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

Manship stared at it uncomprehendingly, realizing only one thing fullyЧhe was still alive.
A flicker of absolutely mad, stampeding fear reached him from Srin's mind. The laboratory assistant jumped from the wall against which he'd been standing, skidded across the tabletop with thrashing tentacles, paused for a moment at the knobs that lined its edge to get the necessary tractionЧand then leaped in an enormous arc to the far wall of the building. The zigzag indentations widened in a sort of lightning flash to let his body through.
So that had been a door after all. Manship found himself feeling rather smug at the deduction. With so little to go onЧpretty smart, pretty smart.
And then the various parts of his brain caught up with current events and he beнgan trembling from the reaction. He should be dead, a thing of shredded flesh and powdered bone. What had happened?
Lirld had fired the weapon at him and missed the first time. Just as he was about to fire again, something had struck the flefnobe about as hard as it had the Assyrian back in the days when the latter was in the habit of coming down like the wolf on the fold. What? Manship had been using no weapon of his own. He had, so far as he knew, no ally on this world. He looked about the huge, vaulted room. Silence. There was nothнing else, nobody else in the place.
What was it the professor had screamed telepathically before he turned into soup? Something about Manship's eyes? Something coming out of the Earthman's eyes?
Still intensely puzzledЧand despite his relief at having survived the last few minнutesЧManship could not help regretting Lirld's extinction. Possibly because of his somewhat similar occupational status, the flefnobe had been the only creature of his type toward whom Manship felt any sympathy. He felt a little lonelier nowЧand, obscurely, a little guilty.
The different thoughts which had been mashing themselves to and fro in his mind abruptly disappeared, to be replaced by a highly important observation.
The zigzag doorway through which Srin had fled was closing, was coming together! And, as far as Manship knew, it was the only way out of the place!
Manship bounced off the huge tabletop in a jump that for the second time in ten minutes did great credit to a few semester-hours of gym some six years ago. He reached the narrowing gap, prepared to claw his way through the solid stone if necessary.
He was determined not to be trapped in this place when the flefnobe police closed in with whatever they used in place of tear gas and machine guns. He had also not forgotten the need to catch up to Rabd and get two or three more driving lessons.
To his intense relief, the aperture dilated again as he was about to hit it. Some sort of photoelectric gadget, he wondered, or was it just sensitive to the approach of a body?
He charged through, and for the first time found himself on the surface of the planet with the night sky all around him.
The view of the sky almost took his breath away and made him forget, temporarily, the utterly strange city of the flefnobes that stretched away in every direction.
There were so many stars! It was as if these stellar bodies were so much confecнtioner's sugar and someone had tossed a bagful at the heavens. They glowed with enough luminosity to maintain a three-quarters twilight. There was no moon, but its lack was not felt; rather it seemed that half a dozen moons had been broken up into quadrillions of tiny white dots.
It would be impossible, in this plenty, to trace out a single constellation. It would be necessary, instead, Manship guessed, to speak of a third brightest patch, a fifth largest sector. Truly, here in the center of the galaxy, one did not merely see the starsЧone lived amongst them!
He noticed his feet were wet. Glancing down, he saw he was standing in a very shallow stream of some reddish liquid that flowed between the rounded flefnobe buildings. Sewage disposal? Water supply? Probably neither, probably something else completely out of the range of human needs. For there were other colored streams flowing parallel to it, Manship saw nowЧgreen ones, mauve ones, bright pink ones. At a street intersection a few yards from him, the reddish stream flowed away by itself down a sort of alley, while a few new colored ribbons joined the main body.
Well, he wasn't here to work out problems in extraterrestrial sociology. He already had the sniffling intimation of a bad head cold. Not only his feet were wet in this spongelike atmosphere; his pajamas clung to his skin in dampest companionship and, every once in a while, his eyes got blurry with the moisture and he had to brush them dry with the back of a hand.
Furthermore, while he was not hungry, he had not only seen nothing resembling human-type victuals since his arrival, but also no evidence to suggest that the flefnobes had stomachs, let alone mouths.
Maybe they took in nourishment through the skin, soaked it up, say, from those differently colored streams that ran through their city. Red might be meat, green could be vegetables, white for dessertЧ
He clenched his fists and shook himself. I've no time for any of this philosophic badminton, he told himself fiercely. In just a few hours, I'm going to be extremely hunнgry and thirsty. I'm also going to be extremely hunted. I'd better get movingЧwork out some solutions!
Only where? Fortunately, the street outside Lirld's laboratory seemed deserted. Maybe the flefnobes were afraid of the dark? Maybe they were all good, respectable homebodies and everyone, without exception, toddled into his bed at night to sleep the darkness through? MaybeЧ
Rabd. He had to find Rabd. That was the beginning and the end of the only soluнtion to his problems he had come even close to, since his materialization on Profesнsor Lirld's lab table.
Rabd.
He tried "listening" with his mind. All kinds of drifting, miscellaneous thoughts were sloshing around in his brain, from the nearer inhabitants of the city.
"All right, darling, all right. If you don't want to gadl, you don't have to gadl. We'll do something else..."
"That smart-aleck Bohrg! Will I fix him properly tomorrow.
"Do you have three zamshkins for a plet? I want to make a long-distance send..."
"Bohrg will roll in tomorrow morning, thinking everything is the same as it's alнways been. Is he going to be surprised..."
"I like you, Nernt, I like you a lot. And that's why I feel it's my duty to tell you, strictly as a friend, you understand.
"No, darling, I didn't mean that I didn't want to gadl. I thought you didn't want to; I was trying to be considerate like you always tell me to be. Of course I want to gadl. Now please don't look at me like that..."
"Listen here. I can lick any flefnobe in the place..."
"To tell you the truth, Nernt, I think you're the only one who doesn't know. Everyнbody else..."
"So you're all scared, huh? All right, I'll take you on two at a time. Come on, come on..."
But no hint of Rabd. Manship began to walk cautiously down the stone-paved streets, sloshing through the little rivulets.
He stepped too close to the wall of the dark buildings. Immediately, a zigzag doorнway opened its jagged invitation. He hesitated for a moment, then stepped through.
Nobody here either. Did the flefnobes sleep in some central building, dormitory fashion? Did they sleep at all? He must remember to tune in on some likely mind and investigate. The information might be useful.
This building seemed to be a warehouse; it was filled with shelves. The walls were bare, howeverЧthere seemed to be some flefnobe inhibition against putting objects against the walls. The shelves rose in tall tiersЧagain free-form shapesЧfrom the center of the floor.
Manship strolled over to the shelving that was the height of his chest. Dozens of fat green balls rested in white porcelain cups. Food? Could be. They looked distinctly edible, like melons.
He reached out and picked one up. It immediately spread wings and flew away to the ceiling. Every one of the other green balls, on all the shelves, spread a similar set of multiple, tiny wings and flew upward, like so many spherical birds whose nests have been disturbed. When they reached the domed ceiling, they seemed to disappear.
Manship backed out of the place hurriedly through the jagged aperture. He seemed to be setting off alarms wherever he went!

Once out in the street, he sensed a new feeling. There was a sensation of bubbling excitement everywhere, a tense waiting. Very few individual thoughts were coming through.
Suddenly the restlessness coalesced into an enormous mental shout that almost deafened him.
"Good evening!" it said. "Please stand by for an emergency news bulletin. This is Pukr, the son of Kimp, coming to you on a planetwide, mind-to-mind hookup. Here is the latest on the flat-eyed monster:
"At forty-three skims past bebblewort, tonight, this creature was materialized by Professor Lirld from astronomical unit 649-301-3 as part of an experiment in one-way teleportation. Councilor Glomg was present as a witness to the experiment in the course of his official duties and, observing the aggressive way in which the monster comported itself, immediately warned Lirld of the dangers in letting it remain alive.
"Lirld disregarded the warning and, later, after Councilor Glomg had departed with his son, Rabd, the well-known interplanetary explorer and flefnobe-about-town, the monster ran amuck. Having fought its way out of a cage of solid paper, it attacked the professor with an unknown type of high-frequency mental beam that seems to emanate from its unbelievably flat eyes. This beam seems to be similar, in effect, to that thrown out by second-order grepsas when all fuses have blown. Our best psycho-physicists are, at this very moment, working feverishly on that aspect of the problem.
"But Professor Lirld paid with his life for his scientific curiosity and for disregardнing the warnings of Councilor Glomg's experience. Despite the best efforts of Srin, Lirld's laboratory assistant, who fought a desperate and courageous diversionary acнtion in an attempt to save the old scientist, Lirld perished horribly before the monster's ferocious onslaught. With his superior dead, Srin retreated tentacle by tentacle, fighting all the way, barely managing to make his escape in time.
"This alien monster with its incredible powers is now loose in our city! All citiнzens are urged to remain calm, not to panic. Rest assured that as soon as the authoriнties know what to do, they will do it. RememberЧabove allЧstay calm!
"Meanwhile, Rabd, the son of Glomg, has postponed his mating flight which was to have begun tonight. He is mating, as you all know, with Tekt, the daughter of HilpЧTekt being the well-known star of fnesh and blelg from the southern continent. Rabd is leading a troop of volunteer flefnobes to the scientific quarters of the city, where the monster was last seen, in an attempt to exterminate it with already-existing, conнventional weapons before the creature starts to reproduce. I will return with more bulletins when they are available. That is all for now."