"Arkadi and Boris Strugatski. Spontaneous Reflex (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

little long-haired human. Stepping on the papers scattered on the floor he
headed on. Behind him the girl was yelling into the phone:
"Nikolai Petrovich? Nikolai Petrovich, this is me, Galya! Nikolai
Petrovich, we are being assaulted by Utm. Your Utm! Utm! U as in Uma, T as
in Tim, M as in Mike. Did you hear the siren? Yes! I dont know... I ran upon
him when he was leaving the main reactor room... Yes-yes, he was in the
reactor room. What? No, I dont think so. They already know at the main
controller...
Utm stopped listening. He went into the hallway and stopped dead in his
tracks energetically moving his sonar arrays. Something big, sparkling, and
cold was hanging on the opposite wall. It looked like a gray impenetrable
square in infrared light, but sparkled and gleamed in daylight, which in
itself was not the source of confusion for Utm. Some black monster with
moving horns on its round globe-like head was standing inside the square and
Utm could not figure out where it was located. Visual range-finder told him
immediately that a distance of twelve meters eighty centimeters separated
him from the unknown object; the sonar however contradicted this fact.
"There is no object. Instead there is a smooth almost vertical surface at
the distance of six meters four centimeters," it said. Utm had never
encountered anything like this before, and never before had the sonar and
visual range-finder provide him with such contradictory readings. His body
had a built-in need to make clear and understand everything he encountered.
So he decisively moved ahead noticing and memorizing along the way a certain
rule; the distance given by the range-finder was twice the distance given by
the sonar. He walked into a mirror. The mirror broke in a ringing shower of
fragments and Utm stopped, having come to a wall. Evidently there was
nothing more to do here. Utm scratched the whitewall, sniffed, turned around
and walked towards the exit crunching on the broken glass and completely
disregarding a pallid security guard clinging to the alarm activation
switch. Snow and blizzard enveloped him.

*****

Piskunov was already out in the hallway hurriedly putting on his coat
when Nikolai Petrovich hung up the phone.
"Where are you off to?" questioned Korolev.
"There, of course--" retorted Piskunov.
"Hold on, we need to decide what is to be done. If that contraption
starts fooling around the whole power station--" Petrovich warned.
Ryabkin interrupted, "We should be so lucky if its only the power
station? What about the laboratories? The warehouse? What if it decides to
pay a visit here, to the village?"
Nikolai Petrovich was thinking frantically. Piskunov was treading in
place impatiently, holding onto the door knob.
"We should go there together, all of us," Kostenko offered timidly.
"We'll find it and... well, and grab it!"
Piskunov only frowned to his, and Ryabkin, who was trying to dig out
his fur-coat from the coat-rack, exclaimed angrily, "Great idea - to grab
it! And what would you have us grab it by? By its pants? It weighs half a
ton and has a hit force of about three hundred kilo! What nonsense! You,