"Blish, James - Skysign" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

James Blish

SKYSIGN


CONTENTS


I, II, III, IV, V, VI


Und ein Schiff mit acht Segeln
Und mit fьnfzig Kanonen
Wird entschwinden mit mir.'
Pirate-Jenny: The Threepenny Opera.

I


Carl Wade came back to consciousness slowly and with a dull headachy feeling, as though fighting off a barbiturate hangover - as under the circumstances was quite possible. He remembered right away that he had been one of the people who had volunteered to go aboard the alien spaceship which had been hanging motionless over San Francisco for the last month. The 'lay volunteer', the Pentagon men had insultingly called him. And it was likely that the aliens would have drugged him, because to them, after all, he was only a specimen, and therefore possibly dangerous


But that didn't seem quite right. Somehow, he could not bring his memory into focus. He hadn't actually been taken aboard the ship, as far as he could recall. On the night before he had been supposed to join the volunteer group, in honour of his own approaching martyrdom (as he liked to think of it) he and some friends from the local Hobbit Society, including the new girl, had cycled up to Telegraph Hill to take a look at the great ship. But it had only just continued to hang there, showing no lights, no motion, no activity of any kind except a faint Moon-highlight, as had been the case ever since it had first popped into view in the skies over Berkeley - it responded only to the answers to its own radio messages, only to answers, never to questions - and the club had quickly gotten bored with it.


And then what? Had they all gone off and gotten drunk? Had he managed to get the new girl to bed and was now about to have one of those morning-afters beside her? Or was he in a cell as an aftermath of a brawl?


No one of these ideas evoked any echo in his memory except old ones; and a persistent hunch that he was on the spaceship, all the same discouraged him from opening his eyes yet. He wondered what insanity had ever led him to volunteer, and what even greater insanity had led the Pentagon people to choose him over all other saucerites and other space nuts.


A vague clink of sound, subdued and metallic caught his attention. He couldn't identify it, but somehow it sounded surgical. As far as it went, this matched with the quiet around him, the clean coolness of the air, and the unrumpled, also apparently clean pallet he seemed to be lying on. He was neither in a jail nor in the pad of anybody he knew. On the other hand, he didn't feel ill enough to be in hospital ward; just a little drugged. The college infirmary? No, nonsense, he'd been thrown out of college last year.


In short, he must be on the ship, simply because this must be the day after yesterday. The thought made him squeeze his eyes still tighter shut. A moment later, further speculation was cut off by a feminine voice, unknown to him, and both pleasantly sexy and unpleasantly self-possessed, but obviously human. It said:


'I see you've given us his language, rather than him ours.'


'It cops out on - rules out - avoids - obviates making everyone else on board guard their tongues,' a man's voice replied. 'Man, I really had to dig for that one. He's got a constipated vocabulary; knows words, but hates them.'


'That's helpful, too,' the woman's voice responded. 'If he can't address himself precisely, it'll matter less what we say to him.'


Man, Carl thought, if I ever get that chick where I want her, I'll sell chances on her to wetbacks. But she was still talking: