"Arcady And Boris Strugatsky. Prisoners of Power" - читать интересную книгу автораagainst the wall. He could see two of them holding Rada by the arms. The one
with the cane went up to her, shifted the cane to his left hand, and raising his right with a deliberate motion, struck her on the cheek. Maxim lost all sense of reality. Something clicked in his brain and the people vanished. Only he and Rada were there. No one else. Near them dangerous animals stamped clumsily through the mud. City, archway, naked bulb - all were gone. For him there were only the impassable mountains in the Land of Oz-on-Pandora. And a cave, a trap set by naked apes. And a pale, yellow, apathetic moon looking into the cave. He had to fight for his life. And now he began to fight as he had fought then on Pandora. Time slowed down obediently. Seconds became hours, and during the span of a single second he could perform many maneuvers, deliver many blows, and see all his adversaries simultaneously. The animals were not very agile. They were used to tangling with another kind of beast. They didn't have time to realize that they had chosen the wrong victim and that it would have been wiser to run away. They tried to fight. Maxim seized one of the animals by the jaw, yanked up its pliant head, and chopped its pale pulsating neck with the edge of his hand. Instantly he turned to the next one and grabbed, jerked, and chopped, in a cloud of stinking, predatory breathing, in the cave's echoing silence, in the yellow, dripping semidarkness. Dirty crooked claws tore at his neck and slid off; yellow fangs sank deep into his shoulder and slid off. Now he was alone. Their leader was rushing toward the cave's exit with his club because he, like all leaders, possessed the sharpest reflexes and was the first to realize what was happening. For an instant, Maxim felt and their fleet leader had scarcely moved his legs when Maxim, slipping between the seconds, caught up with him. Maxim hacked him on the run and halted. Time resumed its normal flow again: the cave was now an archway; the moon, a bare bulb; and the Land of Oz-on-Pandora, an enigmatic city on an enigmatic planet. Even more enigmatic than Pandora. Maxim stood there, resting. The leader crawled about painfully on the ground. Blood trickled from Maxim's wounded shoulder. Sobbing, Rada took his hand and ran his palm across her wet face. He looked around; bodies lay like sacks on the dirty concrete. Mechanically, he counted them. Six, including the leader; two, he thought, had managed to escape. Rada's touch felt indescribably pleasant, and he knew that he had taken the proper course; he had done what had to be done. No more, no less. He didn't bother to pursue those who had escaped, although he could have overtaken them easily. Even now he could hear their heels clicking at the end of the street. The ones who had failed to escape lay on the ground; some would die, and some were already dead. These, he realized, were people, too, not apes or armored wolves, although their breath was foul, their touch dirty, and their thoughts repulsive and predatory .He felt a certain regret, sensed that he had lost something, something fine and pure, a part of his soul, and he realized that the old Maxim had disappeared forever. In spite of this loss, he felt a kind of strange pride stirring within him. "Let's go, Maxim," Rada said quietly. He followed her submissively. |
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