving me the needle?"
The Lensman flipped off her screen and gave her unmistakable evidence. The girl, hitherto so unmovedly self-reliant, broke down. She recovered quickly, however, and in Kinnison's cabin she ate ravenously.
"Have you a cigarette?" She sighed with repletion when she could hold no more food.
"Sure. Alsakanite, Venerian, Tellurian, most anythingЦwe carry a couple of hundred different brands. What would you like?"
"Tellurian, by all means. I had a package of Camerfields onceЦthey were gorgeous. Would you have those, by any chance?"
"Uh-huh," he assured her. "Quartermaster! Carton of Camerfields, please." It popped out of the pneumatic tube in seconds. "Here you are sister."
The glittery girl drew the fragrant smoke deep, down into her lungs.
"Ah, that tastes good! Thanks, KinnisonЦfor everything. I'm glad you kidded me into eating; that was the finest meal I ever ate. But it won't take, really. I've never broken yet, and I won't break now. If I do, I won't be worth a damn, to myself or to anybody else, from then on." She crushed out the butt. "So let's get on with the third degree. Bring on your rubber hose and your lights and your drip-can."
"You're still on the wrong foot, Toots," Kinnison said, pityingly. What a frightful contrast there was between her slimly rounded body, in its fantastically gorgeous costume, and the stark somberness of her eyes! "There'll be no third degree, no hose, no lights, nothing like that. In fact, I'm not even going to talk to you until you've had a good long sleep. You don't look hungry any more, but you're still not in tune, by seven thousand kilocycles. How long has it been since you really slept?"
"A couple of weeks, at a guess. Maybe a month."
"Thought so. Come on; you're going to sleep now."
The girl did not move. "With whom?" she asked, quietly. Her voice did not quiver, but stark terror lay in her mind and her hand crept unconsciously toward the hilt of her dagger.
"Holy Klono's claws!" Kinnison snorted, staring at her in wide-eyed wonder. "Just what kind of a bunch of hyenas do you think you've got into, anyway?"
"Bad," the girl replied, gravely. "Not the worst possible, perhaps, but from my standpoint plenty bad enough. What can I expect from me Patrol except what I do expect?' You don't need to kid me along, Kinnison. I can take it, and I'd a lot rather take it standing up, facing it, than have you sneak up on me with it after giving me your shots in the arm."
"What somebody has done to you is a sin and a shrieking shame," Kinnison declared, feelingly. "Come on, you poor little devil." He picked up sundry pieces of apparatus, then, taking her arm, he escorted her to another, almost luxuriously furnished cabin.
"That door," he explained carefully, "is solid chrome-tungsten-molybdenum steel. The lock can't be picked. There are only two keys to it in existence, and here they are. There's a bolt, too, that's proof against anything short of a five-hundred-ton hydraulic jack, or an atomic-hydrogen cutting torch. Here's a full-coverage screen, and a twenty-foot spy-ray block. There is your stuff out of the speedster. If you want help, or anything to eat or drink, or anything else that can be expected aboard a ship like this, there's the communicator. QX?
"Then you really mean it? That I... that you... I mean..."
"Absolutely," he assured her. "Just that you are completely the master of your destiny, the captain of your soul. Good-night."
"Good-night, Kinnison. Good-night, and th... thanks." The girl threw herself face downward upon the bed in a storm of sobs.
Nevertheless, as Kinnison started back toward his own cabin, he heard the massive bolt click into its socket and felt the blocking screens go on.

CHAPTER 5
Illona of Lonabar
Twelve or fourteen hours later, after the Aldebaranian girl had had her breakfast, Kinnison went to her cabin.
"Hi, Cutie, you look better. By the way, what's your name, so we'll know what to call you?"
"Illona,"
"Illona what?"
"No whatЦjust Illona, that's all."
"How do they tell you from other Illonas, then?"
"Oh, you mean my registry number. In the Aldebaranian language there are not the symbolsЦit would have to be. The Illona who is the daughter of Porlakent the potter who lives in the house of the wheel upon the road of...'"
"Hold everythingЦwe'll call you Illona Porter." He eyed her keenly. "I thought your Aldebaranian wasn't so hotЦdidn't seem possible that I could have got that rusty. You haven't been on Aldebaran II for a long time, have you?"
"No, we moved to Lonabar when I was about six."
"Lonabar? Never heard of itЦI'll check up on it later. Your stuff was all here, wasn't it? Did any of the red-headed person's things get mixed in?"
"Things?" She giggled sunnily, then sobered in quick embarrassment "She didn't carry any. They're horrid, I thinkЦpositively indecentЦto run around that way."
"Hm... m. Glad you brought the point up. You've got to put on some clothes aboard this ship, you know."
"Me?" she demanded. "Why, I'm fully dressed..." She paused, then shrank together visibly. "Oh! TelluriansЦI remember, all those coverings! You mean, then... you think I'm shameless and indecent too?"