"Avram Davidson - The Kar-chee Reign" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davidson Avram)

indiscriminately contagious, a roaring wind, sucking up that which lay
behind as well as driving on that which lay before it. Those who toiled in
sending people out were themselves caught up in it and strove to be
themselves sent out. And so, finally, there were comparatively few left
behind.
The long morning had been filled with noise. The long afternoon was
strangely silent. The silence at first was filled with remembered echo.
Earth's remaining people had worked themselves into an unprecedented
fatigue. They had also, it seemed, finally and forever plundered their
planet dry. Scarcely a trace of crude metals remained, and not even a trace
of mineral fuels. The very wastes of the ancient mines had been reclaimed,
reprocessed, redigested and reconsumed. In the last stages, the
technicians had cannibalized their own technology, gobbling up factories
and smelting down fabric and machinery to consolidate and produce the
ultimate ships. The near-empty cities were at last dismantled for their
bones and scrap, ruins ravaged like pigs nosing for truffles.
Finally, no more ships were built on earth and no more migrant parties
sent off. For a while yet, though, the old world Earth stayed in touch with
her children via out-world-built ships touching down with visitors. But
there were never many of them; and as the Earth-born in the outer worlds
grew old and died off, there were ever fewer. So, finally, even they ceased.
There was no announcement, only that the perhaps penultimate one bore
notice, in the form of so few passengers, that the children-planets had
become too caught up in their own concerns to care much about the
withered mother-world.
Yet no doubt habit alone might have served to keep up a
communication with some semblance of regularity. The migrants had
been as careful as they might to purge and to protect themselves against
bringing communicable disease with them as they swarmed out to the
series of worlds which later became known as The Inner Circle. But when
they learned of the presence among them of the deadliest such disease of
all it was too late: it had blazed up, and it was not to die down for
centuries. Its name was War.
And it was then, when all the other worlds of human tenancy were so
pre-empted and preoccupied that the very awareness of the
Earth-Mother-world became only faint memoryтАФless, perhaps, than the
memory of Juteland was to England during her Colonial warsтАФit was then
that the Kar-chee came. Earth-planet may have seemed sucked dry,
worthless, to those who now lived or whose fathers had once lived on itтАж
just as the rind and the pulp of a squeezed orange might. But that same
would not seem worthless at all to a pig or a swarm of flies. Nor did it
seem so to the Kar-chee. They left their lairs around the Ring Stars and
swarmed down onto weary, exhausted, riven old Earth, to pick the bones
and crack the plundered planet for its marrow.


The spring and the man-made salt-lick were well set up for hunting, the
arroyo and ravine being so as to provide an almost perfect situation for
ambush. Only the one narrow way led up to the water welling up at the
foot of an abrupt cliff: as the deer went up, so that same way they had to