"E. C. Tubb - Stardeath" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tubb E. C)

"I suggest you drink this." The robed man held out the cup again. "There has been some dehydration
and loss of essential bodily chemicals together with certain physical reactions associated with your recent
experience. We do not wish for you to fall below optimum physical condition."
"Why not?" Varl looked at the man. "Is there to be more?"
"Punishment? The courts -- "
"You bastard! You sadistic bastard! You -- "
"Steady!" The gloved hand thrust the cup forward. "Drink this! Drink it!"
The cup shattered, a blue shower rising to fall and darken the fabric of the glove and the robe of the
man who wore it. He called out in sudden alarm as Varl rose, snarling, hands reaching to kill.
"Guards!"
Varl touched the robe and the flesh beneath, fingers stiffening as they began to dig into the flaccid
throat. His grip locked as the paralysis seized him and he toppled to one side, his temple striking the edge
of the table. Blood welled from the wound to mask his cheek and jaw.
Then the guards were around him, freeing his hands and staunching the wound, adding more stings to
the one which had fed the numbing drug into his veins. Needles brought a sudden darkness.
When he woke, he was back in his cell. It was a box containing a bunk, a bowl, toilet facilities, and
nothing else. A glowing plate in the ceiling provided illumination. The door was a solid panel. The cell was
a place buried deep, isolated from life, insulated from sound -- a tomb for the living dead.
Varl sat upright on the bunk, his back against the wall. His head ached a little and his nerves were
jumping from the aftermath of drugs and punishment. The wound on his temple, sealed beneath a
transparent dressing, itched a little but he made no effort to scratch it. Instead he relaxed and closed his
eyes and sent his senses to explore his environment.
Long ago, when young and eager to taste the adventure which was space, he rode the ships to new
and exotic worlds where he had learned boredom and disappointment and, too often, the animal which
lives within the skin of a man. But he learned how to kill time in space by picking up the vibrations
created by every movement, every word. In a sealed environment nothing can be lost, and in space
sound is caught and retained by the hull to be transmitted and circulated in fading murmurs which hang
like ghosts in the whispering air.
In his cell he heard the thin vibration of a crying voice, a plaintive wailing which keened on and on as
if a wandering soul mourned for the lost innocence of childhood. He heard a laugh which held the hate of
a nation and a sigh which whispered like a wind between the stars, a scrape of a shoe and the padding of
naked feet, a soft rill of running water, clicks more imagined than heard, and the rustle of what could have
been the passage of electrons through a wire or the soft susurrations of a brush through a mane of silken
hair.
He heard the dying shrieks of his recent ordeal.
He remembered the slow and agonizing crushing of his bones, the ripping torment as his nails were
torn from their beds, the sizzling burn of heated iron. Things once done in the name of religion by robed
familiars working in dungeons illuminated by guttering flambeaux were now done in the name of justice by
cold, detached men working with meters, dials, and minute pulses of electronic energy. A different age,
different means, but the motives were the same. And the cruelty remained.
To kill once had not been enough to satisfy the ire of kings. They had demanded multiple deaths as
far as the limitations of the human physique had allowed: hanging, drawing, quartering, throttling to
unconsciousness, reviving, dissecting, burning pieces of flesh before the living eyes of their victims, forcing
molten lead down a throat, filling a rectum with acid; or slow immersion in boiling oil, or impalement. The
records were filled with the diabolical ingenuity of torments devised by man to use on his fellows.
Finally, the ultimate had been achieved. The torments of hell could be visited on a victim again and
again and again. Punishment could fit the crime in a manner never dreamed of by those who had
proposed the value of poetic justice.
Varl stirred a little, easing a cramp in his right thigh, a growing ache in his left buttock. Small shifts of
position were undiscernible to any who might be watching, and there would be a watcher, he knew.