"William Tenn - The Human Angle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tenn William)

I alerted Tom and told him to listen carefully. "It may be a trick-he might be
drugged. . . ."
He didn't act drugged, though-not exactly. He pushed his way past me and sat
down on a box to one side of the dome. He put his booted feet up on another,
smaller box. "How are you, Ben?" he asked. "How's every little thing?" I grunted.
"Well?" I know my voice skittered a bit.
He pretended puzzlement. "Well what? Oh, I see what you mean. The other
dome-you want to know who's in it. You have a right to be curious, Ben. Certainly.
The leader of a top-secret expedition like this-Project Hush they call us, huh,
Ben-finds another dome on the Moon. He thinks he's been the first to land on it, so
naturally he wants to-"
"Major Monroe Gridley!" I rapped out. "You will come to attention and deliver
your report. Now!" Honestly, I felt my neck swelling up inside my helmet.
Monroe just leaned back against the side of the dome. "That's the Army way of
doing things," he commented ad-miringly. "Like the recruits say, there's a right way,
a wrong way and an Army way. Only there are other ways, too." He chuckled. "Lots
of other ways."
"He's off," I heard Tom whisper over the telephone. "Ben, Monroe has gone and
blown his stack."
"They aren't extraterrestrials in the other dome, Ben," Monroe volunteered in a
sudden burst of sanity. "No, they're human, all right, and from Earth. Guess where."
"I'll kill you," I warned him. "I swear I'll kill you, Monroe. Where are they
from-Russia, China, Argentina?"
He grimaced. "What's so secret about those places? Go on!-guess again."
I stared at him long and hard. "The only place else-"
"Sure," he said. "You got it, Colonel. The other dome is owned and operated by
the Navy. The goddam United States Navy!"

THE DISCOVERY
 OF MORNIEL HATHAWAY

EVERYONE is astonished at the change in Morniel Matha-way since he was
discovered, everyone but me. They remember him as an unbathed and untalented
Greenwich Village painter who began almost every second sentence with "I" and
ended every third one with "me. " He had all the pushing, half-frightened conceit of
the man who secretly suspects himself to be a second-rater or worse, and any
half-hour conversation with him made your ears droop with the boastful yells he
threw at them.
I understand the change in him, the soft-spoken self-depreciation as well as the
sudden overwhelming success. But then, I was there the day he was "
discovered"тАФex-cept that isn't the right way to put it. To tell you the truth, I don 't
know how to put it really, considering the absolute impossibilityтАФyes, I said
impossibility, not im-probabilityтАФof the whole business. All I know for sure is that
trying to make sense out of it gives me belly-yammers and the biggest headache this
side of calculus.
We were talking about his discovery that day. I was sitting, carefully balanced, on
the one wooden chair in his cold little Bleecker Street studio, because I was too
sophis-ticated to sit in the easy chair.
Morniel practically paid the rent on his studio with that easy chair. It was a
broken-down tangle of filthy uphol-stery that was high in the front of the seat and