"Gordon R. Dickson - Time to Teleport" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

Eli looked back at the cubes. They looked identical, but of course they would not be. For a moment he
rolled them back and forth in his palm and then his hand closed over them.

"Let it go, Poby," he said. "But go back and wait for me in my office. I'm going to want you later."

"Yes, Eli," and the young courier slipped away. Kurt moved back into the vacated space.

Eli turned to the desk in front of him. In the polished black surface that winked back at him there was a
slot. He turned the cubes over in his fingers until he found on one of them a mark he was expecting. He
slipped this one into the slot.

There was a moment's pause and then from the high headrest of the chair a voice seemed to murmur in
Eli's ear.

"Eli: Everything is ready. Arthur Howell."

Eli nodded. He turned his attention back to the mysterious extra cube. For several seconds he sat,
turning it over before his eyes and thinking. Then he put it, also in the slot.

Again the pause.Then, this time, a deeper, familiar voice.

"Eli: You—"

Swiftly, but with decision, Eli stabbed at the disposal button on the desk. Before his eyes a little panel
flashed back and the new voice in his ears cut off as he watched, through a shielded transparency, the
two cubes tumble into a little recess where the flash of an electric arc consumed them. The small panel
snapped back again. Eli drew a deep breath and released the button, before turning his attention back
once more to the orating Veillain.

But Veillain had just about finished. He was winding up now on a graceful note and turning the floor over
to Sellars. Eli sat up; and by an effort of will forced the tiredness from him so that the council room
seemed to suddenly stand out sharp and bright, and the people within it to take on a new solidity, as if the
illumination of the amphitheater had suddenly been upped a notch. Veillain was sitting down and Tony
Sellars was rising.

He was a large man but his impressiveness did not lie in his size. He was, in fact, slab-bodied, with wide
shoulders, but a wide waist also—wide, but flat, for there was no fat on him. And he held himself stiffly
erect, so that he seemed to move all in one piece and bend, with difficulty, only at the waist, when he
bent at all. His body was the big-boned, serviceable carcass of the manual laborer—what would have
been called a peasant's body at one time in history. His tunic, kilt, and long, officialcapeofTransportation
blue, seemed to square him off, rather than lend him grace and dignity. He was in his late forties, with hair
untouched by gray and face unlined.

"All right," he said, laying his large, capable hands palm down on the desk before him. "My
underspokesman has given you the background. Now I'll give you the rest of it."

He paused, sweeping them all with his eyes; and his gaze, like his rough-hewn body and his dominant
voice, broadcast to them a sense of power and conviction that his way was right and his conclusions true.