"William Tenn - The Flat-Eyed Monster" - читать интересную книгу автора (William Tenn)
What had that been? All that had happened to him, each time a flefnobe dissolved before his stare, was a good deal of fear. He had been terribly frightened that he was going to be blasted into tiny pieces and had, somewhere in the process of being frightнened, evidently been able to throw out something pretty tremendousЧto judge from results.
Possibly the abnormally high secretion of adrenalin in the human system at moнments of stress was basically inimical to flefnobe body structure. Or maybe there was an entirely mental reaction in Man's brain at such times whose emanations caused the flefnobes to literally fall apart. It made sense.
If he was so sensitive to their thoughts, they should be sensitive to him in some way. And obviously, when he was very much afraid, that sensitivity showed up with a vengeance.
He put his hands behind his head and glanced up to check his meters. Everything was working satisfactorily. The brown circles were expanding and contracting on the sekkel board, as Rabd's mind had said they should; the little serrations on the edge of the control panel were moving along at a uniform rate, the visiscreen showedЧthe visiscreen!
Manship leaped to his feet. The visiscreen showed what seemed to be every vessel in the flefnobe army and space fleetЧnot to mention the heavy maizeltooversЧin hot pursuit of him. And getting closer.
There was one large spacecraft that had almost caught up and was beginning to exude a series of bright rays that, Manship remembered from Rabd's recollections, were grapples.
What could have caused all this commotionЧthe theft of a single jet runabout? The fear that he might steal the secrets of flefnobe science? They should have been so glad to get rid of him, especially before he started reproducing hundreds of himself all over the planet!
And then a persistent thought ripple from inside his own shipЧa thought ripple which he had been disregarding all the time he had been concentrating on the unfaнmiliar problems of deep-space navigationЧgave him a clue.
He had taken off with someoneЧor somethingЧelse in the ship!
Clyde Manship scurried down the twisting ladder to the main cabin. As he apнproached, the thoughts became clearer and he realized, even before the cabin aperнture dilated to let him through, exactly whom he would find.
Tekt.
The well-known female star of fnesh and blelg from the southern continent and Rabd's about-to-be bride cowered in a far corner; all of her tentaclesЧincluding the hundred and seventy-six slime-washed ones that were topped by limpid eyesЧtwisted about her tiny black body in the most complicated series of knots Manship had ever seen.
"Oo-ooh!" her mind moaned. "Qrm! Qrm! Now it's going to happen! That awful, horrible thing! It's going to happen to me! It's coming closerЧcloserЧ"
"Look, lady, I'm not even slightly interested in you," Manship began, before he remembered that he'd never been able to communicate with any flefnobe before, let alone a hysterical female one.
He felt the ship shudder as the grapples touched it. Well, here I go again, he thought. In a moment there would be boarders and he'd have to turn them into bluish soup.
Evidently, Tekt had been sleeping aboard the vessel when he took off. She'd been waiting for Rabd to return and begin their mating flight. And she was obviously a sufficiently important figure to have every last reserve called up.
His mind caught the sensation of someone entering the ship. Rabd. From what Manship could tell, he was alone, carrying his trusty blasterЧand determined to die fighting.
Well, that's exactly what he'd have to do. Clyde Manship was a fairly considerate individual and heartily disliked the idea of disintegrating a bridegroom on what was to have been his honeymoon. But, since he had found no way of communicating his pacific intentions, he had no choice.
"Tekt!" Rabd telepathed softly. "Are you all right?"
"Murder!" Tekt screamed. "Help-help-help-help..." Her thoughts abruptly disнappeared; she had fainted.
The zigzag aperture widened and Rabd bounced into the cabin, looking like a series of long balloons in his spacesuit. He glanced at the recumbent Tekt and then turned desperately, pointing his curlicued blaster at Manship.
"Poor guy," Manship was thinking. "Poor, dumb, narrow-minded hero type. In just a second, you'll be nothing but goo." He waited, full of confidence.
He was so full of confidence, in fact, that he wasn't a bit frightened.
So nothing came out of his eyes, nothing but a certain condescending sympathy.
Afterword
Two days after Christmas 1954, the woman with whom I was living and with whom I was planning marriage made me a bang-up supper featuring all kinds of sharp spices. Two hours later, I was admitted to the hospital with a bleeding ulcer. As a free-lance writer, I had no medical insurance of any kind; my usually low bank account had to be comнpletely emptied so that I could be admitted in a status other than that of charity patient.
The word spread rapidly through the New York City science-fiction community, and for some reason the word that was spread was that I gone to St. Vincent's Hospital for an ordinary check-up. As a result, science-fiction folk showed up in my hospital room that night with all kinds of bizarre gag accouterments, only to find out that I was involved in some very serious business indeed. Harry and Joan Harrison, for example, came in holdнing a lily eachЧand were crushed to discover that the doctors were trying to decide if a dangerous immediate operation should be attempted.
After a conference, the doctors decided to hold off on the operation unless the bleeding intensified during the night. Then, one by one, the people around my bed drifted off, still apologizing for their jokey entrances. The last one to go was the woman with whom I was planning to share my life. She bent over me and put her warm, wet mouth to my ear.
Now I know that when a writer memoirizes some fifty years after the event, he cannot be expected to remember exactly every word of every speech. I therefore ask the reader to keep in mind two essential considerations: One, for most of my time on this planet, I have been blessed and cursed with almost perfect recall; and, two, such was the matter of her communication to me that it kind of seared itself into my brain.
"Now, darling," she asked warmly, wetly. "Is it true that you are absolutely penniless?"
"Absolutely," I told her. "My brother, Mort, cleaned out my whole bank account just to get me in here. I don't know what I'll do for next month's rent. Not to mention the surgeon's bill if they do decide to operate."
"That's what I thought," she breathed, still warm and still wet. "Now sweetheart, please listen to me. You are flat on your back, physically, psychologically, and financially. There's really nothing in this for me anymore. So I'll be going. Goodbye, my darling."
I pulled my head away and swiveled round to stare at her. "Hey," I said. "You can't be serious."
"Now, don't be selfish," she said, backing away to the door. "Try to look at it from my point of view. Goodbye."
Then she raised her right hand, waved it twice at me, closed the door behind her, and was gone.
I sat up in bed. I stared at the closed door for a long time. Then I picked up the teleнphone and called Horace Gold, the editor of Galaxy. (Horace was an agoraphobe and edited the magazine out of his apartment in Peter Cooper Village.)
Horace had heard what was going on with me. "Listen," he said. "They tell me you're in tough shape and you're broke. I'll put a voucher through tomorrow morning for five hundred dollars. You can have someone pick up the check for you about eleven a.m. What I want you to do for me...I want you to write a ten-thousand-word noveletteЧit should be very, very funny. Okay?"
"Thanks, Horace," I said. "I'll do it. If I live."
"Right," he agreed. "If you live. Meanwhile, don't forget. Very, very funny."
I hung up the phone, swallowed a large pill, and reached for the clipboard that my brother, Morton, and his wife, Sheila, had placed on my bedside table. What should I write? Well, there was the fact that Galaxy prided itself on not being a cheapo science-fiction magazine like those pulps that featured "bug-eyed monster" covers, with stories full of slime-dripping horrors to match. And there was my great fondness for two early stories by A.E. van Vogt, "Black Destroyer" and "Discord in Scarlet." I had long dreamed of doing a minor and respectful parody of the sociological analysis of aliens both stories featured.
The nurse came in, took my temperature, urged me to rest and get a good night's sleepЧand left.
I picked up a pencil. Trying hard not to bleed, I began writing, in longhand, "The Flat-Eyed Monster." Now, what, I mused to myself as I wrote, would Horace consider very, very funny?
Written 1954 / Published 1955
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