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

"Damn squealing, squawling brutes getting ready to pop
. . . you clumsy oaf, pick up that crate," Pipeliness commented, licking a scrap of meat from her paw.
"So that's what they are," Blake said angrily. "You might have had the decency to warn me they'd kick my nose."
Penton started. "They're moving in the crate now." The squealing grew suddenly louder, much louder. It became a rapidly rising howl that, they realized, must be echoing through the whole, vast warehouse.
"They're over here." Somewhere outside a voice shouted. The heavy rhythmic tread of running guards drew nearer. Blake rose, looking at Penton.
"I think we'll have to go somewhere else."
Penton rose with his hands above his head. The crate overhead balanced on his hands, he suddenly heaved with all his power. The crate, bulky as it was, flew into the air to land with a tremendous crash somewhere beyond. Instantly, a terrific howling, squealing riot of sound started. Blake followed the crate with another, full of the quiescent stragath. The shock of landing broke the crate and aroused the contents.
The two Callistan dogs were incredibly active, but the stragath were ten thousand to one. In rapid succession, Pen-ton crashed open four more crates.
"That may divert them," he said mildly, watching the results take form.
Penton and Blake set out hastily, entirely obscured from the sight of approaching guards by a mad, inverted snowstorm of tens of thousands of bouncing, bounding, madly cavorting stragath. Behind them, guards stepping on the weird things were falling in the resultant slippery mess. Blithely, the Terrestrials dodged through mountainous heaps of goods, down a long lane, finally to a small locked door. In unison, they charged it, their Earth-born strength proving too great for the frame of the exit.
"They don't look as though they could possibly carry that load," said Penton, nodding toward the great lumbering trucks rolling down the broad traffic-choked artery that
paralleled the harbor and docks. Immense trucks, almost lost under the vast heaps of merchandise loading them, rumbled by on wheels seemingly impossibly fragile. "That light gravity makes heavy loads light, and hence bulky. Bulky loads, my friend, suggest loads on which we can hide remarkably well. Won't you join me?"
A huge truckload of bagged goods of some type paused momentarily in the exigencies of traffic. A moment later it started on again. Penton and Blake pulled the huge bags of some granular, sticky substance over them.
"Must you pick sticky stuff?" grunted Blake. "Wonder how-hey, for the-hey, Ted-"
"Sh-h-" his friend clapped a restraining hand over his mouth. "I told you they wouldn't be lost easily. They just jumped on the-hey, stop it, Pipeline. My face is clean- at any rate cleaner than your tongue. What happened, couldn't you hold any more stragath?"
"More borax," suggested Pipeline. "More borax for Pipeliness."
For half an hour the truck rumbled on slowly, stopped and started in the slow-moving, choked traffic. Finally the truck turned, stopped a moment while something rattled noisily near them, then started again with a smooth, soundless pull of acceleration. Abruptly, the traffic noises changed, and echoing reverberations surrounded them. A Callistan called cheerily outside, and another answered him from the truck.
"It's all out," said Penton hastily. "This is the delivery point, I imagine. We'll have to put these fellows to sleep for a while, and go on-we're inside a building of some kind- phewl Must be some sort of chemical plant." Penton stirred, the sticky bag that had covered him moved, and he stood upright. Beside him, Blake rose simultaneously, and together they leaped to the ground. Four Callistans started at them in startled amazement-and slumped soundlessly to the ground after none-too-gentle taps.
They stood on the floor of an immense single room. Reaching up a hundred feet above them, and spread out
three hundred feet in each direction, it was as large as three football fields, under one roof. But huge as it was, it was filled with enormous wooden tanks coated inside and out with some dark plastic material.
From the tanks, thick silvery metal pipes reached up, interconnecting in a network of conduits leading across the room. Other pipes of plastic material led to each tank from a single huge reservoir at one end of the room. Somewhere, huge blowers were whistling softly.
"Where do we go from here?" asked Blake.
"Mind your step, you blithering idiot. . . . Grag Kuolp, some day you'll learn what I mean. ... Touch one of those conduits, and by the Gods of Space, electricity will tie you in knots of a hundred unpleasant varieties. ... Mind your step," chanted Pipeliness. "Mind your step, visit us at the fifty pounds of borax and ten kilograms of boric acid."
Penton whistled and looked into the animal's violet eyes.
"You can repeat only thoughts thunk near you, Pipeliness, but I take it you have an editorial ability-you repeat appropriate ones that make sense. You mean, I take it, that if we don't watch our steps, we won't visit the ship. Yes, you may be-Wavering Worlds, Blake-keep away from those metal things!" Penton was suddenly leaping up the wooden stairs that climbed the side of the nearest of the tanks.
Blake followed him swiftly, to pause as he neared the top. An overpowering odor of rank animal life assailed his nostrils; an odor, he realized suddenly, the great blowers had been dissipating near the lower levels. Faltering, he reached the edge of the tank and, not breathing the foul odor, looked down.
A titanic mass of warm, steaming flesh lay there, an immense, quivering vat of raw meat. Into it the silvery pipes plunged, dividing into ten thousand tendrils. Into it, the plastic tube fed a constant stream of frothy, bubbling liquid. From that another plastic tube drew a constant stream of putrid-smelling fluid. Nauseated, Blake stumbled away, down the wooden steps. A moment later, Penton, his face greenish in hue, followed him. But the latter immediately
started off across the great room to a small space on one side, where men had evidently been intended to work.
Blake found him staring at a clear, glassy panel, some ten by ten feet, connected with the silvery tubes and the maze of plastic tubes, fitted with dials, valves, gauges, and wheel-controls.
"By the Nine Gods of the Nine Worlds, and the multiple deities of spacel" Penton breathed. "These men-Blake, my lad, do you know what that is?" Penton bent forward, looked at bars, pipes, instruments and sighed. He turned around, gaping in awe. "That, my boy, is a power house. It generates power at about 1000 volts D.C."
"Which can, of course, be raised by the addition of further cells in series," interrupted the beast at their side. "The greatest difficulty is the size required to obtain practical amperages. . . . This can be done, however. . . . Take that animal out, if you will, Purthal. . . . That's the third time it's wandered in here. ... It belongs in Farg Thorun's lecture room. . . . This can be done, as I was saying, now blast you, stay where you belong before I throttle you," Pipeline concluded.
Blake stared. "Electric eels-they have 'em trained!"
"No, those aren't animals-they're synthetic life made to serve the function. This is where they get the power for the electric mechanism of half the city. I imagine, for such services as electric controls, telephones, radio, telegraph.
"But look, Blake. The operator of this plant must be a well paid technician, and should, I imagine, have a private car. It must be in the building somewhere. I'll look down near the door the truck came in; you see if it's toward the back." Penton started toward the doorway as Blake trotted toward the dim-lit rear of the huge room. Pipeline and his mate looked at them uncertainly, then split, each following one of the two men.
Penton found the vehicle, a small, smooth-lined sedan-type car, parked between two of the giant, wooden tanks.
"Blake-" he called out. Faintly, from the far end of the room he heard his friend's answer.
"Rod, look over that switchboard, and figure out which are the mains lending the power out to the city, and open those switches. I wouldn't cut off the blowers, or the circulating pumps. That electric-flesh stuff might get peeved and climb out. I'll look over the car."
V
MUSCLEMOBILE
FIVE MINUTES LATER Blake found him sitting on the door ledge of the car with Pipeline before him. He looked up at Blake and shook his head. "These Callistans are the super-past-masters of the grand craft of life-molding. Take a look at the engine." Blake glanced at the car, and noted that it was evidently rear-engined. A moment later he had the hood up and was looking at the mass of mechanism.
"Looks like a six-cylinder radial type, equipped with a supercharger-but it's made out of plastics. Something like the one we rode in-and wrecked-on Ganymede."
"Huh," grunted Penton. "Almost the whole car is. It's got a metal frame, but on a fireless world metal is costly. Plastics, weight for weight, are nearly as strong. This isn't painted blue; it is blue."
"The engine isn't. It looks like green glass."
"I think I pointed out that even a Diesel couldn't work in this air? That, my boy, is not an engine. That is an animal, a nice, synthetic animal."
"Animal! A six-cylinder animal? With a gear-box and ignition system?" _
"No, six-muscled animal. The supercharger is not a supercharger; it's a blower, a mechanical lung. The fuel tank contains not gasoline, but a sugar solution. I tasted it. The ignition system, on the other hand, is made up of synthetic nervous tissue, and a few, miniature electric cells for stimulation. Muscles, my friend, don't need a high oxygen con-
centration; they repair themselves, renew themselves, and grow stronger with use.
"I didn't have time to look, but I suspect that the animal engine also has a series of synthetic kidneys to remove waste products, and probably some oil-secreting cells, like the oil glands in your elbow, to supply lubrication. Six muscles pulling on tendons connected to a slip-ring-probably made of non-poisoning silver-a metal crankshaft geared direct to the wheels. The speedometer reads to the equivalent of eighty miles an hour; about the speed of a greyhound in good training."
Blake looked thoughtfully at the streamlined vehicle.
"I wonder, would it answer to the name of Rover, do you suppose?"