"Jack Williamson - Manseed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

walled him in, beside and above and even beneath. Something coffin close.
A wave of terror chilled him.
Had he been buried alive?
Not breathing, yet still with no sense of suffocating, was he even alive?
The phone caught him working late at the lab terminal, running Biowand programs to build
and test model virus models, searching for one that might have saved his wife and Roger. Too
late for them, but others might be cured. Absorbed in the dancing patterns of possible life and
annoyed at the call, he let it ring.
It kept on till he gave up.
"What d'you want?"
"Dr. Tomislav?" A girl's voice, soft and clear as Olga's once had been. "The biologist?"
 "Ivan Tomislav," he muttered. "I do biology."
"Well enough to win the Nobel." Recalling Olga and the Yiddish lullaby she used to croon
when she was nursing Roger, he couldn't hang up. "I'm Megan Drake. With the Raven
Foundation. We were warned not to bother you at work, but we're trying something very new in
genetic engineering, and we need you urgently. Can you possibly come to Albuquerque for a
consultation - "
Again, the icy, everlasting dark.
Still he floated in it, floated nowhere, still shut inside those narrow walls. Stiffly, fighting
stabbing agony in every joint, he reached to feel for any opening, any clue, any device that might
set him free. All he found was slick and seamless hardness. His tingling hands fell back, and he
found his own flesh. His naked hips, his flanks, the flatness of his belly.
Himself?
All his body felt cold and slick as that coffin wall, oddly numb to his dull fingers. He groped
again, lower. No balls or penis. Nor labia, either. Not even hair. All he found was smooth and
strangely hard, more like metal than flesh.
What sort of thing had he become?
Recoiling from the shock, from the pain of loss and the riddle of it, he strove again for
answers. All he could recall was those shattered scraps of dream. Megan Drake in all of them. Or
had they been more than dream?
Still starkly vivid to him, they had the feel of actual recollection. He clung to Megan's image.
Her fine lean features, her greenish-gray eyes, her vital eagerness. She must be, must have been
real.
But - himself?
Was he - could he have been Martin Rablon? Or Don Brink? Or Ivan Tomislav? All of them?
That made no sense. If she had really called them, or any of them, for a consultation at the Raven
Foundation, what could that have been about?
Searching, all he found was the baffling dark.
His fingers strayed back to his naked crotch.
"Dr. Galen Ulver?"
Startled, he looked up from the half-assembled model rocket on the workbench and found her
in the open doorway of the garage.
"Forgive me for breaking in." Her voice erased his brief annoyance. "It seems you have no
phone."
"Nobody to answer it now."
"The fusion-drive man?" Suddenly doubtful, she was staring at the little rocket.
"Building toys." He shrugged a little ruefully, grinning at the bench. "They're better than
alcohol or suicide. In fact, I kid myself that they're really more than toys. The best I can do since
NASA scrubbed the fusion engine. To me, they're designs for starcraft that ought to be built."
He waited to see what she wanted.