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

most ferocious of all the million Patrolmen, remained in heart and in soul-and
on active
duty -a Gray Lensman.

Worsel was a frightening apparition to anyone who had never met a Velantian
before. At
first glance he seemed grotesquely hideous, a nightmarish reptile, all fangs
and claws.
The day he arrived at Pok, the Planetoid of Knowledge, to begin the most
incredible of
his adventures, he frightened the old soldier-scientist assigned to meet him.

Two utterly different kinds of Galactic Patrolmen met at that moment in the
docking-port
reception chamber when he slithered, then leaped, from his personal
spacecraft. Most
Patrolmen were fighting men, accustomed to deadly battle in the far depths of
space, but
some were laboratory soldiers, forever sheltered in their quiet isolation, at
war only with
facts and figures. Worsel was the epitome of the superlative warrior, one of
the unique
quartet of Lensmen, the elite of the elite; the other was an elderly
scientist, still
non-combatant even in his Third-and-Final Life-Restoration. The old man in the
youthful
body was content to end his days on the Pok research team in his endless quest
for
knowledge. He had never met a Velantian; he had never met a Second Stage
Lensman;
now he met both in the living flesh of a single creature.

The actual meeting was the most excitement he had had in his life, more
exciting by far
than even his appointment as Curator of Pok. And now he was terrified by the
encounter.
No books, no three-D pictures had prepared him for what he saw: the incredible
appearance of the reknowned hero who looked and smelled of the violence that
had
swirled, and still swirled, around the Galactic Patrol.
The human was in the twilight of his life, but the Velantian Lensman,
suggesting a cross
between a winged pterosaur and a long-necked Tyrannosaurus Rex with brains,
was at
the peak of his magnificent physical and mental powers. Like a serpentine
dragon, the
creature emerged from his polished shell, metal door clanging against metal
wall, and
loomed before the man. The twelve-foot ceiling was touched by a monstrous
reptilian