"Edward L. Ferman - Best From F&SF, 23rd Edition" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ferman Edward L)

away at its creeping pace, and hurried off to find Song.
"You've got to name it after me," he said as they hurried back to the garden. "That's my right, isn't it,
as the discoverer?"
"Sure," Song said, peering along his pointed finger. "Just show me the damn thing and I'll immortalize
you."
The thing was twenty centimeters long, almost round, and dome-shaped. It had a hard shell on top.
"I don't know quite what to do with it," Song admitted. "If it's the only one, I don't dare dissect it, and
maybe I shouldn't even touch it"
"Don't worry, there's another over behind you." Now that they were looking for them, they quickly
spied four of the creatures. Song took a sample bag from her pouch and held it open in front of the beast.
It crawled halfway into the bag, then seemed to think something was wrong. It stopped, but Song nudged
it in and picked it up. She peered at the underside and laughed in wonder.
"Wheels," she said. "The thing runs on wheels."
"I don't know where it came from," Song told the group that night. "I don't even quite believe in it.
It'd make a nice educational toy for a child, though. I took it apart into twenty or thirty pieces, put it back
together, and it still runs. It has a high-impact polystyrene carapace, nontoxic paint on the outsideтАФ"
"Not really polystyrene," Ralston interjected.
". . . and I guess if you kept changing the batteries it would run forever. And it's nearly polystyrene,
that's what you said."
"Were you serious about the batteries?" Lang asked.
"I'm not sure. Marty thinks there's a chemical metabolism in the upper part of the shell, which I
haven't explored yet. But I can't really say if it's alive in the sense we use. I mean, it runs on wheels! It has
three wheels, suited for sand, and something that's a cross between a rubber-band drive and a
mainspring. Energy is stored in a coiled muscle and released slowly. I don't think it could travel more than
a hundred meters. Unless it can recoil the muscle, and I can't tell how that might be done."
"It sounds very specialized," McKillian said thoughtfully. "Maybe we should be looking for the niche
it occupies. The way you describe it, it couldn't function without help from a symbiote. Maybe it fertilizes
the plants, like bees, and the plants either donate or are robbed of the power to wind the spring. Did you
look for some mechanism the bug could use to steal energy from the rotating gears in the whirligigs?"
"That's what I want to do in the morning," Song said. "Unless Mary will let us take a look tonight?"
She said it hopefully, but without real expectation. Mary Lang shook her head decisively.
"It'll keep. It's cold out there, baby."
A new exploration of the whirligig garden the next day revealed several new species, including one
more thing that might be an animal. It was a flying creature, the size of a fruit fly, that managed to glide
from plant to plant when the wind was down by means of a freely rotating set of blades, like an autogiro.
Crawford and Lang hung around as the scientists looked things over. They were not anxious to get
back to the task that had occupied them for the last two weeks: that of bringing the Podkayne to a
horizontal position without wrecking her. The ship had been rigged with stabilizing cables soon after
landing, and provision had been made in the plans to lay the ship on its side in the event of a really big
windstorm. But the plans had envisioned a work force of twenty, working all day with a maze of pulleys
and gears. It was slow work and could not be rushed. If the ship were to tumble and lose pressure, they
didn't have a prayer.
So they welcomed an opportunity to tour fairyland. The place was even more bountiful than the last
time Crawford had taken a look. There were thick vines mat Song assured him were running with
water, both hot and cold, and various other fluids. There were more of the tall variety of derrick,
making the place look like a pastel oilfield.
They had little trouble finding where the matthews came from. They found dozens of
twenty-centimeter lumps on the sides of the large derricks. They evidently grew from them like tumors
and were released when they were ripe. What they were for was another matter. As well as they could
discover, the matthews simply crawled in a straight line until their power ran out If they were wound up