"Foster, Alan Dean - Splinter of the minds eye" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

Fluid mud filled most of a languid stream to the right of the ship. It meandered in slow motion. To his left the trunk of the enormous tree he'd nearly hit towered into the mist. Beyond lay a tangle of other tall growths fringed with bushes and tired, drooping ferns. Gray-brown ground bordered it. There was no way to tell from a distance how solid the surface was. Bracing himself with a hand on a small branch, Luke leaned over the side of the ship. The X-wing appeared to be resting on similar terrain. It wasn't sinking. That meant he might be able to walk. This was some comfort to him, since without a ship he was a rotten flier.

Smiling slightly to himself, he crouched and peered under the limb. The double wing on the port side of the ship had been snapped off cleanly somewhere back in the forest, leaving only twin metal stubs. Both engines on that side, naturally, were also missing. Unequivocally, he was grounded.

Carefully crawling back into the ruined cockpit he unlocked the seat and shifted it to one side, then began rummaging in the sealed compartment behind it for the material he'd have to carry with him. Emergency rations, his father's lightsaber, a thermal suit... the last because despite the tropic appearance of some of the vegetation, it was decidedly cool outside.

Luke knew there were temperate rain forests as well as tropical ones. While the temperature would probably not become dangerously cold, it still could combine with the omnipresent moisture to give him an uncomfortable and potentially debilitating chill. So he took the precaution of packing the thin suit. The survival pack for his back was strapped to the backside of the seat. Unbuckling it, he began to fill its copious interior with supplies from the compartment.

When the rip-proof sack was stuffed, he tried to seal the cockpit as best he could to protect it. Then he sat on the edge of the seat and thought.

His preliminary observations had revealed no sign of the Princess' Y-wing. Yet in the damp, foggy air it could have touched down ten meters away and still be effectively invisible. She probably had landed or crashed slightly ahead of him, according to his estimate of how rapidly he had set his own ship down. Lacking any other information, he had no choice but to continue on foot along his last plotted course for her.

It had occurred to him to stand on the nose of the ship and shout, but he'd decided it would be better to locate the ship visually first. The cacophony of cries, hoots, howls, whistles and buzzings which seeped out of the encircling bog and thick vegetation didn't encourage him to make himself conspicuous. Shouting might attract all sorts of attention, some of it possibly carnivorous.

Better to find the Princess' ship first. With any luck she would be seated sensibly in the cockpit, alive and intact and fuming with impatience as she waited for him to arrive.

Pulling himself clear of the cockpit again, Luke used branches for balance as he climbed down to the broken stub of the port double wing. He lowered himself carefully to the ground, which was soft, almost springy. Pulling up one foot, he saw that his boot sole was already coated with sticky gray gook that resembled wet modeling clay. But the ground held, supported him. Artoo joined him a moment later.

Thanks to the abruptness of his forced landing, he didn't have to search for a walking stick. There was an abundance of shattered, splintered limbs strewn in the fighter's wake. He selected one which would serve both for support and for testing the ground ahead.

Using the nose of the ship as a crude guide, he set his tracomp and they started off, angling a few degrees to starboard.

It might have been a movement of bush branches in the forest, it might have been the Force, or it might have been an old-fashioned hunch, but even Ben Kenobi would have admitted that Luke had only one chance of finding the Princess' ship. If it didn't lie close along the path he was taking, if he missed it and passed on, he could continue trodding the surface of Mimban for a thousand years without ever seeing her again.

If his original plotting tape had been accurate and if she hadn't altered her course of descent at the last moment for some strange reason, he ought to find her within a week. Of course, he considered, she might not have been able to prevent her fighter from changing its angle of fall. He shunted that possibility aside. The situation was grim enough without such speculations.

The fog-mist-rain altered its consistency but never dried up completely. So it wasn't long before the exposed portions of his body were thoroughly soaked. At present, he thought, it was more of a belligerent fog than a real rain.

His suit kept his body moisture-free, but face, hands and scalp soon had rivulets of their own as water accumulated. There were rare, almost clear-dry moments, but he still spent a lot of energy regularly wiping the accumulated water beads from his forehead and cheeks.

Once he saw something that looked like a four-meter-long pale snake slither off into the underbrush at his approach. As he strode cautiously over the path it had taken, he saw that it had left a grooved track lined with luminous mucus in the soft earth. But Luke wasn't impressed. He had spent little time in zoological study. Even on Tatooine, which harbored its own protoplasmic freaks, such things hadn't interested him much. If a critter didn't try to eat you, claw you or otherwise ingest you, there were other things to absorb one's interest.

Nonetheless, he now had to direct all his attention to keeping to his predetermined path. Despite the tracom built into his suit sleeve he knew he could easily lose his way. A deviation of a tenth of a degree could be critical.

He mounted a slight rise during one of the rare, almost clear periods. Through the fog and mist he glimpsed monolithic gray battlements off in the distance. It seemed likely to him that those walls had not been raised by human hands.

Their uniform steel-gray color made them look as if they'd been constructed of a child's toy blocks. Luke couldn't be sure, this far away, whether their color was true or distorted by the shifting fog. Soaring gray towers were inlaid with black stone or metal and boasted misshapen domes.

He paused, tempted for the first time to change direction and explore. There were discoveries to be made here. However, the Princess waited not in that eldritch city but somewhere further on, in an environment which at any moment might prove hostile.

As if in response to his thought, he noticed a stirring in a clump of rust-green bushes ahead. Straining every sense, he dropped to one knee and removed the lightsaber from its place at his waist. The vegetation began to rustle violently. His thumb slid over the activation stud. Artoo beeped nervously alongside.

Whatever was in there was moving toward him. He thought about testing the wind, remembered sheepishly that there wasn't any. That, however, might not prove an inhibition to the creature approaching him.

Quite abruptly the greenery ahead parted. Out walked the Mimbanite. It was a large dark brown furry ball, with patches and stripes of green covering its body, roughly a meter in diameter. Four short furry legs supported it, ending in thick, double digits. Four arms poked clear of the upper surface. The modest tail was naked like a rat's.

Two wide eyes peering out from among the bristly fur were all that showed of a face. They grew wider as they settled on Luke and Artoo Detoo.

Luke waited tensely, finger poised over the lightsaber switch.