"Moore, C L - The Cold Gray God UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore C. L)

dawned upon him where he had seen those odd spirals and

queer twisted characters before. Then he remembered. No

wonder they looked familiar, for they had stared down upon

him baf flingly from the walls of countless Martian dwellings.

He lifted his eyes and saw a band of them circling the walls

above him now. But they were large, and these on the box

intricately tiny, so that at first glance they looked like the

merest waving lines incised delicately all over the box's

surface.

Not until then, following those crawling lines, did he see that the box had no opening. To all appearances it was not a box at all, but a block of carved ivory. He shook it, and something within shifted slightly, as if it were packed in loose wrappings. But there was no opening anywhere. He turned it over and over, peering and prying, but to no avail. Finally he shrugged and wrapped the canvas back about the

enigma.

"What do you make of it?" he asked.

Mhici shook his head.

' 'Great Shar alone can tell," he murmured half in derision, for Shar is the Venusian god, a friendly deity whose name rises constantly to the lips of the Hot Planet's dwellers. The god whom Mars worships, openly or in secret, is never named aloud.

They discussed the puzzle of it off and on the rest of the afternoon. Smith spent the hours restlessly, for he dared not

smoke nuari nor drink much, with the interview so close ahead. When the shadows were lengthening along the Lakklan he got into his deerhide coat again and tucked the ivory box into an inner pocket. It was bulky, but not betray-ingly so. And he made sure his flame-gun was charged and ready.

In the late afternoon sun that sparkled blindingly upon the snow crystals blowing along the wind', he went down the Lakklan again with his right hand hi his pocket and his eyes raking the street warily under the shadow of his cap. Evidently the pursuers of that box had not traced it, for he was not followed.

Judai's house squatted dark and low at the edge of the Lakklan .Smith fought down a rising revulsion as he lifted his hand to knock, but the door swung open before his knuckles had touched the panel. That same shadowy servant beckoned him in. This time he did not put his gun away when he shifted it from his coat pocket. He took the canvas-wrapped box in one hand and the flame-pistol in the other, and the servant opened the door he had passed last night upon the room where Judai was waiting.

She 'stood exactly as he had left her in the center of the floor, white and scarlet against the queer traceries on the wall beyond. He had the curious notion that she had not stirred since he left her last night. She moved a little sluggishly as she turned her head and saw him, but it was a lethargy which she quickly overcame. She motioned him toward the divan, taking her seat at his side with the flowing, feline ease of every true Venusian. And as before, he shrank involuntarily from the contact of that fragrant, velvet-sheathed body, with an inner revulsion he could not understand.

She said nothing, but she held out her two hands cupped up in entreaty, and she did not lift her eyes to his face as she did so. He laid the box in her upturned palm. At that moment for Ihe first time it occurred to him that not once had he met her eyes. She had never lifted those veiling lashes and looked into his. Wondering, he watched.

She was unwrapping the canvas with quick, delicate mo-lions of her pink-stained fingers. When the box lay bare in her

hands she sat quite motionless for a while, her lowered eyes fixed upon the carven block of the thing which had cost at least one life. And her quiet was unnatural, trance-like. He thought she must have ceased to breathe. Not a lash fluttered, ; not a pulse stirred in her round white wrists as she held the little symbol-traced box up. There was something indescrib- ^ ably horrid in her quiet as she sat and stared, all her being I centered in one vast, still concentration upon the ivory box. jj Then he heard such a deep breath rush out through her 3 nostrils that it might have been life itself escaping, a breath that thinned into a high, shuddering hum like the whine of wind through wires. It was not a sound that any human creature could make.

Without realizing that he had moved, Smith leaped. Of their own volition his muscles tensed into a spring of animal terror away from that high-whining thing on the couch. He j ground himself half crouched a dozen paces away, his gun ' steady in a lifted hand and his hair stiffening at the roots as he i faced her. For by the thin, high, shuddering noise he knew \ surely that she was not human. <

For a long instant he crouched there, taut, feeling his scalp , crawl with a prickling terror as his pale eyes searched for < some reason in this madness which had come over them both. ^ She still sat rigid, with lowered eyes, but though she had not "• stirred, something told him unerringly that his first instinct « had been right, his first intuitive flinching from her hand on :) his arm—she was not human. Warm white flesh and fragrant •"; hair and subtle, curving roundness of her under velvet, all this was camouflage to conceal—to conceal—he could not i guess what, but he knew that loveliness for a lie, and all down j his back the nerves tingled with man's involuntary shudder from the unknown.

She rose. Cradling the ivory box against the sweet high curve of her bosom, she moved slowly forward, her lashes making two dim crescents on her exquisitely tinted cheeks. He had never seen her lovelier, or more hideously repulsive. For in some obscure part of his brain he knew that the humanity which she had clutched like a cloak about her was being dropped. In another instant . . .