"Philip Jose Farmer - WOT 5 - The Lavalite World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

supple as an octopus's. A pair of tentacles also grew from the base.

The latter helped balance the trunk as it moved on two short kneeless
legs ending in huge round barky toeless feet. When the tree temporarily
changed from an ambulatory to sedentary state, the lower tentacles bored into
the soil, grew roots, and sucked sustenance from the ground. The roots could
be easily broken off and the tentacles withdrawn when the tree decided to move
on.

Kickaha had asked Urthona why he had had such a clumsy unnatural monster
made in his biolabs.

"It pleased me to do so."

Urthona probably was wishing he hadn't done so. He had wakened the
others, and all were staring at the weird-and frightening-creatures.

Kickaha walked up to him. "How do they communicate?"

"Through pheromones. Various substances they emit. There are about
thirty of these, and a tree smelling them receives various signals. They don't
think; their brains are about the size of a dinosaur's. They react on the
instinctive-or robotic-level. They have a well-developed herd instinct,
though."

"Any of these pheromones stimulate fear?"

"Yes. But you have to make one of them afraid, and there's nothing in
this situation to scare them."

"I was thinking," Kickaha said, "that it's too bad you don't carry
around a vial of fear-pheromones."
 "I used to," Urthona said.

The nearest scout had halted thirty feet away. Kickaha looked at Anana,
who was sixty feet from the group. Her beamer was ready for trouble from the
three men or the tree.

Kickaha walked to the scout and stopped ten feet from it. It waved its
greenish tentacles. Others were coming to join it, though not on a run. He
estimated that with those legs they could go perhaps a mile an hour. But then
he didn't know their full potentiality. Urthona didn't remember how fast they
could go.

Even as he walked down toward the tree, he could feel the earth swelling
beneath him, could see the rate of its shaping increase. The air became
warmer, and spaces had appeared between the blades of grass. The earth was
black and greasy-looking. If the shaping stopped, and there was no change for
three days, the grass would grow enough to fill in the bare spots.