"Gordon R. Dickson - Danger-Human" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

be more dangerous than you seem, but to impress you with your
helplessness so that you may be more ready to help us. Here you are, and
here you will stay."
"And you think," demanded Eldridge hoarsely, "that this's all going to
make me want to help you?"
"Yes," said the doctor, "because there's one thing more that enters into
the situation. You were literally taken apart physically, after your capture;
and as literally put back together again. We are advanced in the organic
field, and certain things are true of all life forms. I supervised the work on
you, myself. You will find that you are, for all practical purposes immortal
and irretrievably sane. This will be your home forever, and you will find
that neither death nor insanity will provide you a way of escape."
They turned and filed out. From some remote control, the cage door
was swung shut. He heard it click and lock. The bridge was withdrawn
from the moat. A screen lit up and a woolly face surveyed the building's
interior.
The building's door opened. They went out; and the guards took up
their patrol, around the rim in opposite directions, keeping their eyes on
Eldridge and their weapons ready in their hands. The building's door
closed again. Outside, the flickering wall blinked out for a second and then
returned again.
The silence of a warm, summer, mountain afternoon descended upon
the building. The footsteps of the guards made shuffling noises on their
path around the rim. The bars enclosed him.
Eldridge stood still, holding the bars in both hands and looking out.
He could not believe it.


He could not believe it as the days piled up into weeks and the weeks
into months. But as the seasons shifted and the year came around to a
new year, the realities of his situation began to soak into him like water
into a length of dock piling. For outside, Time could be seen at its visible
and regular motion; but in his prison, there was no Time.
Always, the lights burned overhead, always the guards paced about him.
Always the barrier burned beyond the building, the meals came swinging
in on the end of a long metal arm extended over the moat and through a
small hatchway which opened automatically as the arm approached;
regularly, twice weekly, the doctor came and checked him over, briefly,
impersonally-and went out again with the changing of the guard.
He felt the unbearableness of his situation, like a hand winding tighter
and tighter day by day the spring of tension within him. He took to pacing
feverishly up and down the cage. He went back and forth, back and forth,
until the room swam. He lay awake nights, staring at the endless glow of
illumination from the ceiling. He rose to pace again.
The doctor came and examined him. He talked to Eldridge, but
Eldridge would not answer. Finally there came a day when everything split
wide open and he began to howl and bang on the bars. The guards were
frightened and called the doctor. The doctor came, and with two others,
entered the cage and strapped him down. They did something odd that
hurt at the back of his neck and he passed out.