"Edmond Hamilton - Valley of Creation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

directly.
And it was not human. There was an alien quality in its vibration that set even his
dreaming mind bristling.
"No, Turk! You were to watch, not to kill! Not-yet!"
To Nelson the answering mental voice seemed human enough. But though it lacked the
uncannily alien quality of the first, it was chill, silvery, merciless.
He knew that he was dreaming. He knew that he lay here in the battle-wrecked frontier
village of Yen Shi, that he had drunk too much to forget the doom that stared him and his
companions in the face, that fatigue and too much liquor were doing this to him.
Yet it was creepily real, this swift, urgent dialogue of voices that only his mind could
hear. And again his nerves crawled at the non-human strangeness of the first voice.
"They should all die now, little sister! For he even now seeks them out, to hire them as
our foes! Ei has brought me word!"
"Turk, no! Watch only till I order-"
Nerve-tension snapped and Eric Nelson found himself scrambling up from his blankets,
staring wildly around the dark room.
A black flying shadow leaped for the open window and was gone as his blurred eyes
focused-a shadow that was not human!
With a strangled exclamation, Nelson lurched to the window, plucking the heavy pistol
from his belt.
Great wings flapped suddenly out there in the night, rapidly receeding. He leveled the
pistol but he could see nothing, and after a moment there were no more sounds.
Eric Nelson stood bewildered, his skin still creeping from the uncanny terror of the
experience. His brain was fogged by sleep and by the sick aftertaste of the previous night's
drinking.
Gradually his bristling nerves quieted. There was nothing out there in the dark-nothing
but the few blinking lights of the wretched mud village, cowering underneath the silent stars,
close beside the black wall of the great mountains that shouldered all the way to Tibet."
Dawn was coming. Nelson holstered his gun and ran his hands heavily over his
unshaven face. Waves of pain surged up through his eyeballs as he turned from the window.
"Too much to drink," he muttered. "No wonder I'm hearing-and seeing-things."
He made a deliberate effort to thrust down the uncanny strangeness of his experience,
to forget it. But he couldn't, quite.
It was not the mere fact of the voices that was so weird. The brain heard strange things
in dreams. It was the alien, somehow husky quality of that first voice that still shook him.
Nelson lit a clay oil-lamp. Its flickering rays and the growing light of dawn showed
nothing unusual hi the bare, squalid little room. He put on his uniform-jacket and went
through a door into the common-room of the
ALIEN DREAM 7
deserted inn. Three of his four fellow-officers were in the room.
Two of them, the big Dutchman, Piet Van Voss, and Lefty Wister, the spidery little
Cockney, were snoring in their bunks.
Nick Sloan, the third, stood shaving in front of a tiny steel mirror, his big body easily
balanced on firm-set feet, his flat, hard brown face looking coolly over his shoulder at
Nelson.
"I heard you yell in there," Sloan said. "Bad dream?"
Eric Nelson hesitated. "I don't know. There was something in the room. A shadow-"
"I'm not surprised," Sloan drawled unsympathetically. "You were pretty stiff last night."
Nelson was suddenly resentfully aware of the contrast of his disheveled figure and
tumbled blond hair with Sloan's competent neatness.