"Lester Del Rey - The Wings of Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Del Rey Lester)

imagination came in handy in cases like this. He went about the business of jockeying down the enormous
crater as if he were docking at York port, too busy with the uncertain blast to worry about what he might
find at the bottom. Slim gazed at him in wonder, then fell back to staring at the screen for some indication
of the reason behind this obviously artificial trap.

Lhin scratched idly through the pile of dirt and rotten shale, pried a thin scrap of reddened stone out
from where his eyes had missed it the first time, and rose slowly to his feet. The Great Ones had been
good to him, sending a rockslide just when the old beds were wearing thin and poor from repeated
digging. His sensitive nostrils told him there was magnesium, ferrous matter, and sulphur in abundance, all
more than welcome. Of course, he'd hoped there might be copper, even as little as the end of his finger,
but of that there seemed to be no sign. And without copperтАФ
He shrugged the thought aside as he had done a thousand times before, and picked up his crude
basket, now filled half with broken rock and half with the lichenlike growth that filled this end of the
crater. One of his hands ground a bit of rottenstone together with shreds of lichen and he popped the
mixture into his mouth. Grace to the Great Ones who had sent the slide; the pleasant flavor of magnesium
tickled his tongue, and the lichens were full-flavored from the new richness of the soil around them. Now,
with a trace of copper, there would have been nothing left to wish for.
With a rueful twitch of his supple tail, Lhin grunted and turned back toward his cave, casting a
cursory glance up at the roof of the cavern. Up there, long miles away, a bright glare lanced down,
diffusing out as it pierced through the layers of air, showing that the long lunar day was nearing noon,
when the sun would lance down directly through the small guarding gate. It was too high to see, but he
knew of the covered opening where the sloping walls of the huge valley ended and the roof began.
Through all the millennia of his race's slow defeat, that great roof had stood, unsupported except for the
walls that stretched out around in a circle of perhaps fifty miles in diameter, strong and more lasting than
even the crater itself; the one abiding monument to the greatness that had been his people's.
He knew without having to think of it that the roof was artificial, built when the last thin air was
deserting the moon, and the race had sought a final refuge here in the deepest crater, where oxygen could
be trapped and kept from leaking away. In a vague way, he could sense the ages that had passed since
then and wonder at the permanence of the domed roof, proof against all time.
Once, as the whole space about him testified, his had been a mighty race. But time had worked on
them, aging the race as it had individuals, removing the vigor of their youth and sending in the slow
creepers of hopelessness. What good was existence here, cooped up in one small colony, away from
their world? Their numbers had diminished and some of their skill had gone from them. Their machines
had crumbled and vanished, unreplaced, and they had fallen back to the primitive, digging out the rocks
of the crater walls and the lichens they had cultured to draw energy from the heat and radioactive
phosphorescence of the valley instead of sunlight. Fewer young were planted each year, and of the few, a
smaller percentage proved fertile, so that their original million fell to thousands, then to hundreds, and
finally to a few grubbing individuals.
Only then had they awakened to the danger of extinction, to find it too late. There had been three
elders when Lhin was grown, his seed being the only fertile one. Now the elders were gone long years
since, and Lhin had the entire length and breadth of the crater to himself. And life was a long series of
sleeps and food forages, relieved only by the same thoughts that had been in his mind while his dead
world turned to the light and away more than a thousand times. Monotony had slowly killed off his race,
but now that its work was nearly done, it had ended. Lhin was content with his type of life; he was
habituated, and immune to boredom.
His feet had been moving slowly along with the turning of his thoughts, and he was out of the valley
proper, near the door of the shelter carved into the rocky walls which he had chosen from the many as
his home. He munched another mouthful of rock and lichen and let the diffused sunlight shine on him for a
few minutes more, then turned into the cave. He needed no light, since the rock walls about had all been
rendered radioactive in the dim youth of his race, and his eyes were adapted to wide ranges of light