"Murray Leinster - Four from Planet 05" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

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Copyright @ Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1959

First published in the United States
by Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1959

White Lion edition, 1974

1SBN085617 338X

Made and printed in
Great Britain
for White Lion Publishers Limited

R. Kingshott & Co.Ltd., Deadbrook Lane, Aldershot, Hampshire
1.

THE WORLD was remarkably normal when the thing began. For some days past Soames had reminded
himself frequently that things in general were unchanged. He'd met Gail Haynes. He liked her. Too
much. But nothing could come of it. He had a small bank account in a New York bank. He had a small
income from his profession. He had never even been rich enough to own an automobile. Back in the
United States he'd had to content himself with a motorcycle, and he had practically no prospect of
ever getting richer.
There have always been people in this condition. It is not news. There was really practically
nothing novel about anything anywhere on Earth, just then, and of all commonplace situations, that
of Soames was most natural. Other people in his fix and looking for a way out of the financial
doldrums worked at things they didn't care about and made more money. Some of them took extra jobs
at night, and some of them let their wives work, and most people had moments of intense
satisfaction and other moments in which they bitterly regretted that they'd persuaded girls into
such hopelessly unglamorous marriages. Soames was resolved not to do Gail so great an injustice.
He remembered the world as, up to now, filled with bright sunshine and many colors and inhabited
by people he didn't envy because he liked the work he was doing. How quickly a girl had changed
his comfortable smugness. Now he envied every man who had a job he could expect to lead ~o
something better, so he could buy a house and scrimp to pay for it and meanwhile come home in the
evening to a wife he cared about and children who thought him remarkable.
He still liked his own work, but he wished he'd wanted to be a salesman or a truck-driver or a
corporation employee instead of a research specialist in- a non-spectacular branch of science. He
could imagine Gail and himself living in a not-too-expensive suburb, with a small lawn to cut and
movies to go to and with each other to be glad about. It was not an extravagant dream, but he
couldn't believe in it. It was too late. So he grimly tried to thrust Gail out of his mind.
It wasn't easy. And when the normal state of affairs for all the world began to bend and crack,
with the shattering of all usual happenings just ahead, Gail was within feet of him. She looked at
him with interest. She was absorbed in listening to him. It was difficult to act as he felt he
must. But he did behave with detachment, as a man acts toward a girl he thinks he'd better not get
to know too well, for her sake. The place and background and the look of things, and the subject
of his conversation too, combined to make a romantic rapport between them unthinkable. They were •
not even alone.
They were in a circular room some twenty feet across, with a plastic domed roof overhead. A
complicated machine occupied the middle of the floor. There was a square, silver-plated tube which