"Gordon R. Dickson - The Cloak and the Staff" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

“I will accept your messages in an hour, no more, once I’ve come back. Do you understand what I have
just said to you?”

“I understand, untarnished sir,” said Shane.

“Until then, remain dutiful. But be comfortable.”

Laa Ehon led the way out of the room, Otah On close behind him. The Aalaag at the desk sat down
again and went back to his sheets.

Shane looked once more at the girl beyond the one way glass. She sat, unaware of what another hour
would bring. They would question her with chemicals, of course, first. But after that their methods would
become physical. There was no sadism in the Aalaag character. If any of the aliens had shown evidence
of such, his own people would have considered it an unfitting weakness and destroyed him for having it.
But it was understood that cattle might be induced to tell whatever they knew if they were subjected to
sufficient discomfort. An Aalaag, of course, was above any such persuasion. Death would come long
before any degree of discomfort could change the individual alien’s character enough to make him or her
say what they wished to keep unsaid.

Shane felt his robe clinging to his upper body, wet with a secret sweat. The woman sat almost in profile,
her blond hair down her shoulders, her surprisingly pale-skinned (for this latitude) face, smooth and
gentle-looking. She could not be more than barely into her twenties. He wanted to look away from her,
so that he could stop thinking about what was awaiting her, but—as it had happened to him a year ago
with the man on the triple hooks when he had first created the symbol—Shane could not make his head
turn.

He knew it now for what it was—a madness in him. A madness born of his own hidden revulsion against
and private terror of these massive humanoids who had descended to own the Earth. These were the
Masters he served, who kept him warm and well-fed when most of the rest of humanity chilled and ate
little, who patted him with condescending compliments—as if he was in fact the animal they called him,
the clever house pet ready to wag his tail for a kind glance or word. The fear of death was like an ingot
of cold iron inside him, when he thought of them; and the fear of a long and painful death was like that
same ingot with razor edges. But at the same time there was this madness—this madness that, if he did
not control it by some small actions, would explode and bring him to throw his dispatches in some Aalaag
face, to fling himself one day like a terrier against a tiger, at the throat of his Master, First Captain of
Earth, Lyt Ahn.

It was a real thing, that madness. Even the Aalaag knew of its existence in their conquered peoples.
There was even a word for it in their own tongue—yowaragh. Yowaragh had caused the man on the
hooks a year ago to make a hopeless attempt to defend his wife against what he had thought was an
Aalaag brutality. Yowaragh, every day, caused one human, at least somewhere in the world, to fling a
useless stick or stone against some shielded untouchable conqueror in a situation where escape was
impossible and destruction was certain. Yowaragh had knocked at the door of Shane’s brain once, a
year ago, threatening to break out. It was knocking again.

He could not help but look at her; and he could not bear to look at her—and the only alternative to an
end for both of them was to somehow keep it from happening—Laa Ehon’s return, the torture of the girl,
and the yowaragh that would lead to his own death.

In one hour, Laa Ehon had said, he would be back. Rivulets of perspiration were trickling down Shane’s