"C M Kornbluth - Friend To Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

He felt that he bulged with the stuff when he stopped, and knew the first uneasy intimations of inevitable
cramp. The native was not moving, but something that could have been an eye turned on rnm.



"Salt?" asked Smith, his voice thin in the thin air. "I need salt with water."



The thing rubbed two appendages together and he saw a drop of amber exude and spread on them. It
was, he realized a moment later, rosining the bow, for the appendages drew across each other and he
heard a whining, vibrating cricket-voice say: "S-s-z-z-aw-w?"



"Salt," said Smith.



It did better the next time. The amber drop spread, and—"S-z-aw-t?" was sounded, with a little tap of
the bow for the final phoneme.



It vanished, and Smith leaned back with the cramps beginning. His stomach convulsed and he lost the
water he had drunk. It seeped without a trace into the floor. He doubled up and groaned—once. The
groan had not eased him in body or mind; he would groan no more but let the cramps run their course.
 Nothing but what is useful had always been his tacit motto. There had not been a false step in the
episode of Amy. When Square-Jaw had been disposed of, Smith had waited until her father, perhaps
worldly enough to know his game, certain at all events not to like the way he played it, left on one of his
regular inspection trips. He had been formally introduced to her by a mutual friend who owed money to a
dangerous man in the Quarter, but who had not yet been found out by the tight little clique that thought it
ruled the commercial world of that planet.



With precision he had initiated her into the Open Quarter by such easy stages that at no one point could
she ever suddenly realize that she was in it or the gray eyes ever fill with shock. Smith had, unknown to
her, disposed of some of her friends, chosen other new ones, stage-managed entire days for her, gently
forcing opinions and attitudes, insistent, withdrawing at the slightest token of counter-pressure, always
urging again when the counter-pressure relaxed.



The night she had taken Optol had been prepared for by a magazine article—notorious in the profession
as a whitewash—a chance conversation in which chance did not figure at all, a televised lecture on
addiction, and a trip to an Optol joint at which everybody had been gay and healthy. On the second visit,
Amy had pleaded for the stuff—just out of curiosity, of course, and he had reluctantly called the
unfrocked medic, who injected the gray eyes with the oil.