"Robert F. Young - Neither Stairs Nor Door" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

The tower lay in the midst of the forest, and though
the peasant girl's eyes were wide with fright
and mystery, she could see it had ...


neither stairs nor door

FRAU Schnabel did not see the spaceship land, nor did she see it blast off. If she had witnessed
either occurrence, the romantic tale which she was to tell later onтАФthe true source of which has only
recently come to lightтАФwould probably never have been related; for a person's perspective is arbitrarily
governed by his thought-world, and while Frau Schnabel had no trouble interpreting what she did see,
Newton's third law of dynamics in action would undoubtedly have posed a problem much too complex
for her medieval mind to cope with.
Strictly speaking, the spaceship wasn't really a spaceshipтАФit was, in the gobbledygook of the
Metennabulite navy, a ship-to-planet-planet-to-ship contact-vehicle, and compared to its orbiting
mother-ship, it was a very small fish in the pond indeed. But to Frau, Schnabel, when she first set eyes on
it, it looked as large as a houseтАФor, to be more exact, a tower. The circumstances leading up to this
memorable moment are worth examining.
"Mother" had wandered far from her native shore, consuming, in the process, much of her food
supply, and her larder was badly in need of replenishing. Her captain, consequently, had put in to the
system nearest her trajectory, and established her in orbit around the planet with the highest
uranium-content readingтАФthe third one out from the sun. Not long thereafter, her matter-detector
registered a rich pitchblende deposit on one of the planet's larger continents, and a STPPTSCV was
immediately sent down, with a crew of one, for the purpose of pinpointing the part of the deposit that
contained the maximum amount of uranium oxide. Once the proper co-ordinates were relayed back, a
transfer-beam would be directed upon the area and the uranium oxide would be extracted and
transmitted simultaneously.
The "crew of one" was named Anaxel, and by Metennabulite standards, he was an ordinary enough
individual. In common with most Metennabulite males, he was tall, noble of mien, had regular features
and curly brown hair; and, in common with his fellow crew-members, he wore the regulation
Metennabulite navy uniform, attire consisting of a white coat-blouse, pale-blue, jodhpur-like trousers,
and gilt leather boots. He knew his job and he knew it well, and the STPPTSCV had no sooner settled
on its metal haunches in the clearing of a small forest than he set about accomplishing his mission. First he
donned his communicator-helmetтАФa tiara-like affair comprised of an intricate network of silvery
wiresтАФthen he disengaged the lock and stepped into the stirrup of the boarding cable. The cable
lowered him gently from the lofty lock to the ground, withdrew like a lazy golden serpent when he
released it. Finally he set forth into the forest, his eyes flicking every now and then to his uranium
detector, which was inset in a gold ring on the index finger of his right hand and which looked for all the
world like a large and resplendent ruby.

HE ranged far and wide, but it was not till late in the afternoon, when he was on his way back to the
ship, that the detector began emitting the series of flashes he was waiting for. After rotating the ring
several times, he set off in the direction that evoked the most rapid reaction, his eyes focused on the
detector. So great was his absorption in his task that, arriving in a small clearing, he failed to see the
young woman who was kneeling in the middle of a bed of blue flowers till he was on the verge of tripping
over her. She failed to see him too at first, so busily engaged was she in pulling up the flowers and
nibbling away at their roots, and when she finally did become aware of him and looked up, startled, from
her quaint repast, his knee was only inches away from her nose.
She was round-faced and flaxen-haired, and she had the biggest blue eyes that Anaxel had ever
seen. They proceeded to grow even bigger, and for an alarmed moment he was afraid that they were