"William Tenn - The Flat-Eyed Monster" - читать интересную книгу автора (William Tenn)

"Me friend," Manship went on desperately, raising and lowering his arms. "Me intelligent entity. Me have IQ of 140 on the Wechsler-Bellevue scale."
"You may be satisfied," Glomg was saying, as Lirld left the table with a light jump and floated, like an oversized dandelion, to a mass of equipment overhead, "but I'm not. I don't like this business one little bit."
"Me friendly and intelligent entiЧ" Manship began. He sneezed again. "Damn this wet air," he muttered morosely.
"What was that?" Glomg demanded.
"Nothing very important, Councilor," Srin assured him. "The creature did it beнfore. It is evidently a low-order biological reaction that takes place periodically, posнsibly a primitive method of imbibing glrnk. Not by any stretch of the imagination a means of communication, however."
"I wasn't thinking of communication," Glomg observed testily. "I thought it might be a prelude to aggressive action."
The professor skimmed back to the table, carrying a skein of luminescent wires. "Hardly. What could a creature of this sort be aggressive with? I'm afraid you're letнting your mistrust of the unknown run away with you, Councilor Glomg."
Manship had crossed his arms across his chest and subsided into a helpless siнlence. There was evidently no way to make himself understood outside of telepathy. And how do you start transmitting telepathically for the first time? What do you use?
If only his doctoral thesis had been in biology or physiology, he thought wistfully, instead of The Use of the Second Aorist in the First Three Books of the Iliad. Oh, well. He was a long way from home. Might as well try.
He closed his eyes, having first ascertained that Professor Lirld did not intend to approach his person with the new piece of equipment. He wrinkled his forehead and leaned forward with an effort of extreme concentration.
Testing, he thought as hard as he could, testing, testing. One, two, three, fourЧtestнing, testing. Can you hear me?
"I just don't like it," Glomg announced again. "I don't like what we're doing here. Call it a presentiment, call it what you will, but I feel we are tampering with the infiniteЧand we shouldn't."
I'm testing, Manship ideated frantically. Mary had a little lamb. Testing, testing. I'm the alien creature and I'm trying to communicate with you. Come in, please.
"Now, Councilor," Lirld protested irritably. "Let's have none of that. This is a scientific experiment."
"That's all very well. But I believe there are mysteries that flefnobe was never meant to examine. Monsters as awful-looking as thisЧno slime on the skin, only two eyes and both of them flat, unable or unwilling to pmbff, an almost complete absence of tentaclesЧa creature of this sort should have been left undisturbed on its own hellнish planet. There are limits to science, my learned friendЧor there should be. One should not seek to know the unknowable!"
Cant you hear me? Manship begged. Alien entity to Srin, Lirld and Glomg: This is an attempt at a telepathic connection. Come in, please, someone. Anyone. He considered for a moment, then added: Roger. Over.
"I don't recognize such limitations, Councilor. My curiosity is as vast as the uniнverse."
"That may be," Glomg rejoined portentously. "But there are more things in Tiz and Tetzbah, Professor Lirld, than are dreamed of in your philosophy."
"My philosophyЧ" Lirld began, and broke off to announceЧ"Here's your son. Why don't you ask him? Without the benefit of half a dozen scientific investigations that people like you have wanted to call off time after time, none of his heroic achieveнments in interplanetary discovery would be possible."
Thoroughly defeated, but still curious, Manship opened his eyes in time to see an extremely narrow black suitcase swarm up to the tabletop in a spaghetti-cluster of tentacles.
"What isЧthat?" the newcomer inquired, curling a bunch of supercilious eye-stalks over Manship's head. "It looks like a yurd with a bad case of hipplestatch." He considered for a moment, then added, "Galloping hipplestatch."
"It's a creature from astronomical unit 649-301-3 that I've just succeeded in teleporting to our planet," Lirld told him proudly. "Mind you, Rabd, without a transнmitting outfit on the other end! I admit I don't know why it worked this time and never beforeЧbut that's a matter for further research. A beautiful specimen, though, Rabd. And as near as we can tell, in perfect condition. You can put it away now, Srin."
"Oh, no you don't, SrinЧ" Manship had barely started to announce when a great rectangle of some pliable material fell from the ceiling and covered him. A moment later, the tabletop on which he'd been sitting seemed to drop away and the ends of the material were gathered in underneath him and fastened with a click by a scuttling individual whom he took to be the assistant. Then, before he had time to so much as wave his arms, the tabletop shot up with an abruptness that he found twice as painful as it was disconcerting.
And there he was, packaged as thoroughly as a birthday present. All in all, things were not improving, he decided. Well, at least they seemed disposed to leave him alone now. And as yet they showed no tendency to shove him up on a laboratory shelf along with dusty jars of flefnobe fetuses pickled in alcohol.
The fact that he was probably the first human being in history to make contact with an extraterrestrial race failed to cheer Clyde Manship in the slightest.
First, he reflected, the contact had been on a distinctly minor keyЧthe sort that an oddly colored moth makes with a collector's bottle rather than a momentous meeting between the proud representatives of two different civilizations.
Second, and much more important, this sort of hands-across-the-cosmos affair was more likely to enthuse an astronomer, a sociologist or even a physicist than an assistant professor of Comparative Literature.
He'd had fantastic daydreams aplenty in his lifetime. But they concerned being present at the premiere of Macbeth, for example, and watching a sweating Shakeнspeare implore Burbage not to shout out the "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorнrow" speech in the last act: "For God's sake, Dick, your wife just died and you're about to lose your kingdom and your lifeЧdon't let it sound like Meg at the Mermaid screaming for a dozen of ale. Philosophical, Dick, that's the idea, slow, mournful and philosophical. And just a little bewildered."
Or he'd imagined being one of the company at that moment sometime before 700 B.C. when a blind poet rose and intoned for the first time: "Anger, extreme anger, that is my tale..."
Or being a house guest at Yasnaya Polyana when Tolstoy wandered in from the garden with an abstracted look on his face and muttered: "Just got an idea for a terrific yarn about the Napoleonic invasion of Russia. And what a title! War and Peace. Nothing pretentious, nothing complicated. Just simply War and Peace. It'll knock them dead in St. Petersburg, I tell you. Of course, it's just a bare little short story at the moment, but I'll probably think of a couple of incidents to pad it out."
Travel to the Moon and the other planets of the solar system, let alone a voyage to the center of the galaxyЧin his pajamas? No, that was definitely not a menu calcuнlated to make Clyde Manship salivate. In this respect, he had wisted no farther afield than a glimpse, say, of Victor Hugo's sky-high balcony in St. Germain des Pres or the isles of Greece where burning Sappho loved and, from time to time as it occurred to her, sang.
Professor Bowles, now, Bowles or any of the other slipstick-sniffers in the Physics DepartmentЧwhat those boys would give to be in his position! To be the subject of an actual experiment far beyond the dreams of even theory on Earth, to be exposed to a technology that was patently so much more advanced than theirsЧwhy, they would probably consider that, in exchange for all this, the vivisection that Manship was morosely certain would end the evening's festivities was an excellent bargain and verged on privilege. The Physics Department...
Manship suddenly recalled the intricately weird tower, studded with gray dipoles, that the Physics Department had been erecting in Murphy Field. He'd watched the government-subsidized project in radiation research going up from his window in Callahan Hall.
Only the evening before, when it had reached the height of his window, he'd reflected that it looked more like a medieval siege engine designed to bring down walled cities than a modern communicative device.
But now, with Lirld's comment about one-way teleportation never having worked before, he found himself wondering whether the uncompleted tower, poking a ragged section of electronic superstructure at his bedroom window, had been partially reнsponsible for this veritable puree-of-nightmare he'd been wading through.
Had it provided a necessary extra link with Lirld's machine, sort of an aerial connection or grounding wire or whatever? If only he knew a little physics! Eight years of higher education were inadequate to suggest the barest aye or nay.
He gnashed his teeth, went too far and bit his tongueЧand was forced to suspend mental operations until the pain died away and the tears dribbled out of his eyes.
What if he knew for certain that the tower had played a potent, though passive, part in his removal through interstellar space? What if he knew the exact part it had played in terms of megavolts and amperages and so forthЧwould the knowledge be the slightнest use to him in this impossible situation?
No, he'd still be a hideous flat-eyed, non-intelligent monster plucked pretty much at random from the outer reaches of the universe, surrounded by creatures to whose minds his substantial knowledge of the many literatures of astronomical unit 649-301-3 would probably come across, allowing even for the miracle of translation, as so much schizophrenic word-salad.
In his despair, he plucked hopelessly at the material in which he'd been wrapped. Two small sections came away in his fingers.
There wasn't enough light to examine them, but the feel was unmistakable. Paper. He was wrapped in an oversized sheet of something very much like paper.
It made sense, he thought, it made sense in its own weird way. Since the appendнages of the flefnobes he had seen to date consisted of nothing more than slender tenнtacles ending in either eyes or tapered points, and since they seemed to need knoblike protuberances on the laboratory table in order to perch beside him, a cage of paper was pretty much escape-proof from their point of view. There was nothing for their tentacles to gripЧand they evidently didn't have the musculature to punch their way through.
Well, he did. Athletically, he had never amounted to much, but he believed, given enough of an emergency, in his ability to fight his way out of a paper bag. It was a comforting thought, but, at the moment, only slightly more useful than the nugget about the tower in Murphy Field.
If only there were some way of transmitting that bit of information to Lirld's little group: Maybe they'd realize that the current flefnobe version of The Mindless Horror from Hyperspace had a few redeeming intellectual qualities, and maybe they could work out a method of sending him back. If they wanted to.
Only he couldn't transmit information. All he could do, for some reason peculiar to the widely separate evolutionary paths of man and flefnobe, was receive. So former Assistant Professor Clyde Manship sighed heavily, slumped his shoulders yet a furнther slumpЧand stolidly set himself to receive.
He also straightened his pajamas about him tenderly, not so much from latent sartorial ambition as because of agonizing twinges of nostalgia: he had suddenly realized that the inexpensive green garment with its heavily standardized cut was the only artifact he retained of his own world. It was the single souvenir, so to speak, that he possessed of the civilization which had produced both Tamerlane and terza rima; the pajamas were, in fact, outside of his physical body, his last link with Earth.
"So far as I'm concerned," Glomg's explorer son was commentingЧit was obvious that the argument had been breezing right along and that the papery barrier didn't affect Manship's "hearing" in the slightestЧ"I can take these alien monsters or leave them alone. When they get as downright disgusting as this, of course, I'd rather leave them alone. But what I meanЧI'm not afraid of tampering with the infinite, like Pop here, and on the other side, I can't believe that what you're doing, Professor Lirld, will ever lead to anything really important."
He paused, then went on. "I hope I haven't hurt your feelings, sir, but that's what I honestly think. I'm a practical flefnobe, and I believe in practical things."
"How can you sayЧnothing really important?" In spite of Rabd's apology, the professor's mental "voice" as it registered on Manship's brain positively undulated with indignation. "Why, the greatest concern of flefnobe science at the moment is to achieve a voyage to some part of the outer galaxy where the distances between stars are prodigious compared to their relative denseness here at the galactic center.
"We can travel at will between the fifty-four planets of our system and we have recently achieved flight to several of our neighboring suns, but going so far as even the middle areas of the galaxy, where this specimen originates, remains as visionary a project today as it was before the dawn of extra-atmospheric flight over two centuries ago."