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

'But what's he faking for, Brand? He's obviously wide awake.'


At this Carl opened his eyes and mouth to protest indignantly that he wasn't faking, realized his mistake, tried to close both again, and found himself gasping and goggling instead.


He could not see the woman, but the man called Brand was standing directly over him, looking down into his face. Brand looked like a robot - no; remembering the man's snotty remark about his vocabulary, Carl corrected himself: He looked like a fine silver statue, or like a silver version of Talos, the Man of Brass (and wouldn't Carl's damned faculty advisor have been surprised at how fast he'd come up with that one!). The metal shone brilliantly in the blue light of the surgery-like room, but did not look like plate metal. It did not look hard at all. When Brand moved, it flowed with the movement of the muscles under it, like skin.


Yet somehow Carl was dead sure that it wasn't skin, but clothing of some sort. Between the metallic eye-slits, the man's eyes were brown and human, and Carl could even see the faint webbing of blood-vessels in their whites. Also, when he spoke, the inside of his mouth was normal mucous membrane - black like a chow's mouth instead of red, but certainly not metal. On the other hand, the mouth, disconcertingly, vanished entirely when it was closed, and so did the eyes when they clinked; the metal flowed together as instantly as it parted.


"That's better,' the man said. 'Check his responses, Lavelle. He still looks a little dopey. Damn this language.'


He turned away and the woman - her name had certainly sounded like Lavelle - came into view, obviously in no hurry. She was metallic, too, but her metal was black, though her eyes were grey-green. The integument was exceedingly like a skin, yet seeing her Carl was even more convinced that it was either clothing or a body-mask, for there was nothing at all to see where Carl instantly looked. Also, he noticed a moment later, either she had had no hair or else her skull cap - if that was what she wore -was very tight, a point that hadn't occurred to him while looking at the man.


She took Carl's pulse, and then looked expertly under his upper eyelids. 'Slight fugue, that's all,' she said with a startling pink flash of tongue. Yet not quite so startling as Brand's speaking had been, since a pink mouth in a black face was closer to Carl's experience than was any sort of mouth in a silver face.'He can go down to the cages any time.'


Cages?


'Demonstration first,' Brand, now out of sight again, said in an abstracted voice. Carl chanced moving his head slightly and found that his horizon headache was actually a faint one-side earache, which made no sense to him at all. The movement also showed him the dimensions of the room, which was no larger than an ordinary living room - maybe 12' by 13' - and painted an off-white. There was also some electronicapparatus here and there, but no more than Carl had seen in the pads of some hi-fi bugs he knew, and to his eyes not much more interesting. In a corner was a dropdown bunk, evidently duplicating the one he now occupied. Over an oval metal door - the only ship-like feature he could see - was a dial-face like that of a huge barometer or clock, its figures too small to read from where he lay, and much too closely spaced too.


Brand reappeared. After a moment, the shining black woman called Lavelle took up a position a few feet behind him and to his left.


'I want to show you something,' the man said to Carl. 'You can see just by looking at us that it would do you no good to jump us - to attack us. Do you dig - do you understand that?'


'Sure,' Carl said, rather more eagerly than he had intended. As a first word, it wasn't a very good one.


'All right.' Brand put both his hands on his hips, just below his waist, and seemed to brace himself slightly. 'But there's a lot more to it than you see at the moment. Watch closely.'


Instantly the silver man and Lavelle changed places. It happened so suddenly and without any transition that for a second Carl failed to register what he was supposed to have noticed. Neither of the two metal people had moved in the slightest. They were just each one standing where the other one had been standing before.


'Now -' the man said.


At once, he was back where he had been, but the gleaming black woman - man, that outfit was sexy! - was standing far back, by the oval door. Again, there'd been not a whisper or hint of any motion in the room.


'And once more -'