"Jack Vance - The Last Castle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vance Jack)

gained by trepidation, Xanten thrust the door aside and
entered.
The offices were empty. The desks, where centuries before
underlings had sat, calculating invoices and bills of lading,
were bare, polished, free of dust. The computers and informa-
tion banks, black enamel, glass, white and red switches,
looked as if they had been installed only the day before.
Xanten crossed to the glass pane overlooking the hangar
floor, shadowed under the bulk of the ship.
He saw no Meks. But on the floor of the hangar, arranged
in neat rows and heaps, were elements and assemblies of the
ship's control mechanism. Service panels gaped wide into the
hull to show where the devices had been detached.
Xanten stepped from the office out into the hangar. The
spaceship had been disabled, put out of commission. Xanten
looked along the neat rows of parts. Certain savants of
various castles were expert in the theory of space-time
transfer; S. X. Rosenhox of Maraval had even derived a set of
equations which, if translated into machinery, eliminated the
troublesome Hamus Effect. But not one gentleman, even were
he so oblivious to personal honor as to touch a hand to a tool,
would know how to replace, connect and tune the mecha-
nisms heaped upon the hangar floor.
When had the malicious work been done? Impossible to
say.
Xanten returned to the office, stepped back out into the
twilight, walked to the next hangar. Again no Meks; again the
spaceship had been gutted of its control mechanisms. Xanten
proceeded to the third hangar, where conditions were the
same.
At the fourth hangar he discerned the faint sounds of
activity. Stepping into the office, looking through the glass
wall into the hangar, he found Meks working with their usual
economy of motion, in a near silence which was uncanny.
Xanten, already uncomfortable because of skulking
through the forest, became enraged by the cool destruction of
his property. He strode forth into the hangar. Slapping his
thigh to attract attendon he called in a harsh voice, "Return
the components to place! How dare you vermin act in such a
manner?"
The Meks turned about their blank countenances, studied
him through black beaded lensclusters at each side of their
' heads.
"What?" Xanten bellowed. "You hesitate?" He brought
forth his steel whip, usually more of a symbolic adjunct than
a punitive instrument, and slashed it against the ground.
"Obey! This ridiculous revolt is at its end!"
The Meks still hesitated, and events wavered in the balance.
None made a sound, though messages were passing among
them, appraising the circumstances, establishing a consensus.