"The Deep Down Dragon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merril Judith)

The Deep Down DragonThe Deep Down Dragon

The girl's one duty was to look — and understand:
White flatness of the wide wall dissolved into mist as the room dimmed. Then
whiteness itself broke apart, from all-color to each component.
Pinpoints of brightness swirled and coalesced into new patterns of color and
shape. Pinks and yellows here. Silver, blue, black there. Brown, gray, green.
Rainbow stripes.
First flat, like a painted scene, then deepening to its own kind of reality, the
scene glowed in the center of nothingness where the wall had been before.
The scene had been exactly the same before, she remembered. There was the
strangely clear-air atmosphere, thin and sharp. The sketched-in effect of the
background — hills, oddly shaped? a domed structure closer? — was simply a
matter of her focused attention, not distance haze. Through this transparent air
detailed vision would be possible at a far distance. And the background hills
were far; for the moment, however, they were only background.
What counted was front-center, bright-colored . . . as real as when she had seen
it the first time, for herself.
The three footprints. The shoe. The square of cloth. The three bushes. In color,
focus and meaning they were identical. Her own shoe, with the silly spike heel
and lacy strap unfastened, was lying where it dropped on the pink-hued sand,
alongside the alien prints. The first time she had not known why, exactly, the
prints were "alien." Now she saw it was the shoe that accomplished the effect.
Plenty of three-toed things left prints in sand, but nothing exactly the length
of her own foot was tripartite.
Nothing on Earth.
It was the same thing with the brown-gray-green thorn bushes ... planted, she
suddenly realized, by some insane gardener, to landscape that circular
blockhouse thing in the background! Or maybe not so insane. Nowhere else in
sight was there a growing or green thing at all. Poor green was better than
none. Spikes, spines and thorns did grow. They were alive, if still — alien?
Why? Of course, the same thing. The patterned robe. A square of cloth, from the
same bolt from which she had made the robe, only last week, hung impaled on the
farthest bush.
Farthest? Nearest! Nearest to the door of the house, from which the strange
footprints curved down and off-scene.
Half the wall was filled now. Inch by slow fraction of inch the scene widened.
She sat forward, breathing almost not at all, tensed with knowing the next
print, or the one beyond it, would contain the print-maker, the — alien.
Alien? What an odd thought! That was the second — the third? — time she'd
thought it. She did not remember the thought from the first seeing of the same
scene. "Strange," maybe. "Unknown." Not "alien."
Odd . . . odder still, as her eyes went unwillingly from the forming print at
the far edge of the scene, she saw her own sandal alongside the trail, silly
spike heel and lacy strap, still fastened as it had been on her foot.
That wasn't just odd. It was wrong! And the torn strip of fabric ripped from her
robe by the thornbush —
"That's not how it was! That's not the way it went," she thought, and the scene
faded out.
The light brightened in the room as the wall came back to normality, and she