"Jack Williamson - The Happiest Creature" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

butchered animals. His name was Casey James.
He was armed like some jungle carnivore, however, with a sharpened steel blade.
His body, like his whole planet, was contaminated with parasitic organisms. He was
quivering with fear and exhaustion, like any hunted animal, the night he blundered
upon the ship. The pangs of his hunger had passed, but a bullet wound in his left
arm was nagging him with unalleviated pain.
In the darkness, he didn't even see the ship. The trucks were stopped on the road,
and the driver of the last had left it while he went ahead to help to adjust the loading
ramp. The anthropoid climbed on the unattended truck and hid himself under a
tarpaulin before it was driven aboard.
Though he must have been puzzled and alarmed to find that the ship was no native
conveyance, he kept hidden in the cargo hold for several days. With his animal
crafti-ness, he milked one of the specimen animals for food, and slept in the cab of
an empty truck. Malignant organisms were multiplying in his wounded arm, however,
and pain finally drove him out of hiding.
He approached the attendants who were feeding the animals, threatened them with
his knife, and demanded medical care. They disarmed him without difficulty and
took him to the veterinary ward. The collector found him there, already scrubbed
and disinfected, sitting up in his bed.
"Where're we headed for?" he wanted to know.
He nodded without apparent surprise when the collector told him the mission and
the destination of the ship.
"Your undercover work ain't quite so hot as you seem to think," he said. "I've
seen your flying saucers myself."
"Flying saucers!" The collector sniffed disdainfully, "They aren't anything of ours.
Most of them are nothing but refracted images of surface lights, produced by
atmos-pheric inversions. The quarantine people are getting out a book to explain that
to your fellow creatures."
"A good one for the cops! " The anthropoid grinned. "I bet they're still scratching
their dumb skulls, over how I dodged 'em." He paused to finger his bandaged arm,
in evident appreciation of the civilized care he had received. "And when do we get to
this wonderful zoo of yours?"
"You don't," the collector told him. "I did want exactly such a specimen as you
are, but those stuffy bureaucrats wouldn't let me take one."
"
So you gotta get rid of me?"
The psionic translator revealed the beast 's dangerous desperation, even before his
hard body stiffened.
"Wait!" The collector retreated hastily. "Don 't alarm yourself. We won't hurt you.
We couldn't destroy you, even to escape detection. No civilized man can destroy a
human life."
"Nothing to it," the creature grunted. "But if you ain't gonna toss me out in space,
then what?"
"You've put us in an awkward situation. " The yellow man scowled with
annoyance. "If the quarantine people caught us with you aboard, they 'd cancel our
permits and seize everything we've got. Somehow, we'll have to put you back."
"But I can't go back." The anthropoid licked his lips nervously. "I just gut-knifed
a guard. If they run me down this time, it's the chair for sure."
The translator made it clear that the chair was an elabo-rate torture machine in
which convicted killers were put to a ceremonial death, according to a primitive tribal