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The Stars My Destination ( Tiger! Tiger! ) :: Bester Alfred
Страница: 16 из 164They turned on the ancient autoclave. It boiled and geysered, filling the hall with howling steam. They turned on the old fluoroscope. It was short-circuited and spat sizzling bolts of lightning across the steaming hall.
A ten foot figure loomed up to the table. It was Joseph on stilts. He wore a surgical cap, a surgical mask, and a surgeon's gown that hung from his shoulders to the floor. The gown was heavily embroidered with red and black thread illustrating anatomical sections of the body. Joseph was a lurid tapestry out of a surgical text.
«I pronounce you Nomad!» Joseph intoned.
The uproar became deafening. Joseph tilted a rusty can over Foyle's body. There was the reek of ether.
Foyle lost his tatters of consciousness and darkness enveloped him. Out of the darkness «Vorga-T:i 339» surged again and again, accelerating on a sunward course that burst through Foyle's blood and brains until he could not stop screaming silently for vengeance.
He was dimly aware of washings and feedings and trampings and chantings. At last he awoke to a lucid interval. There was silence. He was in a bed. The girl, Moira, was in bed with him.
«Who you?» Foyle croaked.
«Your wife, Nomad.»
«What?»
«Your wife~ You chose me, Nomad. We are gametes.»
«What?»
«Scientifically mated,» Moira said proudly. She pulled up the sleeve of her nightgown and showed him her arm. It was disfigured by four ugly slashes. «I have been inoculated with something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.»
Foyle struggled out of the bed.
«Where we now?»
«In our home.»
«What home?»
«Yours. You are one of us, Nomad. You must marry every month and beget many children. That will be scientific. But I am the first.»
Foyle ignored her and explored. He was in the main cabin of a small rocket launch of the early 2300's . . . once a private yacht. The main cabin had been converted into a bedroom.
He lurched to the ports and looked out. The launch was sealed into the mass of the asteroid, connected by passages to the main body. He went aft. Two smaller cabins were filled with growing plants for oxygen. The engine room had been converted into a kitchen. There was Hi-Thrust in the fuel tanks, but it fed the burners of a small stove atop the rocket chambers. Foyle went forward. The control cabin was now a parlor, but the controls were still operative.
He thought.
He went aft to the kitchen and dismantled the stove.