"Chapter 18" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gordon Dickson - Forever Man)

CH A P T E R

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"IT'S NOT DEAD, IS IT?" ASKED MARY.
"No," said Jim, "just sleeping. These squonks must go to sleep wherever the mood strikes them. Come to think of it, I'll bet the Laagi do, too-sometimes anyway. Remember the ones we saw near the entrance that had their legs, arms and heads all pulled in and were just sitting there like a cylinder on the floor?"
"But what makes you so certain it's sleep and not something else?"
"Because it's dreaming."
"Dreaming?" Mary hesitated. "You mean literally dreaming, the way you and I dream?"
"That's right. I can catch parts of it. It's like looking at a
crazy recording made up of snippets from half a hundred dif
ferent records."
"I wish I could reach the creature with my mind the way you do!" Mary said. "What's it dreaming about? Can you see what its dreams are?"
"If I try," said Jim. "Look, why don't you not say anything for a while, so I can concentrate on this? What it's dreaming about is clear enough; it's just that I have to concentrate all my
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mind to really see it. Not that any of it's so remarkable. All the dreams are about work."
"Work?"
"Work. Now, if you'll let me=
"Sorry. Go ahead."
Mary fell silent.
Jim had been telling almost the complete truth. It was true that he had to concentrate in order to experience at second hand what Squonk was dreaming. But a deeper reason for his wanting Mary not to disturb him was that he wanted time to evaluate anything to be learned from the dreams, so that he could decide whether it might pay him to keep the knowledge to himself or not. The insult might have lost its force, but he was still determined to get away from the hold Mary had on him, if only to prove he could.
Squonk's dreams had a quality as alien as the creature itself. It occurred to Jim after some minutes that they might not be dreams in the human sense so much as some sort of sorting or memorizing process. But there was no doubt that they were, to say the least, pleasant to the dreamer. There was an emotion of strong satisfaction emanating from Squonk.
But the dreams were hardly more than flashes of episodes. Squonk cleaning AndFriend. Squonk cleaning the outer walls of a building. Squonk cleaning the pavement outside AndFriend, then carrying assemblages of parts from this floor to upper floors of this building. Squonk running a machine which cut segments from a living, green, flat creature; segments which Squonk and other squonks took out and laid down between newly built buildings to grow into pathways of the sort that it had traversed in coming to this building. Squonk hunting for something a Laagi had misplaced, a small part which was needed to fit in with other parts . . .
Interestingly, Squonk did not dream about being praised, either by the Laagi he had encountered on his way to this job or Jim's praising. In the dreams, however, there appeared at least three other Laagis who had put it to work at various things at various times. Jim got the impression Squonk would take orders from any Laagi. In fact, the relationship between Squonk and Laagi might be a lot less like the canine-human relationship Jim had been comparing it to.
But it was undeniable that Squonk existed here for the pur-


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pose of taking orders from Laagi. In fact, it was eager to do so. The kind of work did not seem to matter. It was the fact that there was work available that was the attractive thing from Squonk's point of view.