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

conditions. He passed quickly through the outer room, containing his woven lichen bed and few simple
furnishings, and back into the combination nursery and workshop, an illogical but ever-present hope
drawing him back to the far corner.
But as always, it was reasonless. The box of rich earth, pulped to a fine loam and watered carefully,
was barren of life. There was not even the beginning of a small red shoot to awaken him to hope for the
future. His seed was infertile, and the time when all life would be extinct was growing near. Bitterly he
turned his back on the nursery bed.
So little lacking, yet so much! A few hundred molecules of copper salt to eat, and the seeds he grew
would be fertile; or those same copper molecules added to the water would render the present seeds
capable of growing into vigorous manhood-or womanhood; Lhin's people carried both male and female
elements within each member, and could grow the seeds that became their children either alone or with
another. So long as one member of the race lived, as many as a hundred young a year could be reared in
the carefully tended incubating soilтАФif the vital hormone containing copper could be made.
But that, it seemed, was not to be. Lhin went over his laboriously constructed apparatus of hand-cut
rock bowls and slender rods bound together into tubes, and his hearts were heavy within him. The slow
fire of dried lichen and gummy tar burned still, and slowly, drop by drop, liquid oozed from the last tube
into a bowl. But even in that there was no slightest odor of copper salts. Well, he had tried that and
failed. The accumulation of years of refining had gone into the water that kept the nursery soil damp, and
in it there had been too little of the needed mineral for life. Almost dispassionately he threw the permanent
metal rolls of his race's science back into their cylinders and began disassembling the chemical part of his
workshop.
That meant the other solution, harder, and filled with risks, but necessary now. Somewhere up near
the roof, the records indicated, there was copper in small amounts, but well past the breathable
concentration of air. That meant a helmet and tanks for compressed air, along with hooks and grapples to
bridge the eroded sections of the old trail and steps leading up, instruments to detect the copper, and a
pump to fill the tanks. Then he must carry tanks forward, cache them, and go up to make another cache,
step by step, until his supply line would reach the top andтАФperhapsтАФhe could find copper for a new
beginning.
He deliberately avoided thinking of the time required and the chances of failure. His foot came down
on the little bellows and blue flames licked up from his crude forge as he drew out the hunks of refined
metal and began heating them to malleability. Even the shaping of it by hand to the patterns of the ancient
records was almost impossible, and yet, somehow, he must accomplish it correctly. His race must not
die!
He was still working doggedly hours later when a high-pitched note shot through the cave. A meteor,
coming into the fields around the sealing slides of the roof, and a large one! In all Lhin's life there had
been none big enough to activate the warning screens, and he had doubted that the mechanism, though
meant to be ageless and draw sun power until the sun died, was still functioning. As he stood staring at
the door senselessly, the whistling note came again.
Now, unless he pressed his hand over the inductance grid, the automatic forces would come into
play, twisting the meteor aside and beyond the roof. But he gave no thought to that as he dashed forward
and slapped his fingers against the grille panel. It was for that he had chosen his rock house, once the
quarters of the Watchers who let the few scouting rockets of the dim past ages in and out. A small glow
from the grid indicated the meteor was through, and he dropped his hand, letting the slides close again.
Then he waited impatiently for it to strike, moving out to the entrance. Perhaps the Great Ones were
kind and were answering his prayers at last. Since he could find no copper here, they were sending a
token from outer space to him, and who knew what fabulous amounts it might containтАФperhaps even as
much as he could hold in one hand! But why hadn't it struck? He scanned the roof anxiously, numb with a
fear that he had been too late and the forces had thrown it aside.
No, there was a flare aboveтАФbut surely not such as a meteor that size should make as it sliced down
through the resisting air! A sharp stinging whine hit his ears finally, flickering off and on; and that was not