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

too fast. It turned a blazing white when
at last it struck the atmosphere of the third planet. But those hard metals
held their shape; and the terrible speeds yielded to the fury
of the rev├йrsers and to the pressure of the air that thickened with every
receding mile.
It was the woman who helped his faltering form into the tiny lifeboat. He lay
there, gathering strength, staring with tense eagerness down at the blazing
sea of lights that was the first city he had seen on the night side of this
strange world.
Dully, he watched as the woman carefully eased the small ship into the
darkness behind a shed in a little back alley; and, because succor seemed
suddenly near, sheer hope enabled him to walk beside her to the dimly lighted
residential street nearby.
He would have walked on blankly into the street, but the woman's fingers held
him back into the shadows of the alleyway.
"Are you mad?" she whispered. "Lie down. We'll stay right here till someone
comes."
The cement was hard beneath his body, but after a moment of the painful rest
it brought, he felt a faint surge of energy; and he was able to voice his
bitter thought:
"If you hadn't stolen most of my carefully saved 'life,' we wouldn't be in
this desperate position. You know well that it's more important that I remain
at full power."
In the dark beside him, the woman lay quiet for a while; then her defiant
whisper came:
"We both need a change of blood and a new charge of 'life.' Perhaps I did take
a little too much out of you, but that was because I had to steal it. You
wouldn't have given it to me of your own free will, and you know it."

For a time, the futility of argument held him silent, but, as the minutes
dragged, that dreadful physical urgency once more tainted his thoughts, he
said heavily:
"You realize of course that we've revealed our presence. We should have waited
for the others to come. There's no doubt at all that our ship was spotted by
the Galactic Observer in this system before we reached the outer planets.
They'll have tracers on us wherever we go, and, no matter where we bury our
machine, they'll know its exact location. It is impossible to hide the
interstellar drive energies; and, since they wouldn't make the mistake of
bringing such energies to a third-degree planet, we can't hope to locate them
in that fashion.
"But we must expect an attack of some kind. I only hope one of the great
Galactics doesn't take part in it."


"One of them!" Her whisper was a gasp, then she snapped irritably, "Don't try
to scare me. You've told me time and again that-"
"All right, all right!" He spoke grudgingly, wearily. "A million years have
proven that they consider us beneath their personal attention. And"-in spite
of his appalling weakness, scorn came-"let any of the kind of agents they have
in these lower category planets try to stop us."