"Robert Sheckley. The Day The Aliens Came (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

"Not at all," Rimb said. "I called him that in honor of your species."
"How do you figure?" I asked.
"The derivation is obvious. 'Manny' stands for 'Little Man'."
"That's not the way we generally do things around here, "I told her. But she
didn't understand what I was talking about. Nor did I understand her
explanation of the birth process by which Manny came into being. DDs,
Deferred Deliveries, aren't customary among Earth people. As far as I could
understand it, Rimb would have to undergo the actual delivery at some later
time when it was more convenient. But in fact we never got around to it.
Sometimes it happens like that.
Manny lay in his crib and ooed and aahed and acted like a human baby would, I
suppose. I was a pretty proud poppa. Rimb and I were one of the first viable
human-alien intermatings. I later learned it was no big deal. People all over
the Earth were doing it. But it seemed important to us at the time.
Various neighbors came around to see the baby. The Bayersons came in from their
new room which they had plastered on the side of apartment house after after
molting. Mrs. Bayerson had spun all the construction material out of her own
mouth, and she was some kind of proud I want to tell you. They looked Manny up
and down and said, "Looks like a good one."
They offered to baby-sit, but we didn't like to leave Manny alone with them. We
still didn't have a reliable report on their feeding habits. Fact is, it was
taking a long time getting any hard facts about aliens, even though the federal
government had decided to make all information available on the species that
came to Earth.
The presence of aliens among us was responsible for the next step in human
development, the new interest in composite living. You got tired of the same old
individualism after a while. Rimb and I thought it could be interesting to be
part of something else. We wanted to join a creature like a medusa or Portuguese
man of war. But we weren't sure how to go about it. And so we didn't know
whether to be pleased or alarmed when we received our notification by mail of
our election to an alien composite life-form. Becoming part of a composite was
still unusual in those days.
Rimb and I had quite a discussion about it. We finally decided to go to the
first meeting, which was free, and see what it was like.
This meeting was held at our local Unitarian Church, and there were almost two
hundred people and aliens present. There was a lot of good-natured bewilderment
for a while as to just what we were supposed to do. We were all novices at this
and just couldn't believe that we were expected to form up a two hundred person
composite without prior training.
At last someone in a scarlet blazer and carrying a loose-leaf binder showed up
and told us that we were supposed to be forming five unit composites first, and
that as soon as we had a few dozen of these and had gotten the hang of morphing
and melding, we could proceed to the second level of composite beinghood.
It was only then that we realized that there could be many levels to composite
beings, each level being a discrete composite in its own right.
Luckily the Unitarian Church had a big open space in the basement, and here is
where we and our chimaeric partners fit ourselves together.
There was good-natured bewilderment at first as we tried to perform this
process. Most of us had had no experience at fitting ourselves to other
creatures, so we were unfamiliar with for example, the Englen, that organ of the