"Alien Harvest" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sheckley Robert)

5

At first Stan didn't want to show his robot alien to Julie. On the one hand, he thought it was the best piece of work he had ever done. But would she realize that? What would her reaction be?

It didn't matter what she thought, of course, Stan told himself logically. Yet all the time he knew it did matter, very much. He realized he wanted Julie to think well of him. He had been alone too long, and he had hidden from everyone, including himself, just how lonely and desperate he had been. It would have been too much to have realized that earlier. But now that Julie had come into his life, he could no longer bear being without her. He wanted to make sure that never happened.

He didn't know what was going to happen. He was scared. But he was also strangely happy. Over the last few days the individual moments of his life felt better than they had for a long time. Maybe he'd never felt so good.

He was thinking about this while he showered and put on clothes fresh from the dry cleaners. He shaved with special care, and he laughed at himself for doing all this, but that didn't stop him. He saw Julie over breakfast. She was looking radiant, her hair sparkling in the sunshine.

After breakfast, Stan showed her his lab.

After that, it was time to show off his robot alien.

He kept it in a special temperature-controlled room behind a locked door. The door was to keep people out, not to keep the robot in, he told Julie. It stood perfectly immobile, since it was not presently activated.

Its black, heavily muscled body seemed ready to lunge. Yet Julie did not hesitate when Stan took her hand and peeled back the robot's lips to show its gleaming rows of needle-sharp fangs.

“Your pet looks like evil incarnate,” Julie said.

“As a matter of fact, he's surprisingly gentle. I hope I haven't made a mistake in the circuitry. He may need to be trained to fight.”

“I can be of some help there,” Julie said.