"The Diploids" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)

AFTER he had told her. he sat frozen. This brought the fact to full reality in one blow. An eye in the back of his head! What was it doing there?

After a pause she said. “I believe you.” Her cigarette had burned down to the holder. She stubbed it out.

“Want to see it?” They had to bull through this now it was begun.

“No—yes.” She got up and moved behind him, “Show me.”

He reached back and parted his hair in the place where he let it grow long.

There was a moment of silence. “Does it open?” she asked behind him.

He opened it. The unaccustomed glare of the light in the room was painful, a blinding blend of tans and blues. A pinkish blur came into focus in the shape of a face. He shut his eye again, gratefully shutting out the light.

Nadine walked back in front of the desk looking younger and more flustered than he had ever seen her. “Not the right place for an eye,” she muttered confusedly. Fumblingly she took out a cigarette, juggled and dropped it. “It blinked at me.” she said, picking up the cigarette and trying with trembling fingers to fit it into her holder.

Her confusion was amusing. He had never seen her even slightly flustered before, and the sight distracted him from his own reactions. The tremor left his hands as he began to smile. Self consciously, Nadine made an effort to say something controlled and practical. “Why don’t you have it taken out?”

He looked at her without answering for a moment, then said, “Why don’t you have one of your eyes taken out?”

She looked up at him, seeing him as a person, thinking how he would feel, and suddenly had back her balance and wisdom like picking up a purse she had dropped. “Sorry. You gave me the right answer to that one.”

He grinned, snapping on his cigarette lighter and holding it out for her, his hand steady, and she remembered the cigarette in her hand with a start and looked from it to him, beginning to grin back, and leaned forward putting it between her lips. When the cigarette caught she straightened. “All right, so I’m a sissy.”

They shared smiles. “Okay, I’ve shown you the inventory. How does it add up?”

She sobered abruptly and took the holder from her lips and looked at the cigarette’s glowing tip, delaying speech. Then she took a deep breath and forced herself to look at him and reply. “All right. What gives you the idea that you’re human?”

For a moment he didn’t breathe or think, then his mind raced like a squirrel trapped in a cage. It was almost unbelievable how long he had managed to avoid the elementary question that had trapped him at last. Why should he think he was human? Why should any man have so many freakish differences, and yet feel no pain from any of them at all?

Automatically he gasped out the stock answer he had used to fool himself with all those years. “My parents are normal.”

“How do you know that they are your parents?”

Here was another shattering question. They were obviously too normal, no physical peculiarities at all. They could not possibly be his parents, and yet he had wanted them to be his parents when he was a kid, wanted it desperately enough to fool himself into believing it. The shock of the idea when he heard it now was appalling. It was the effect of the tremendous effort by which he had always avoided that awful question. It was incredible how long he had managed to suppress it, and how cleverly he had been able to fool himself, he thought dully.

All right, so he wasn’t human.

Then damn all humans! The hatred flamed like a blow torch. He could hate them now, all these puny, two-eyed five-fingered people who were the same race as the kids who had jeered and tormented him through his bitter childhood. Somewhere there were people like him— people for whom three eyes and six fingers were right, who could be friends and accept him without thinking anything about him was wrong—or ugly— or inhuman..

“All right,” he said thickly. “So I’m a Martian. Now what?”

Nadine held up a perfectly manicured five-fingered hand. “Not so fast!” She was recovering from the shock and thinking now as he’d seen her concentrate when they were working on a tough case and the opposition had them in a tight corner. She was on his aide, battling against his conclusions. “You don’t have to go all the way into a padded cell with our friend there.” She jerked her head at the televiewer screen. “We don’t need extra-terrestrials to account for a non-human anthropoid type race. You’re obviously Earth adapted, so you have to be a member of a race natural to Earth.”



FOR a moment Breden was held by the sight of her hand. It had five fingers, five lovely fingers, and he couldn’t hate Nadine. He couldn’t hate his “father” or his “mother” either, and they were human. Even some of his clients were good guys and honest dealers. He clenched his hands and unclenched them in frustration. Was there nothing in the world that was simple? Nothing that a person could be wholeheartedly either for or against? He smiled wryly. A tolerant sense of humor was supposed to be the mature reaction to such impulses. But it was a pale substitute for the pleasure of a knock-down, drag-out fight.