"Margaret St Clair - The Stroller" - читать интересную книгу автора (St. Clair Margaret)

had been the night before. Even their pre-breakfast snapping at each other lacked its usual note of bitter
sincerity. When Marta left the apartment and started out to do her shopping, she was humming under her
breath.
The canned crab was easy enough to locate, but she had to go to three stores before she could find
the peaches and the mushrooms. She ran them to earth at last in a little grocery on a side street. Just as
she was leaving it, her eye caught the flash of a red label on a low shelf near the door and she
triumphantly dug out two cans of tomato soup.
"See what I got!" she said, showing her prize to George when she got back home. "I guess I'm lucky
or something. It's awfully hard to find."
"Gosh!" George shut off the video to give her his full attention. "That's wonderful. I happen to know
the Old Man's crazy about it. His mother used to have it all the time. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if it
makes him change his mind completely about going to the union. Marta, you're a smart girl."
Marta spent the rest of the day at the beauty shop, getting her hair re-garnished with galoons and her
face set. She wanted to make the best possible impression on the captain. Around five-thirty she began
getting dinnerтАФit doesn't take long to open cansтАФand an hour or so later the Old Man (his name was
Kauss) was chiming at the door.
Kauss was definitely stiff at first. He greeted Saunders with resentful formality and gave Marta the
merest flash of a smile before his face grew hard again. When the fragrant steam from the tureen of
tomato soup Marta was bringing in blew toward him, he relaxed somewhat, and the salad of canned
string beans, onions, lettuce and mayonnaise softened him still more. By the time he had finished two big
helpings of Marta's crab casserole, it began to look like the job was saved. He offered George a cigar
and began telling him a long story about what the little Martian hostess at the Silver Weetarete had said to
him.
Marta went out in the kitchen to fix the Oche flambe. She cut sponge cake into neat rounds, spread
disks of hard-frozen banana ice cream over them, and crowned the structure on each dessert plate with
half of an enormous canned clingstone peach. From a bottle she poured soma carefully over each of the
peaches, set a bit of paper to burning by pressing it against the element in the atomic range, and then used
the paper to ignite the soma on the peaches.
"George!" she called in the direction of the dining apse. "Oh, George, honey, help me with the
plates!"
She heard him come in. She turned at his step, ready to pick up the plates, one in each hand, and
give them to him.
He was wearing his brown suit.
ButтАФhe was wearing the green one today, wasn't he, because it was the best suit he had and he
wanted to impress the captain. His greenтАФhis greenтАФ
George's face slipped down toward the fourth button on his coat. It wavered, solidified, flowed back
into place, and then slopped down over his lapels once more. Suddenly it solidified into a sort of tentacle.
It came falteringly toward Marta, half-blind, but purposive.
Marta tried to scream. Her throat was too constricted by terror to let out more than a mere thread of
sound, but it had carrying power. George and Kauss, out in the dining apse, heard it.
They came running in. Kauss was quick-witted. He picked up one of the plates with the soma
burning on it and hurled it straight at the thing that was wearing George's clothes.
There was an explosion, so loud that the plexiglas in the windows bulged outward for a moment, and
then a bright, instant column of flame. Then nothing. George's brown suit lay collapsed and empty on the
floor.
"It was wearing your suit, George," Marta said hysterically. She was leaning back against the wall,
looking faint and sick. "George, it was wearing your suit. Oh, what was it, what was it, anyway?"
 Kauss was looking at the debris on the floor. A peculiar expression, half satisfaction, half private
insight, hovered around the corners of his lips.
"It was a Mocker, I think," he answered.