In the Green Star's Glow
- Автор: Картер Лин Спрэг
- Серия: Green Star Rises #5
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «In the Green Star's Glow». Краткое содержание книги:
But he was also an Earthling, whose helpless body lay in suspended animation in a guarded mansion in New England. It was his alien mind that drove Karn through perils that no other wold dare...
In the Green Star's Glow is a science fantasy novel in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Written by American author Lin Carter, it is the final book in his Green Star series. It was first published in 1976.
A curved wall of spotless white enamel met her eyes. The pungent odor of strong antiseptic assailed her nostrils.
There was nothing in the room but a wax model of a human head fastened in midair to a number of transparent tubes and coppery wires which led to small tanks and engines of curious design.
Puzzled, she entered the inner chamber where the wax modes of a human head hung amid these coiling tubes.
The air was clean and fresh and curiously odorless, behind the sharp stench of antiseptic.
The room was brilliantly lit by a sunlike lamp suspended from above.
There was no sound, save for the gurgle of unknown fluids in the tanks, and the drone which arose from the small engines grouped together on the floor beneath the hanging head.
She examined the model curiously.
It was most artistically made, the wax colored with close resemblance to human flesh, and it resembled the head of a young man of her race with a shaved scalp, closed eyes, and loose mouth hanging wetly open.
This object of art, if that is what it was, seemed to her most ghoulish. After inspecting the thing, she turned away with a small, fastidious shudder.
And blundered into a small metal table on wheels which she had not noticed. She stumbled against it, and some of the surgical instruments arranged upon its glistening white upper surface fell to the floor with a clank which seemed loud in the buzzing, gurgling stillness. She froze.
Then the bodiless head opened its eyes and looked at her.
14.
The Sorcerer Quoron
When the bodiless head looked at her, Niamh froze with ghastly horror.
Then she saw that the eyes were wide and unfocused. The gleam of intelligence did not shine in them; they were the blank, unseeing eyes of an idiot-thing.
The loose mouth worked wetly and the head spoke.
“Wa-wa-w-aaah?”
As she stared in horror and revulsion, a dribble of slime drooled from the working lips of the thing as it babbled meaningless noises.
Then a sound came from behind her. A dry cough!
She spun to see a weird, hunched form in the doorway. It was hideous, and curiously disparate. The head was lean, fine-boned, ascetic—even handsome, in a pure, nobly proportioned way.
But its handsomeness ended at the neck.
The body was that of a twisted dwarf with a hunched shoulder and warped, diminutive legs. Swathed in a loose white gown it was, and the gown bulged peculiarly, and in the most surprising places, as if there were portions of the body beneath that gown that bore little or no semblance to the human body.
The creature in the doorway fixed her with a cold, ironic gaze of appraisal. Niamh was very near swooning—the hanging head was still drooling and babbling in a witless manner behind her—but she drew herself up and regarded the being who could only be her captor with a superb pretense of hauteur.
The cold, ironic eyes moved beyond her to the hanging thing. The slight smile left the thin lips and was replaced by an expression of sadness mingled with a curious contempt.
“You are a most persistent young woman,” observed the dwarf. “I had thought you safely tucked away, but here you are, freely wandering my tower and prying into my most closely guarded secrets. Well, having intruded upon Wa-Wa’s privacy, what do you think of him?”
“Wa-Wa?” she repeated faintly. He nodded at the thing behind her.
“Yes, I call it that partly because I have to call it something, and partly because that is the only sound it seems to know how to make. I have been trying to teach it human speech, but, alas, in that, as in so much else, my artistry falls short of its goal. Well, speak up, girl. What do you think?”
Niamh had recovered some of her self-possession by now. She had nothing to lose from speaking bluntly, so she spoke her mind. It did not seem to her that this hunched, deformed cripple could possibly do her any harm. Her own body was lithe and strong; if it came to a contest, she thought it likely she could turn the tables and make the captor captive.
“I think you should put the pitiful thing out of its misery,” she said coldly. “Why do you permit it to continue in this grisly mockery of life? The humane thing to do—”
Something flared in the cold, cruel eyes of the dwarf.
” ‘Mockery of life,’ indeed! My dear young woman, you are looking upon the noblest miracle of science wrought by human hands on this planet since the dead, forgotten days of the mighty Kaloodha! Do you dare to think the thing is only a semblance of life? Gods of The World Above, woman, I have removed the head from a living body sand kept it alive sand functioning for two years!”
She stared at the cold face of the dwarf, her thoughts unutterable. Now a weird passion flamed in his fathomless gaze and drove vivid color into his sallow cheeks.
“Do you not understand the magnitude of this scientific miracle?” he hissed. “Or are your wits too shallow and mundane to perceive the scope of my discoveries? By a fission so adroit and subtle it were inaccuracy itself to demean it by so crude a term as ‘surgery,’ I have removed a man’s head, sealed the nerve endings, attached the veins and arteries to a sterile pumping system, employed a bellows-like device to replace the lungs, and kept the severed head living and healthy! The hair continues to grow unless shaved… the mouth glands salivate as the nostrils inhale the odor of succulent food… the eyes respond to light, darkness, and motion… the eardrums react to loud sounds… the thing lives, I tell you! Lives!”
The dwarf’s voice rose in a frenzied screech that rang deafeningly through the domed white chamber. The dangling head flinched and began to blubber. Niamh shrank from the dwarf as he limped toward her with a shambling, crablike gait.
Suddenly, the hunched little figure was sinister and even fearsome. His sudden, mercurial transition from cold irony to gibbering fervor took her off-guard.
She perceived that her captor was more dangerous than she had thought at first.
“And its—brain?”
The question fell from her lips in automatic response. It was not a question she had meant to ask, and, looking at the scarlet fury that rose and glared within the dwarf’s maniacal gaze, she faltered, and bit her lip, wishing she had not spoken.
Then the frenzy passed. The hunched figure twitched once. The spasm passed; he drooped his head and was, suddenly, somehow pathetic.
“You are right, of course… the brain is dead, for all the subtlety of my surgical technique,” the dwarf muttered in low tones. “Oh, the sensory nerves respond to stimuli… the motor centers still function as if automatically, but—the mind is dead; quite dead. For all my science, I cannot help it to think, to reason, to communicate. It is the one goal I have yet to achieve, the one barrier yet unconquered. I can keep the head alive, but the brain dies…”
The dwarf pondered with bowed head for a moment, then raised his eyes upon her again.
“But I shall yet succeed! I believe the problem lies in the oxygen content of the blood. Between the moment when the head is detached from the body and the moment when the veins and arteries are connected to my artificial heart device, the circulation of blood within the brain pauses. During that interval the brain receives no fresh oxygen, which would otherwise have continued to be carried in the fresh blood pumped from the body’s heart. The lack of fresh oxygen, although momentary, causes oxygen starvation, and the effect is like that of a stroke.” He meditated for a long moment, lost in the intricacies of the problem, plucking at his lower lip with thumb and forefinger; then he said; “Someday—quite soon, I feel—I shall manage to overcome this last remaining obstacle. And then the world shall resound with praise of the arch-scientist, Quoron.”