"Frank Herbert - Whipping Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

"You will sit on floor," the Taprisiot said.

"Thank the immortals for that," Furuneo muttered. He'd once made a call where
the transmitter had led him to a mountainside in wind and driving rain and
made him stretch out, head lower than feet, before opening the overspace
contact. It had had something to do with "refining the embedment," whatever
that meant. He'd reported the incident to the Bureau's data center, where
they hoped one day to solve the Taprisiot secret, but the call had cost him
several weeks with an upper respiratory infection.

Furuneo sat.

Damn! The floor was cold!

Furuneo was a tall man, two meters in bare feet, eighty-four standard kilos.
His hair was black with a dusting of grey at the ears. He had a thick nose
and wide mouth with an oddly straight lower lip. He favored his left hip as
he sat. A disgruntled citizen had broken it during one of his early tours
with the Bureau. The injury defied all the medics who had told him, "It won't
bother you a bit after it's healed."
"Close eyes," the Taprisiot squeaked.

Furuneo obeyed, tried to squirm into a more comfortable position on the cold,
hard floor, gave it up.

"Think of contact," the Taprisiot ordered.

Furuneo thought of Jorj X. McKie, building the image in his mind -- squat
little man, angry red hair, face like a disgruntled frog.

Contact began with tendrils of cloying awareness. Furuneo became in his own
mind a red flow sung to the tune of a silver lyre. His body went remote.
Awareness rotated above a strange landscape. The sky was an infinite circle
with its horizon slowly turning. He sensed the stars engulfed in loneliness.

"What the ten million devils!"

The thought exploded across Furuneo. There was no evading it. He recognized
it at once. Contactees frequently resented the call. They couldn't reject
it, no matter what they were doing at the time, but they could make the caller
feel their displeasure.

"It never fails! It never fails!"

McKie would be jerked to full inner awareness now, his pineal gland ignited by
the long-distance contact.

Furuneo settled himself to wait out the curses. When they had subsided
sufficiently, he identified himself, said, "I regret any inconvenience I may
have caused, but the maxalert failed to say where you could be located. You