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

"The babies are due soon," he said. "I just got a message."
"How many?" asked the senior.
"Three—the doctor thinks. That's not bad for a first birthing."
"My wife only had two."
"I know. You told me."
They fell silent for a few seconds. The spaceboat rocked almost imperceptibly in the waters of
night.
"Look—" said the junior, suddenly. "Here it comes, right on schedule."
The senior glanced overside. Down below, a tall, dark form had emerged from the trees and was
coming put along the path. A little beam of light shone before him, terminating in a blob of illumination
that danced along the path ahead, lighting his way. The senior stiffened.
"Take controls," he said. The casualness had gone out of his voice. It had become crisp,
impersonal.
"Controls," answered the other, in the same emotionless voice.
"Take her down."
"Down it is."
The spaceboat dropped groundward. There was an odd sort of soundless, lightless explosion—it
was as if concussive wave had passed, robbed of all effects but one. The figure dropped, the light rolling
from its grasp and losing its glow in a tangle of short grass. The spaceboat landed and the two aliens got
out.
In the dark night they loomed furrily above the still figure. It was that of a lean, dark man in his early
thirties, dressed in clean, much-washed corduroy pants and checkered wool lumberjack shirt. He was
unconscious, but breathing slowly, deeply and easily.
"I'll take it up by the head, here," said the senior. "You take the other end. Got it? Lift! Now, carry
it into the boat."
The junior backed away, up through the spaceboat's open lock, grunting a little with the
awkwardness of his burden.
"It feels slimy," he said.
"Nonsense!" said the senior. "That's your imagination."
Eldridge Timothy Parker drifted in that dreamy limbo between awakeness and full sleep. He found
himself contemplating his own name.
Eldridge Timothy Parker. Eldridgetimothyparker. Eldridge TIMOTHYparker. ELdrlDGEtiMOthy
PARKer——
There was a hardness under his back, the back on which he was lying—and a coolness. His flaccid
right hand turned flat, feeling. It felt like steel beneath him. Metal? He tried to sit up and bumped his
forehead against a ceiling a few inches overhead. He blinked his eyes in the darkness—
Darkness?
He flung out his hands, searching, feeling terror leap up inside him. His knuckles bruised against
walls to right and left. Frantic, his groping fingers felt out, around and about him. He was walled in, he
was surrounded, he was enclosed.
Completely.
Like in a coffin.
 Buried—
He began to scream. . . .
***
Much later, when he awoke again, he was in a strange place that seemed to have no walls, but
many instruments. He floated in the center of mechanisms that passed and re-passed about him,
touching, probing, turning. He felt touches of heat and cold. Strange hums and notes of various pitches
came and went. He felt voices questioning him.
Who are you?