"A. E. Van Vogt - Asylum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Vogt A E)

ASYLUM

by

A. E. VAN VOCT




I

INDECISION WAS dark in the man's thoughts as he walked across the spaceship
control room to the cot where the woman lay so taut and so still. He bent over
her; he said in his deep voice:
"We're slowing down, Merla."
No answer, no movement, not a quiver in her delicate, abnormally blanched
cheeks. Her fine nostrils dilated ever so slightly with each measured breath.
That was all.
The Dreegh lifted her arm, then let it go. It dropped to her lap like a piece
of lifeless wood, and her body remained rigid and unnatural. Carefully, he put
his fingers to one eye, raised the lid, peered into it. It stared back at him,
a clouded, sightless blue.
He straightened, and stood very still there in the utter silence of the
hurtling ship. For a moment, then, in the intensity of his posture and in the
dark ruthlessness of his lean, hard features, he seemed the veritable
embodiment of grim, icy calculation.


He thought grayly: "If I revived her now, she'd have more time to attack me,
and more strength. If I waited, she'd be weaker-"
Slowly, he relaxed. Some of the weariness of the years he and this woman had
spent together in the dark vastness of space came to shatter his abnormal
logic. Bleak sympathy touched him-and the decision was made.
He prepared an injection, and fed it into her arm. His gray eyes held a steely
brightness as he put his lips near the woman's ear; in a ringing, resonant
voice he said:
"We're near a star system. There'll be blood, Merla! And life!"
The woman stirred; momentarily, she seemed like a golden-haired doll come
alive. No color touched her perfectly formed cheeks, but alertness crept into
her eyes. She stared up at him with a hardening hostility, half questioning.
"I've been chemical," she said-and abruptly the doll-like effect was gone. Her
gaze tightened on him, and some of the prettiness vanished from her face. Her
lips twisted into words:~
"It's damned funny, Jeel, that you're still 0. K. If I thought-"
He was cold, watchful. "Forget it," he said curtly. "You're an energy waster,
and you know it. Anyway, we're going to land."
The flamelike tenseness of her faded. She sat up painfully, but there was a
thoughtful look on her face as she said:
"I'm interested in the risks. This is not a Galactic planet, is it?"
"There are no Galactics out here. But there is an Observer. I've been catching