"Williamson, Jack - 02 - The Humanoid Touch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

It would have been exciting to watch it hatch. The baby dragon would be too small to hurt anybody. And as lovely as the dark-shining egg, he thought, with glittering diamond wings.

Once he dreamed that it was really hatching while he held and warmed it in his hands. The thing that crawled out of the glassy shell wasn't a dragon; it was a black humanoid.

Another crawled after it, out of the broken shell, and then a hundred more. They crawled all over him, with clinging icy feet, and his terror of them froze him so that he couldn't move or scream. He was stiff and chilled and sweating in his berth when Nurse Vesh woke him.

He always shivered when he remembered that dream, but it had made the egg more strangely splendid than ever. He wondered for a long time if it could still be in his father's room. One day when he came in from his route the place was very still. He peeked behind the curtain and saw the red light winking. He listened and heard no sound. His father and Nurse Vesh were out.

His hand trembling, he touched the door.


2

Cat and Dragon Twin suns of the binary "runaway star" on whose planets the refugee colonists tried to escape from the humanoid universe.

The apartment was a branching cave, carved deep in solid rock. His father's room was off a long tunnel behind that faded tapestry, far at the back. It was very secret. That was why it was hidden, and why the gray steel door was so thick, and why the light winked to warn his father if it was ever disturbed or left unlocked.

He almost ran when the door swung open, but nothing else happened. He listened again, but all he could hear was his own thudding heart. He tiptoed inside to look for the dragon's egg.

The room seemed very small and bare. A desk with a holo- phone. A shelf stacked with huge old flatprint books. Blankets neatly folded on the narrow cot where his father slept. A rusty strongbox, with the painted oars of the Lifecrew peeling off the half-open door.

Breathless, he peered inside. Except for a few spilled quota tokens and a tall brown bottle, the strongbox was empty. The dragon's egg must have gone back to that museum. He was turning to slip away, when a picture stopped him.

A strange old flat picture, made with rough daubs of colored paint. The paint had faded, and the silver frame was tarnished black, but the man in the picture looked alive. Looked like his father.

The same black hair and the same straight nose. The same gray eyes, narrowed like his father's when his father was angry. But the man in the picture had a thick black beard, and one hand held a queer old projectile gun.

Nurse Vesh was teaching him to read, and he sounded out the symbols on the darkened silver. Kyrondath KyroneЧ

Kyrone! His breath came faster, because that was the name of the great new starship, and his own name too. He stood a long time looking, wishing he knew more about his father and the room and the humanoids.

He jumped when he heard somebody walking, but it was only Nurse Vesh, getting up from her nap. He scrambled out of the room and pulled the steel door carefully shut and went on wondering. Though she and his father never talked about the starship with his name, he heard more about it from the holo news and later from his history tapes.

The Kyrone had been in construction out in orbit as long as he could remember. It was to carry people to settle planets of the Dragon, which they hoped would be kinder worlds than Kai and Malili. Later that year, it was ready for the flight. Nobody said that it might meet dragons, but his father tried to stop it.

One day at lunch Nurse Vesh had the holo news on and he heard his father speaking to a meeting. The flight had to be halted, his father said, because the fusion engines would have a rhodomagnetic effect. The humanoids might detect that and find the people who had fled from them to the worlds of the Cat.

Captain Vorn followed his father on the holo, laughing at such fears. The Cat and the Dragon were moving too fast, and the humanoids had been left a thousand years behind. Foolish fears had kept people trapped too long on Kai and Malili. The time had come for another bold escape.

He liked the look of Captain Vorn. A tall, lean man with cool, blue eyes and a quick, brown smile, not afraid of anything. When he spoke next day, his daughter Chelni was with him. She was a sturdy little girl with straight black hair and a stubborn chin. He saw they were fond of each other. He never forgot them.

Or the man with golden hands.

Bosun Brong, his name was. He had come from Malili to be an engineer on the starship. The newsmen said he had been exposed to bloodrot outside the Zone and lost his natural hands. The metal hands were shining golden levers, graceful and powerful. The holo showed them bending steel.

In spite of his father, the building of the ship went on. He used to wish that he had been aboard. Sometimes he dreamed of the happy new worlds the colonists would find. Happy there, they would never be hungry or cold. Far from sinister Malili, they needn't fear the humanoids.

For half a year, the holo carried news of the flight. When Vorn reached the Dragon, he found seven planets. The inner worlds were too hot and dry, and the outer ones were cold gas giants, but one in between looked fit for people.

The first lander went down toward it, and everybody waited to hear what the pioneers reported. They never did report. All signals simply stopped. The newsmen couldn't guess what had happened. One Bridgeman wanted to send a rescue expedition, but the Navarch said it would take too long to build another starship.