"Brunner, John - The Repairmen of Cyclops" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brunner John)

The thought passed. True or not, he was at least able
to indulge this much of his thirst for excitement and
challenge; if he had taken any other of the courses open
to him, he would have been drudging away this glorious
summer in a city or on a farm or in some squalid fish-
ing-port, pestered continually by the demands of other
people, by the need to stack up work-credits, by holes in
his shoes or leaks in his roof.
Even her high-and-mightiness is preferable to that. ..
He biinked. The wing-glints had come again, and this
time remained in view instead of vanishing into the blur
of heat-haze and shimmery reflection along the skyline.
His pulse beat faster as he began to count: five, six
eight, ten, at least a dozen and possibly more.
Name of the cosmos, but it must be a giantf
For one moment, uncharacteristic alarm filled him. He
had come deliberately to this northern extreme of the
wolfsharks* range, because those that beat a path of
slaughter more than a hundred miles from the equatorial
shallows which were their customary habitat were cer-
tain to be the largest and greediest specimens, and after
his long impatient chafing in Frecity he had felt nothing
less than a monster would compensate him.
But seeing a dozen or more buzzards hovering was ft
shock.
It was perhaps the most characteristic sight on Cy-
clops: Jackson's buzzards, swift, cniel-taloned, steely-
winged, on the track of a wolfshark, which killed for
savage delight and not for hunger, so that even the mon-
strous appetites of the birds were easily glutted by its
gore-leaking victims. At this time of year, nearer the
equator, one could look out over the sea and espy as
many as five or six groups of the carrion-eaters follow-
ing the blood-smeared killers, for the ocean teemed with
'life.
Yet it was rare to see more than six buzzards to every
wolfshark. By twos and threes, they would sate them-
selves and flap heavily away, while others took their
place, the total number in the sky remaining roughly
constant. And there were reasons why those that roamed
furthest north were followed usually only by two or
three buzzards: first, the sea offered fewer victims and
hence less carrion; second, the birds were still feeding
their young at this time of year, and could not wander
too far from their breeding-mats, the vast raft-like as-
semblies of Cyclops kelp which occurred only in a nar-
row belt around the planet's centre.
Nonetheless, here it was: a wolfshark so big, so fast,
and so murderous that a hundred miles away from home
it was killing in quantities great enough to tip the bal-