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

Cemp asked quickly, 'What is their overall purpose?'

'I don't know. But it's not what they said.... Oh please!' She was threshing in the water now, physically
disorganised. In a moment it would be noticed.

Cemp said hastily, 'Don't worry тАФ I'll help you. You have my word.'

Her name, he discovered, was Mensa. She said she was very beautiful in her breather form.

Cemp had already decided that since she might be useful, he would have to let himself be drawn into the
shark tank.

It was not obvious when it happened. One of the V's who was capable of energy output swam up
beside him. Simultaneously but casually the others fell back.

'This way,' said his guide.

Cemp followed. But it was several moments before he realised that he and his guide were on one side of
a transparent wall and the rest of the group was on the other.

He looked around for his companion. The V had dived down and was sliding into a cavern between two
rock formations.

Abruptly, the water around Cemp was plunged into pitch darkness.

He grew aware that the V's were hovering beyond the transparent walls. Cemp saw movement in the
swaying weeds тАФ shadows, shapes, the glint of an eye, the play of light on a grayish body... He switched
to another level of perception, based on shadow pictures, and grew alert for battle.

In his fish stage, Cemp could normally fight like a superelectric eel тАФ except that his energy discharge
was a beam requiring no actual contact. The beam had the bright flash of chain lightning and was strong
enough to kill a dozen sea monsters. It was formed outside his body, a confluence of two streams of
oppositely charged particles.

But this was not a normal time. The change in him was too imminent. Any fight with a denizen of this sea
in space would have to be with logic of levels, not with energy. He dared not waste any of his precious
store of energy.

Even as he made the decision, a shark swam lazily out of the jungle of waving fronds and just as lazily, or
so it seemed, came toward him turned on its side, and mouth open, teeth showing, slashed at him with its
enormous jaws.
 Cemp impressed a pattern on an energy wave that was passing through his brain toward the beast It was
a pattern that stimulated an extremely primitive mechanism in the shark тАФ the mechanism by which
pictures were created in the brain.

The shark had no defense against controlled over-stimulation of its picture-making ability. In a flash it
visualised its teeth closing on its victim and imagined a bloody struggle, followed by a feast. And then,
sated, stomach full, it imagined itself swimming back into the shadows, into the underwater forest in this
tiny segment of a huge spaceship cruiser near Jupiter.