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

The Flat-Eyed Monster
William Tenn


For the first few moments, Clyde ManshipтАФwho up to then had been an assistant professor of
Comparative Literature at Kelly UniversityтАФfor the first few moments, Manship tried heroically to
convince himself that he was merely having a bad dream. He shut his eyes and told himself chidingly, with
a little superior smile playing about his lips, that things as ugly as this just did not occur in real life. No.
Definitely a dream.
He had himself half convinced, until he sneezed. It was too loud and wet a sneeze to be ignored.
You didn't sneeze like that in a dreamтАФif you sneezed at all. He gave up. He'd have to open his eyes and
take another look. At the thought, his neck muscles went rigid with spasm.
A little while ago, he'd fallen asleep while reading an article he'd written for a schol-arly journal. He'd
fallen asleep in his own bed in his own apartment in Callahan HallтАФ"a charming and inexpensive
residence for those members of the faculty who are bachelors and desire to live on campus." He'd
awakened with a slightly painful tingling sensation in every inch of his body. He felt as if he were being
stretched, stretched interminably andтАФand loosened. Then, abruptly, he had floated off the bed and
gone though the open window like a rapidly attenuating curl of smoke. He'd gone straight up to the
star-drenched sky of night, dwindling in substance until he lost consciousness completely.


And had come to on this enormous flat expanse of white tabletop, with a multivaulted ceiling above him
and dank, barely breathable air in his lungs. Hanging from the ceiling were quantities and quantities of
what was indubitably electronic equipment, but the kind of equipment the boys in the Physics Department
might dream up, if the grant they'd just received from the government for military radiation research had
been a million times larger than it was, and if Professor Bowles, the department head, had insisted that
every gadget be carefully constructed to look substantially different from anything done in electronics to
date.
The equipment above him had been rattling and gurgling and whooshing, glow-ing and blinking and
coruscating. Then it had stopped as if someone had been satisfied and had turned off a switch.
So Clyde Manship had sat up to see who had turned it off.
He had seen all right.
He hadn't seen so much who as he had seen what. And it hadn't been a nice what. In fact, none of
the whats he had glimpsed in that fast look around had been a bit nice. So he had shut his eyes fast and
tried to find another mental way out of the situation.
But now he had to have another look. It might not be so bad the second time. "It's always darkest,"
he told himself with determined triteness, "before the dawn." And then found himself involuntarily adding,
"except on days when there's an eclipse."
But he opened his eyes anyway, wincingly, the way a child opens its mouth for the second spoonful
of castor oil.
Yes, they were all as he had remembered them. Pretty awful.
The tabletop was an irregular sort of free-form shape, bordered by thick, round knobs a few inches
apart. And perched on these knobs, about six feet to the right of him, were two creatures who looked
like black leather suitcases. Instead of handles or straps, however, they sported a profusion of black
tentacles, dozens and dozens of tentacles, every second or third one of which ended in a moist turquoise
eye shielded by a pair of the sweepingest eyelashes Manship had ever seen outside of a mascara
advertisement.
Embedded in the suitcase proper, as if for additional decorative effect, were swarms of other
sky-blue eyes, only these, without eyelashes, bulged out in multitudes of tiny, glittering facets like
enormous gems. There was no sign of ear, nose or mouth anywhere on the bodies, but there was a kind