The World of Ptavvs Read Online Free Page A

difficult to see, for all that reached the eye was a distorted view of other parts of the room.
    The statue was less than four feet tall. It looked very much like a faceless hobgoblin. The triangular hump on its back was more stylized than realistic, and the featureless globular head was downright eerie. The legs were strange and bent, and the heels stuck out too far behind the ankle. It could have been an attempt to model a gnome, except for the strange legs and feet and the stranger surface and the short, thick arms with massive Mickey Mouse, hands.
    "I notice he's armed," was Larry's first, slightly uneasy comment. "And he seems to be crouching."
    "Crouching? Take a closer look," Jansky invited genially. "And look at the feet."
    A closer look was worse. The crouch was menacing, predatory, as if the supposed alien was about to charge an enemy or a food animal. The gun, a ringed double-barreled shotgun with no handle, was ready to deal death. But--
    "I still don't see what you're driving at, but I can see his feet aren't straight. They don't lie flat to the ground."
    "Right!" Jansky waxed enthusiastic. His accent thickened noticeably. "That was the first thing I thought of, when I saw a picture of the statue in the Griffith Park Observatory. I thought, the thing wasn't made to stand up. Why? Then I saw. He is in free flight!"
    "Yeah!" It was startling how obvious the thing became. The statue was in a weightless spaceman's crouch, halfway toward fetal position. Of course he was!
    "That was when the archaeologists were still wondering how the artist had gotten that mirror finish. Some of them already thought the statue had been left by visitors from space. But I had already completed my time field, you see, and I thought, suppose he was in space and something went wrong. He might have put himself in slow time to wait for rescue. And rescue never came. So I went to Brasilia Ciudad and persuaded the UNCCE to let me test my t'eory. I aimed a liddle laser beam at one finger.
    "And what happened? The laser couldn't even mark the surface. Then they were convinced. I took it back here with me." He beamed happily.
    The statue had seemed formidable, armed and crouched and ready to spring. Now it was merely pitiful. Larry asked, "Can't you bring him out of it?"
    Jansky shook his head violently. "No. You see that unshiny bump on his back?"
    Larry saw it, just below the apex of the triangular hump. It was just duller than the perfect mirror surface which surrounded it, and faintly reddened.
    "It sticks out of the field, just a little. Just a few molecules. I think it was the switch to turn, off the field. It may have burned off when our friend came through the air, or it may have rusted away while he was at the bottom of the ocean. So now there is no way to turn it off. Poor designing," he added contemptuously.
    "Well, I think they are ready."
    Larry's uneasiness returned. They were ready. Machinery hummed and glowed outside the cage. The disk were steady on the humped contact machine, from which two multicolored cables led to the helmets. Four workmen in lab smocks stood nearby, not working but not idling. Waiting.
    Larry walked rapidly back to the table, poured and drained half a cup of coffee, and went back into the cage. "I'm ready too," he announced.
    Jansky smiled. "Okay," he said, and stepped out of the cage. Two workmen immediately closed the flap with a zipper fwenty feet long.
    "Give me two minutes to relax," Larry called. "Okay," said Jansky.
    Larry stretched out on the couch, his head and shoulders inside the metal shell which was his contact helmet, and closed his eyes. Was Jansky wondering why he wanted extra time? Let him wonder. The contact worked better when he was resting.
    Two minutes and one second from now, what wonders would he remember?
    ***
    Judy Greenberg finished programming the apartment and left. Larry wouldn't be back until late tonight, if then; various people would be quizzing him. They would want to know how