"Andre Norton - The X Factor 1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

room that was Renfry's. Here were kept the travel disks from his Scout trips, the trophies from his star
wandering, all mounted and displayed. It was a room that Diskan had never before had the courage to
enter on his own.

On his hands and knees, he crawled from behind the curtains, to sit crouched in the middle of the open
space, far from anything he could brush against or knock over. He laced his heavy arms about his
upthrust knees and looked about him.

A man's life was in this room. What land of showing would his life make if the remnants of his passing
were set on shelves for viewing? Broken bits and pieces, smudged and torn fabrics—and the slow,
stupid words, the wrong actions that would not be tangible but that made smudges and tears inside
himself and others. Diskan's hands went up again to his head, not to muffle the sighing music, the hum of
voices from beyond walls and door, but to rub back and forth across his forehead, as if to ease the dull
ache that had been ever present during his waking hours on Vaanchard. But he did not seem stupid to
himself, at least not until he tried to translate into action or words what he thought—as if inside him there
was a bad connection so that he could never communicate clearly with his own body, let alone with those
about him.

There were things he could do! Diskan's mouth for the first time in hours relaxed from the wry twist,
even shaped a shadow smile that would have surprised him had he at that moment faced a mirror. Yes,
he could do some things, and not, he thought, too clumsily either. That varch now— he had thought of
the varch, and then he had thought of what it must do—and it had done it just as he wished, and with
more speed and skill than his own hands carried out any of his brain's commands.

That had happened before, when he was alone. He had never dared try it before others, since he was
rated as strange enough without that additional taint of wrongness. He could communicate with
animals—which probably meant he was far closer to them than to his own kind, that he was a slip-back
on the climbing path of evolution. But the varch had distracted Rixa for the necessary moments.

Diskan relaxed. The room was still, the sounds of merriment more muffled here than in the garden. And
this chamber was less alien in its appointments than any other in the huge palace dwelling. The rich fabrics
at the window were native, but their colors were not so muted here. They were warmer. And save for
one lacy spiral object on the wide desk-table, there were none of the fragile native ornaments. The rack
of travel disks might have been taken out of a spacer—perhaps it had been.

He studied that rack, his lips shaping numbers as he counted the disks, each in its own slot. More than a
hundred worlds—keys to more than a hundred worlds—all visited at some time or another by Renfry
Fen tress. And any one of those, fitted into the auto-pilot of a spacer could take a man to that world—

Blue tapes first—worlds explored by Fentress, now open for colonization—ten of those, a record of
which to be proud. Yellow disks—worlds that would not support human life. Green—inhabited by native
races, open for trade, closed to human settlement. Red—Diskan eyed the red. There were three of those
at the bottom of the case.

Red meant unknown—worlds on which only one landing had been made, reported, but not yet checked
out fully as useful or otherwise. Empty of intelligent life, yes, possible for human life as to climate and
atmosphere, but planets that posed some kind of puzzle. What could such puzzles be, Diskan speculated,
for a moment pulled from his own concerns to wonder. Any one of a hundred reasons could mark a
world red—to await further exploration.