"A. E. Van Vogt - Concealment (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Vogt A E)

She whirled on the group around her, laughing through her even, white teeth. 'By space, here's action at last after ten dull years of surveying. We'll rout out these hide-and-go-seekers in short order.'
Excitement blazed inside her like a living force.

The strange thing to Watcher was that he knew before he wakened why he was still alive. Not very long before.
He felt the approach of consciousness. Instinctively, he began his normal Dellian preawakening muscle, nerve and mind exercises. In the middle of the curious rhythmic system, his brain paused in a dreadful surmise.
Returning to consciousness? He!
It was at that point, as his brain threatened to burst from his head with shock, that the knowledge came of how it had been done.
He grew quiet, thoughtful. He stared at the young woman who reclined on a chaise longue near his bed. She had a fine, oval face and a distinguished appearance for so young a person. She was studying him from sparkling gray eyes. Under that steady gaze, his mind grew very still.
He thought finally: 'I've been conditioned to an easy awakening. What else did they do-find out?'
The thought grew until it seemed to swell his brainpan:
WHAT ELSE?
He saw that the woman was smiling at him, a faint, amused smile. It was like a tonic. He grew even calmer as the woman said in a silvery voice:
'Do not be alarmed. That is, not too alarmed. W7hat is your name?'
Watcher parted his lips, then closed them again, and shook his


head grimly. He had the impulse to explain then that even answering one question would break the thrall of Dellian mental inertia and result in the revelation of valuable information.
But the explanation would have constituted a different kind of defeat. He suppressed it, and once more shook his head.
The young woman, he saw, was frowning. She said: 'You won't answer a simple question like that? Surely, your name can do no harm.'
His name, Watcher thought, then what planet he was from, where the planet was in relation to the Gisser sun, what about intervening storms. And so on down the line. There wasn't any end.
Every day that he could hold these people away from the information they craved would give the Fifty Suns so much more time to organize against the greatest machine that had ever flown into this part of space.
His thought trailed. The woman was sitting up, gazing at him with eyes that had gone steely. Her voice held a metallic resonance as she said:
'Know this, whoever you are, that you are aboard the Imperial Battleship Star Cluster, Grand Captain Laurr at your service. Know, too, that it is our unalterable will that you shall prepare for us an orbit that will take our ship safely to your chief planet.'
She went un vibrantly: 'It is my solemn belief you already know that Earth recognizes no separate governments. Space is indivisible. The universe shall not be an area of countless sovereign peoples squabbling and quarreling for power.
'That is the law. Those who set themselves against it are outlaws, subject to any punishment which may be decided upon in their special case.
'Take warning.'
Without waiting for an answer, she turned her head. 'Lieutenant Neslor,' she said at the wall facing Watcher, 'have you made any progress?'
A woman's voice answered: 'Yes, noble lady. I have set up an integer based on the Muir-Grayson studies of colonial peoples who have been isolated from the main stream of galactic life. There is no historical precedent for such a long isolation as seems to have obtained here, so I have decided to assume that


they have passed the static period, and have made some progress of their own.
'I think we should begin very simply, however. A few forced answers will open his brain to further pressures, and we can draw valuable conclusions meanwhile from the speed with which he adjusts his resistance to the brain machine. Shall I proceed?'
The woman on the chaise longue nodded. There was a flash of light from the wall facing Watcher. He tried to dodge, and discovered for the first time that something held him in the bed, not rope, or chain, nothing visible. But something as palpable as rubbery steel.
Before he could think further, the light was in his eyes, in his mind, a dazzling fury. Voices seemed to push through it, voices that danced and sang, and spoke into his brain, voices that said:
'A simple question like that-of course I'll answer . . . of course, of course, of course- My name is Gisser Watcher. I was born on the planet Kaider III, of Dellian parents. There are seventy inhabited planets, fifty suns, thirty billion people, four hundred important storms, the biggest at Latitude 473. The Central Government is on the glorious planet, Cassidor VII-'
With a blank horror of what he was doing, Watcher caught his roaring mind into a Dellian knot, and stopped that devastating burst of revelation. He knew he would never be caught like that again but-too late, he thought, too late by far.

The woman wasn't quite so certain. She went out of the bedroom, and came presently to where the middle-aged Lieutenant Neslor was classifying her findings on receptor spoois.
The psychologist glanced up from her work, said in an amazed voice: 'Noble lady, his resistance during the stoppage moment registered an equivalent of IQ 8oo. Now, that's utterly impossible, particularly because he started talking at a pressure point equivalent to IQ 167, which matches with his general appearance, and which you know is average.
'There must be a system of mind training behind his resistance. And I think I found the clue in his reference to his Dellian ancestry. His graph squared in intensity when he used the word.


'This is very serious, and may cause great delay-unless we are prepared to break his mind.'
The grand captain shook her head, said only: 'Report further developments to me.'
On the way to the transmitter, she paused to check the battleship's position. A bleak smile touched her lips, as she saw on the reflector the shadow of a ship circling the brighter shadow of a sun.
Marking time, she thought, and felt a chill of premonition. Was it possible that one man was going to hold up a ship strong enough to conquer an entire galaxy?
The senior ship meteorologist, Lieutenant Cannons, stood up from a chair as she came toward him across the vast floor of the transmission receiving room, where the Fifty Suns weather station still stood. He had graying hair, and he was very old, she remembered, very old. Walking toward him, she thought:
There was a slow pulse of life in these men who watched the great storms of space. There must be to them a sense of futility about it all, a timelessness. Storms that took a century or more to attain their full roaring maturity, such storms and the men who catalogued them must acquire a sort of affinity of spirit.
The slow stateliness was in his voice, too, as he bowed with a measure of grace, and said:
'Grand Captain, the Right Honourable Gloria Cecily, the Lady Laurr of Noble Laurr, I am honoured by your personal presence.'