"A. E. Van Vogt - Slan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Vogt A E)

his weariness. Something damp and sticky was clinging to his side, and his muscles felt stiff.
His mind felt slow and unwieldy. He paused and peered out of the door.
He was staring into a street vastly different from Capital Avenue. It was a dingy street of
cracked pavement, the opposite side lined with houses that had been built of plastic a
hundred or more years before. Made of virtually unbreakable materials, their imperishable
colors basically as fresh and bright as on the day of construction, they nevertheless showed
the marks of time. Dust and soot had fastened leechlike upon the glistening stuff. Lawns
were ill-tended, and piles of debris lay around.
The street was apparently deserted. A vague whisper of thought crept forth from the
dingy buildings. He was too tired to make certain tile thoughts came only from the buildings.
Jommy lowered himself over the edge of the warehouse platform and dropped to the hard
concrete of the street below. Anguish engulfed his side, and his body had no yield in it, none
of the normal spring that would have made such a jump easy to take. The blow of striking
the walk was a jar that vibrated his bones. The world was darker as he raced across the
street. He shook his head to clear his vision, but it was no use. He could only scamper on
with leaden feet between a gleaming but sooty two-story house and a towering, stream-
lined, sea-blue apartment block. He didn't see the woman on the veranda above him, or
sense her, until she struck at him with a mop. The mop missed because he caught its
shadow just in time to duck.
'Ten thousand dollars!' she screamed after him. 'The radio said ten thousand. And it's
mine, do you hear? Don't nobody touch him. He's mine. I saw him first.'
He realized dimly that she was shouting at other women who were pouring out of the
tenement. Thank God, the men were away at work!
The horror of the rapacious minds snatched after him as he fled with frightened strength
along the narrow walk beside the apartment building. He shrank from the hideous thoughts
and flinched from the most horrible sound in the world: the shrill voice clamor of people
desperately poor, swarming in their dozens after wealth beyond the dreams of greed.
A fear came that he would be smashed by mops and hoes and brooms and rakes, his
head beaten, his bones crushed, flesh mashed. Swaying, he rounded the rear corner of the
tenement. The muttering mob was still behind him. He felt their nervousness in the turgid
thoughts that streamed from them. They had heard stories about slans that suddenly almost
overshadowed the desire to possess ten thousand dollars. But the mob presence gave
courage to individuals. The mob pressed on.
He emerged into a tiny back yard piled high with empty boxes on one side. The pile
reared above him, a dark mass, blurred even in the dazzle of the sun. An idea flashed into
his dulled mind, and in an instant he was climbing the piled boxes.
The pain of the effort was like teeth clamped into his side. He ran precariously along over
the boxes, and then half lowered himself, half fell into a space between two old crates. The
space opened all the way to the ground. In the almost darkness his eyes made out a deeper
darkness in the plastic wall of the tenement. He put out his hands and fumbled around the
edges of a hole in the otherwise smooth wall.
In a moment he had squeezed through and was lying exhausted on the damp earth
inside. Pieces of rock pressed into his body, but for the moment he was too weary to do
anything but lie there, scarcely breathing, while the mob raged outside in frantic search.
The darkness was soothing, like his mother's thoughts just before she told him to leave
her. Somebody climbed some stairs just above him, and that told him where he was: in a
little space underneath back stairs. He wondered how the hard plastic had ever been
shattered.
Lying there, cold with fear, he thought of his mother -- dead now, the radio had said.
Dead! She wouldn't have been afraid, of course. He knew only too well that she had longed