"Alan Dean Foster - Flinx 16 - Snakes Eyes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

desolate reaches of the High Desert he could anticipate finding no water and precious little game.

Five days before, he'd shot a skipgravel. Only hunger had enabled him to eat all of the tiny quasi-rodent,
down to the last bean-size organ. That had been his last solid food. His water... when had his water run
out? His brain said yesterday. His tongue and throat argued for a week.

Leaning back, he glared at the cloud-mottled sky that had become an unfriendly, unavoidable
companion. It was overcast, as always. Few regions on the winged world of Moth saw the sun more than a
couple of days a year. But the homogenized clouds overhead held on to their slight moisture content with
the tenacity of a bereaved mistress guarding her benefactor's will.

Towering on the western horizon, broken-toothed mountains prevented any substantial moisture from
reaching the High Desert. It all fell heavily on their eastern slopes. None fell where it could revive Knigta
Yakus.

Painfully he squinted at the distant snow-capped spires of five-thousand-meter-high Mount Footasleep.
Beneath it and several kilometers to the north lay Coc-cyxcrack Pass and the town of Edgedune. Both
were unbearably far away, impossibly out of his reach.

In his youth, when his body was made of braided duralloy cable insulated in hard flesh, he might have
made it. Bitterly he cursed his eighty-two-year-old frame. The insulation was battered, the cables of his
muscles corroded away. Dehydration gave his naturally thin form the look of a dead twig. Once-powerful
muscles hung slackly from old bones like slabs of exfoliating shale.

A sad snort caused him to look backward. Even though he had already abandoned all his equipment, the
dryzam was beginning to fail. The ten-meter-long scaly quadruped stumbled along faithfully in his wake.
Its long anteaterlike snou*. swung slowly from side to side over the rocky ground. Absurdly tiny eyes
glowed behind the snout. There were five of them, set in a curve across the top of the skull. Like the sails
of an ancient ship, twin dorsal fins moved on the back. They helped to cool the tired creature, but that was
no substitute for a long drink.

Oddly, the starving dryzam no longer made Yakus nervous, though his desiccated human carcass would
make a welcome snack for the omnivorous beast of burden. A more faithful creature Yakus could not
imagine. It had never complained about its load, or about the always slim rations Yakus had allowed it.
Despite its evident thirst, the prospector was convinced it would die before it turned on him. The animal
was the best purchase he'd made on Moth.

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 Foster, Alan Dean - Commonwealth 16 - Flinx - Snakes Eyes (SS) (v1.0)




Yakus had a great deal of respect for such loyalty. He eyed the slightly swollen belly of the green-and-
yellow beast sadly. Its meat and blood could keep him alive for some time, maybe even long enough to
reach Edgedune. Idly he fingered the needier slung at his hip. Could he kill it?

"I'm sorry, Dryzam." He'd never bothered to name it.

The creature halted when Yakus did. It wheezed painfully, sounding like a badly tuned oboe. Already it