"Philip Jose Farmer - The Book of Philip Jose Farmer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

into the earth at a forty-five degree angle. It illuminated the passage with a flashlight
which it took from its belt. They came into a large chamber which contained all of the
fifty dekapeds. These were waiting motionless. The biped, as if sensing Lane's
curiosity, pulled off its glove and held it before several small vents in the wall. Lane
removed his glove and felt warm air flowing from the holes.
Evidently this was a pressure chamber, built by the ten-legged things. But
such evidence of intelligent engineering did not mean that these things had the
individual intelligence of a man. It could mean group intelligence such as Terrestrial
insects possess.
After a while, the chamber was filled with air. Another plug was pulled; Lane
followed the dekapeds and his rescuer up another forty-five degree tunnel. He
estimated that he would find himself inside the tube from which the biped had first
come. He was right. He crawled through another hole into it.
And a pair of beaks clicked as they bit down on his helmet!
Automatically, he shoved at the thing, and under the force of his blow the
dekaped lost its bite and went rolling on the floor, a bundle of thrashing legs.
Lane did not worry about having hurt it. It did not weigh much, but its body
must be tough to be able to plunge without damage from the heavy air inside the tube
into the almost-stratospheric conditions outside.
However, he did reach for the knife at his belt. But the biped put its hand on
his arm and shook one of its heads.
 Later, he was to find out that the seeming bite must have been an accident.
Always -- with one exception -- the leggers were to ignore him.
He was also to find that he was lucky. The leggers had come out to inspect
their garden because, through some unknown method of detection, they knew that the
plantlets had been disturbed. The biped normally would not have accompanied them.
However, today, its curiosity aroused because the leggers had gone out three times in
three days, it had decided to investigate.
The biped turned out its flashlight and motioned to Lane to follow.
Awkwardly, he obeyed. There was light, but it was dim, a twilight. Its source was the
many creatures that hung from the ceiling of the tube. These were three feet long and
six inches thick, cylindrical, pinkish-skinned, and eyeless. A dozen frondlike limbs
waved continuously, and their motion kept air circulating in the tunnel.
Their cold firefly glow came from two globular pulsing organs which hung
from both sides of the round loose-lipped mouth at the free end of the creature. Slime
drooled from the mouth, and dripped onto the floor or into a narrow channel which
ran along the lowest part of the sloping floor. Water ran in the six-inch deep channel,
the first native water he had seen. The water picked up the slime and carried it a little
way before it was gulped up by an animal that lay on the bottom of the channel.
Lane's eyes adjusted to the dimness until he could make out the water-dweller.
It was torpedo-shaped and without eyes or fins. It had two openings in its body; one
obviously sucked in water, the other expelled it.
He saw at once what this meant. The water at the North Pole melted in the
summertime and flowed into the far end of the tube system. Helped by gravity and by
the pumping action of the line of animals in the channel, the water was passed from
the edge of the Pole to the equator.
Leggers ran by him on mysterious errands. Several, however, halted beneath
some of the downhanging organisms. They reared up on their hind five legs and their
tongues shot out and into the open mouths by the glowing balls. At once, the fire-
worm -- as Lane termed it -- its cilia waving wildly, stretched itself to twice its former