"Campbell, John W Jr - The Immortality_Seekers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell John W Jr)

"Huh. They have compressed air guns, too."
Penton looked thoughtfully down the hallway. Two guards cluttered up the doorway, conversing interestedly. Beryllium was big news, of course. Further down the corridor, two more were equally interested in the possibility of immortality. But they were very much awake.
"You know, my friend, I wonder what these birds would do if-" Penton went through his pockets and the pouch he was still wearing. He felt his flashlight, powered by a miniature atomic disintegrator. Too miniature to do any real damage. Two packs of cigarettes that wouldn't burn in this atmosphere, which was rich in carbon dioxide and nitrogen, but too poor in oxygen to support combustion came into view. Soap, water softener, odds and ends, some pieces of magnesium scrap, and finally a small bottle of waxy, white phosphorus. "We can but try," he sighed at last.
In full view of the guards, he sat down in the middle of the room. From the flashlight, he removed the lens, the bulb, and the reflector, baring the copper contacts. From the bottle of phosphorus he removed three white sticks. Then he built up a little pile of magnesium metal on the stone flooring.
The guards had stopped talking, and were watching him uneasily. Penton had found a length of copper wire in his pocket and Blake produced another. Rapidly Penton attached them to the contacts of the flashlight, so that they extended out about three feet, a supply wand of insulated copper wire, ending in two bare bits of metal. These he wrapped around two magnesium metal nuts he found. Briefly he pressed the button of the flashlight. The magnesium nuts flared magnificently for an instant, then died as the current was broken.
The guards were drawing closer, their swords unsheathed, but looking uncertain of themselves. "Huh." Penton nodded slowly. "They are trying to make it out. Never saw an electric arc, or fire. This, I think, will be fun." He wrapped a bit of the phosphorus in a scrap of copper wire. Again the
atomic flash sent a burst of flame between the contacts. This time the phosphorus came away flaring red, while an enormous cloud of dense, dirty-white smoke rolled out.
Penton and Blake slapped handkerchiefs across their noses, and ran to the water-jar on one side of the room. In a moment the room was filled with one of the most impenetrably dense, white clouds known to man.
Penton sumbled his way through the whiteness, with the protecting mask across his mouth. Outside the room,. the guards were calling; inside, one was choking, coughing, and upsetting the furniture. Penton bent over his pile of magnesium metal, and a moment later a terrific flare of blue-white light glared through the enveloping pall of phosphorus pentoxide smoke. The magnesium was burning beautifully. It made a perfect camouflage.
Sixty seconds later they moved rapidly down the silent corridor; far away, around many bends, they heard the shouts of alarmed guards.
"How the blazes do you fire these pop-guns?" demanded Blake, inspecting hastily his captured weapon.
"That stud there-it isn't a nut; it's a trigger." Penton coughed and swore. "That nose mask wasn't any too effective. And my mouth is beginning to itch from the acid."
They dodged down side corridors, past doors from which bewildered Callistans appeared, to be hurled out of the path of the two Terrestrials, muscled for a far heavier world. A door appeared at the side of a corridor, and Penton halted abruptly. He caught Blake, and looked at the lettering on the door a moment.
"Damn. Wish I'd learned their writing more consciously- I think that means exit." They tried it. At their feet, a corridor slanted downward, spiraling off to the right, and down. The steep slant made running dangerous; the thin air made running difficult.
Spaced lights gave the only illumination, doors appearing occasionally gave the only indication of altitude. Down-down till one of the doors burst open, and a troop of guardsmen faced them in blank surprise. The flashlight suddenly
flared with the incredible brilliance of burning magnesium, and Penton charged at the group. Blake's air gun soughed softly three times, then failed as the supply of compressed air gave out.
Stumbling over each other, the guards retreated from the weirdly flaming death Penton so evidently carried; some deadly radiation known only to these beings of another world, -no doubt- The Terrestrials followed their fleeing footsteps, but turned aside at the first window. Eighty feet beneath the aperture the orange lawn swaled off toward the shabby docks and warehouses.
"Let's go," said Penton. "We can stand an eighty foot drop-I hope."
Ill PIPELINE
THEY STOOD STILL, panting, two minutes later, lost in a maze of crated, baled goods, as the platoon of guards thundered across the broad lawn after them, running in great strides behind the Earthmen's crazy leaps. The masses of goods imported from unknown ports of this strange sea piled about them in an ordered confusion. Somewhere workmen were shouting, calling to the guards as Blake scurried around a great heap of crated fruit of some kind. Each crate was fully six feet square, and he halted abruptly.
"Penton, we need a residence. Catch hold." Blake swung at one of the bulky crates; it lifted easily to his Earth-strength. Five minutes later the guards deployed through the building, seeking, shouting, ordering. In a four-foot by six closet, completely surrounded by the friendly and uncommunicative fruit, Penton grinned thoughtfully.
"Here we are, hidden in this crate, walled in on every side by provisions, and with somewhat collapsed gastric regions, yet not taking advantage of the situation. Shall we eat?"
Blake looked at the fruit in the surrounding crates. They were about the size of lemons, with a horny-looking shell of bright purple with yellow-green spots.
"I don't know. I'm sensitive to color, and if they taste anything like they look, we'll be most remarkably ill."
"I'm not affected by color, but I am affected by food. They smell good, so I'll experiment. The soldiers seem to have missed us." Penton opened his pouch, and pawed through its contents. "Soap-I'm a cleanly individual but-say, it will grease the knife, though, whep we cut this wood. Borax water softener-no help. Another scrap of magnesium-ah, here we are. The knife."
Carefully soaping the blade, he cut at the soft wood of the crate. Presently he had an opening large enough to admit his fingers, and a moment later gently extracted one of the weird looking things. Cautiously he wiped the remaining soap from the knife blade, and attacked the horny coating. It was thin, and almost at once gave way, to allow a dark, purplish jelly to ooze forth. Skeptically Penton tested a bit of it on the point of his knife, tasted a larger amount, and smiled approval.
"Hm-m," said Blake, sampling Penton's offering. "Quite fairish. Have you any knowledge, plucked from Tha Lagth's mind as to-"
Abruptly there was a frantic scratching at the case near them, and a thunderbolt of peculiarly active flesh forced its way inward. Frantically Penton and Blake backed away in their tiny closet, beating at the furry thing half seen in the dimness. The creature, whatever it was, made a terrific leap at Penton, gripped, and sank its teeth with an unpleasant grating sound of power into the folds of the pouch he was carrying, tearing the tough fabric open instantly, to release a tinkling deluge of miscellaneous items onto the floor.
Instantly it forgot all about the men to paw frantically, with little whimpering sounds, among the wreckage. With an air of supreme triumph it came up with a small, square package, which it immediately crushed between its teeth,
to consume with every evidence of the most complete satisfaction.
"My god-that was borax!" gasped Penton. "That's going to be one sick animal in a sweet short time."
Paper and package vanished as the animal gulped heavily once. Its dimly seen head turned, and gleaming, violet eyes looked up at Penton.
"Borax," it remarked pleasantly, very happily in fact. The word echoed clearly, precisely in Penton's mind, in Blake's mind, too.
Penton sat down heavily. Blake looked blankly at the animal, now sufficiently motionless for observation. It was long, two feet long. It was low, not more than six inches at the shoulder, and it had a doglike head, with rather friendly, violet eyes. But it had six short, stubby legs, each armed with four sharp claws. It was smiling, more or less, in a friendly sort of way, and displaying a set of teeth that started with glistening, grayish fangs, almost metallic in their luster, and ranged backward to a group of opposed molars as broad as a man's thumb-nail. It had a soft, gray-brown coat of fur, and a long, gently wagging tail.
"More borax?" it amended.
"I think," said Blake faintly, "that it likes borax, hard as that may be to believe. In fact, I think it's a mind-reading, broadcasting pooch that came because it smelled our borax."
"Like borax," mentally agreed the animal, wagging a friendly tail.
"It looks like the result of mixing a d.t.'s nightmare with a dachshund," Penton decided. "I'm glad, at least, that it doesn't like me."
"Like you," insisted the animal. "Gkrthps likes you . . . More borax?" The mental impressions were somewhat slurred, accented, so to speak, as the utterances of a parrot are accented by the peculiar limitations of the parrot's anatomy.
"Gk-anyway, that must be its name," Blake said. "I think we had better call it Pipeline. With all those legs, tails and heads sticking out of that unnecessarily elongated body, I think it resembles a complete network of pipes," Penton
sighed. "I think-and hope-that it means it approves of me in a personal way; that is, that its liking for me and its appreciation of borax differ fundamentally. Anyway, it looks friendly."
"More borax?" telepathized the animal plaintively.
"No, Pipeline, not here. You'll have to visit us some day when we get back to the ship. There is about fifty pounds of it there."
Pipeline almost danced.
"Visit the ship . . . Go back to the ship."
"Hm-m, we'd like to, too, but can't just now. Say, Penton, how far do you think this creature's mental impressions reach out? Is he broadcasting our conferences here like an animated telepathic microphone? Did the Callistans send him here for that purpose?"
"Not far. I was just becoming aware of a sensation of a pleasant odor, which must have been, actually, my picking up his thoughts as he caught the scent of borax-sweet satellites, what a delicacy for any animal-when he burst in here. It doesn't radiate far. But-I have a suspicion it has a memory."
"Memory," agreed Pipeline proudly. "Remember, they must be in here . . . Watch the exits . . . No, guard the ship . . . You're a fool, watch the exits . . . You're an infernal, insubordinate, unripe idiot . . . You're a blistering under-captain, trying to tell a general his duty . . . Get out of here before I stamp my initials permanently in your liver . . . Watch the ship, you blithering, blasting, blowing, brainless aberration! What did they escape for? . . . They want the ship . . . Go to the ship, visit the ship. Borax-more borax-visit the ship . . . They went to the ship, so why hunt the city-they'll go to the ship . . . Watch the ship."
Blake sighed.
"Disconnected, perhaps," he said, leaning back against a crate, "but intelligent. Highly intelligent. You are a remarkable animal, Pipeline, and you get a full pound of borax for that, the minute we reach the ship, though what you want it for, and how you live on it beats me. You seem to have a