"2 The Alien Within" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bova Ben)

Jo said, "I have a videotaped presentation from Dr. Healy and several of his staff members. ..."

"But he's actually awake and doing well?" asked one of the older board members, a heavyset, red-faced man who had received a heart transplant several years earlier.

"Yes," Jo said, not allowing herself to smile. "He is alive and as healthy as he was eighteen years ago. As far as the medical tests can ascertain, he has not suffered any detectable damage from being frozen."

She touched a button on the keypad in front of her with a manicured finger. The overhead lights dimmed slightly, and the wall to her left became a three-dimensional video screen. Everyone around the table turned to see.

Keith Stoner stood before them, life-sized and naked.

"This is when he first woke up," Jo told them.

One of the women board members whispered something. Jo could not catch the words, but the tone was carnal.

Stoner's image was quickly replaced by Healy's. The corporation's chief scientist began to explain, with charts and graphs, that Stoner's physical condition was so close to his condition as recorded eighteen years ago that the differences were undetectable. Then Richards, the psychiatrist, appeared and said that although Stoner's reactions appeared normal, he needed further study to "get deeper into the subject."

A male voice rumbled in the semidarkness, "The shrink's gay, is that it?"

"Maybe he's fallen in love with his patient," someone replied.

A few scattered laughs, most of them self-conscious.

The screen now showed Richards and Stoner strolling together along the grounds behind the building where Stoner was being kept. No walls or fences were in sight, only brightly flowering shrubs of hibiscus and oleander, which hid the lasers and electronic sensors of the security system. The area looked like a university quadrangle, bounded by multistory glass-and-chrome laboratory buildings. But no stranger or lab employee could get within a hundred yards of the carefully screened area where Richards and Stoner walked.

While the board members eavesdropped on their conversation, Jo sank back in her chair and studied Keith Stoner's handsome face. He had not changed at all. Or had he? His eyes seemed different, somehow. Nothing she could put her finger on, but different.

She had read every word of every transcript of every conversation Keith had taken part in. Not once had he asked about Jo Camerata. Not once had he spoken of the nights they had shared together, so long ago.

She turned slightly in her chair and saw her husband. He was not watching the screen. He was staring directly at her.

The videotape ended and the ceiling lights automatically came back up to full brightness as the screen turned opaque once more.

Jo tore her gaze away from Nillson's deathly pale eyes.

"Stoner appears perfectly willing to cooperate with us," she told the board. Then she added, "For the time being."

"What do you mean?"

"Sooner or later he's going to want to get out of our lab complex. He's going to want to see the world--after all, for him it's a new world. He's been asleep for eighteen years."

"He's much too important to let go," said the corporation's executive vice-president, a vigorous-looking man in his early forties, tanned and athletically trim.

"He's a vital asset," agreed the older woman sitting next to him.

"We've invested an enormous amount of money in this program," the corporation's treasurer added, waving his black cigar. "He can't just go wandering off where we can't keep him under study."

"What about the publicity aspects of this project?" Nillson asked, looking down the table to the new director of corporate public relations.

She was a stunningly beautiful Oriental, more than ten years younger than Jo. A face of hauntingly fragile delicacy, almost childlike except for the knowing eyes. A childlike body, too, slim and boyish, which Jo knew attracted her husband more than her own womanly figure. She was a protege of Archie Madigan's. By rights she should not have been sitting in on a board meeting; but the chairman had invited her, and Jo knew better than to argue the point.