"A. E. Van Vogt - The Rat & the Snake & Other Stories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Vogt A E)

earthlike scene that spread before him. It made him feel better, vaguely.
He jumped abruptly down to the ground and began to walk toward the
nearest hilltop. Darkness was falling rapidly but it did not occur to him
to turn back.
Soon the ship was lost in the night behind him.
A girlfriend of his youth was the first to talk to him. She came out
of the blackness. and they had a long conversation. In the end they
decided to marry
The ceremony was immediately completed by a minister who drove up in
a car and found both families assembled in a beautiful home in the suburbs
of Pittsburgh. The clergyman was an old man whom Hart had known in his
childhood.
The young couple went to New York City and to Niagara Falls for their
honeymoon, then headed by aere-taxi for California to make their home.
Suddenly there were three children, and they owned a hundred-thousand-acre
ranch with a million cattle on it, and there were cowboys who dressed like
movie stars,
For Grayson, the civilization that sprang into full-grown existence
around him on what had originally been a barren, airless planet had
nightmarish qualities. The people he met had a life expectancy of less
than seventy years. Children were born in nine months and ten days after
conception.
He buried six generations of one family that he had founded. And
then, one day as he was crossing Broadway - in New York City - the small
sturdiness, the walk, and the manner of a man coming from the opposite
direction made him stop short.
"Henry!" he shouted. "Henry Malkins!"
"Well, I'll be - Bill Grayson."
They shook hands, silent afler the first excited greeting. Malkins
spoke first. "There's a bar around the corner."
During the middle of the second drink John Hart's name came up.
 "A life force seeking form used his mind' said Grayson
matter-of-factly. "It apparently has no expression of its own. It tried to
use me -" He glanced at Malkins questioningly.
The other man nodded. "And me!" he said,
"I guess we resisted too hard."
Malkins wiped the perspiration from his forehead. "Bill," he said,
"it's all like a dream. I get married and divorced every forty years. I
marry what seems to be a twenty-year-old girl. In a few decades she looks
five hundred."
"Do you think it's all in our minds?"
"No no-nothing like that. I think all this civilization extsts -
whatever I mean by existence." Malkins groaned. "Let's not get into that.
When I read some of the philosophy explaining life, I feel as if I'm on
the edge of an abyss. If only we could get rid of Hart, somehow."
Grayson was smiling grimly. "So you haven't found out yet?"
"What do you mean?"
"Have you got a weapon on you?"
Silently, Malkius produced a needle-beam projector. Grayson took it,
pointed it at his own right temple, and pressad the curved firing pin - as