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Suddenly she jerked her head up. She had eaten enough at the apple of humiliation; it was time to let Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html anger have its turn. Imperiously she gestured at him. "You need say no more. I will tell you only that the thought of you and your imagined fondness - how often I foolishly imagined that it was only your friendship with Bruce that kept you from making advances towards me! -your hollow fondness has been the only factor keeping me sane over these last few impossible years." "Come, I am certain you exaggerate -" "I am talking! I see now that all your airs and graces, all this phoney Hungarian glamour you put on, they ah* mean nothing. You are just a false front, Mihaly, a romantic who dislikes romances, a - a ladies' man who is afraid of ladies. Good-bye to you, Mihaly, and damn you! Through you I have lost both my husband and my son." The door slammed behind her. They had been talking in the hall. Mihaly put his hands up to his burning cheeks. He was shaking. He averted his eyes from the sight of himself in the mirror. The terrible thing was, that without having the least interest in Enid physically, he had admired her spirit and, knowing what a difficult man Bruce was behind the scenes, he had indeed encouraged her with warm glances and occasional pressures of the hand - purely to illustrate to her that someone was capable of seeing her virtues. Ah, beware, indeed beware of pity! "Darling, has she gone?" He heard the tiny summoning voice of his mistress from the living room. Doubtless she would have eavesdropped on the scene with Enid. Without eagerness, he went to hear what she had to say about it all. There was no doubt that the charming Ah Chi, after her painting holiday in the Persian Gulf or wherever she had been, would be horribly inquisitive over the whole incident. It was only a watch after Bryant Lattimore had felt like a minor crustacean that Mrs. Warhoon got a volun-teer. The discovery sent her in a flutter into the heart of the molybdenum crystal belt. Lattimore Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html quickly took the chance to seize her by her fleshy upper arms. "Steady now, Hilary! I hate to see a pretty cosmoclec-tician in a tizzy. So you wanted a volunteer, so you've got him; now go ahead and give him the pitch." Mrs. Warhoon freed herself, though not without getting appetizingly disarranged. What strong brutes men were! Heaven alone knew what this one would be like when he got metaphorically east of Suez at next planetfall. Well, at least a woman had her own defences: she could always give in. "This volunteer is rather special, Mr. Lattimore. Does the name Samuel Melmoth mean anything to you?" "Not a thing. No, wait! Ye gods and little fishes! It's Ainson's son! You meanhe's volunteered?" "He has managed to make himself rather unpopular down on the messdeck, and in consequence feels rather anti-social. A friend of his called Quilter gave him a black eye.'1 "Quilter again, eh? Likely leader material there; I must speak to the captain about him." "I d like you to come and stand by me while I brief this young Ainson, if you aren't too busy." "Hilary, I'd stand by you at any time." The Ur-Organic style (like all art movement labels, the name was inaccurate to the point of meaninglessness) hadperpetrated a nasty whimsy in Mrs. Warhoon's office. She and Lattimore stepped into a popinjay's heart. Under a magnification of 200,000, the fibrous tissue ran and knotted in bas-relief over ceiling and floor as well as walls. In the middle of it, lonely, green about one eye, sat Aylmer Ain-son, his head indistinct against a galaxy of striated aortal muscle. He stood when Mrs. Warhoon and Lattimore entered. Poor little devil, thought Lattimore. The lady here is somewhat up a gum tree in concluding that it was Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html any-thing so simple as a black eye that led this boy to want to maroon himself on a strange planet. His whole history -and his parents' history, and so their parents' history, and so back to those first deluded dimwits who decided that animal life wasn't good enough for them - everything has led to this act of his; the black eye was just a clincher. And who would say, who could be a fly-sized god and see it all, that the clincher was accidental? Maybe the poor kid had to provoke the assault to reassure himself that the outside world was the aggressor. Somewhere, Lattimore thought (but with as much com-placency as trepidation, as he realized) my upbringing took the wrong turning, or I would not diagnose so much meaning from the hangdog-proud way this kiddie stood up for us. "Sit down, Mr. Melmoth," Mrs. Warhoon said, in a pleasant voice Lattimore found unpleasant. "This is the Flight Advisor, Mr. Lattimore. He knows as well as any-one the communication problems you will be up against, and can give you pointers on the subject." "How do you do, sir," young Ainson said, smiling round his puffy eye. "Firstly, the larger programme," said Mrs. Warhoon, and chose a military phrase with winsome self-conscious-ness, "just to put you in the picture, as they say. When we come out of TP flight, we shall be in a star cluster thatcontains at least fifteen planets, of which six, to judge by a remote technivisual survey conducted by theMarie-stopes, have Earth-type atmospheres. Our aliens, as you know, were found beside a space vehicle - whether it belonged to them or to an allied species, we hope to deter-mine soon. But its suggests that we may find space flight established in this cluster. In that case we shall need to survey all inhabited planets. It was planned before we left Earth that on the first such planet we should deposit an unmanned observation post. Since then, however, I have had a further idea, which Captain Pestalozzi has agreed to let me carry out. "My idea is simply to leave a volunteer with the obser-vation post Since we could furnish him with provisions and food synthesizers, and the natives, as we know by our captive specimens, will not be [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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