"E. E. Doc Smith - Lensman 8 - The Dragon Lensman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

enough to play it this way?" These were more words than he had spoken in
perhaps a
year. He heard them physically through the vibrations from his chest, but he
did not hear
them through his ears because they had atrophied by disuse. It was
characteristic of his
race to interpret sound vibrations through sense organs in the skin around
nose and
throat.

Worsel knew that he had come to the most critical room. He was positive that
something
would happen here. This room on Level 97 wasn't overwhelmingly large, limited,
as it
was, to only the most sophisticated of items, but it contained all the "wits"
and the
"smarts" of the mech world.
They were all potentially in working order, a rather stupid situation he
thought, ready to
go into their dances and sing their songs of science or business, war or crime
at the flick
of a switch or the touch of a mind. Probably most of them could calculate,
compute and
make logical deductions as fast, maybe faster, than any Lensman, including
himself.
Maybe they weren't creative thinkers, like their creators, but then again ...
Maybe the
magnitude of Pok was getting him down. It was no longer the small place he had
helped
establish years before. The sheer numbers of apparatuses now collected on the
Planetoid of Knowledge was staggering, representing thousands of civilizations
from
which the Patrol had obtained the exhibits. Appreciation of this came only
after he had
walked through a half thousand rooms and skipped an equal number. It wasn't
their sizes
which were intimidating-considering that Worsel himself was thirty feet long
and built like
a piece of heavy-labor machinery covered with tough, flexible scales, he
dwarfed most of
the mechanisms. No, not their sizes, it was the extent of the alien collection
which im-

pressed him.

Pok, the Planetoid of Knowledge, was unique. It was an artificially
constructed sphere
eighteen miles in diameter, originally the project of The Velantian Council of
Scientists
before becoming a Galactic Patrol installation. When Velantia had discovered