"Foster,.Alan.Dean.-.Splinter.Of.The.Mind's.Eye" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

Undoing the g-locks, Luke slipped free of the harness. Even moving slowly and carefully, he felt as if every muscle in his body had been grabbed and pulled from opposite ends to the near-breaking point. Ignoring the pain as best he could, he inventoried his surroundings.

Between the distortions generated by the electronic storm he'd passed through and the more prosaic results of the crash, his instruments had become candidates for the secondhand shop. They would never operate this fighter again. Turning to his left, he keyed the exit panel but was not surprised when it failed to respond. After throwing the double switch on the manual release he jabbed the emergency stud. Two of the four explosive bolts fired. The panel moved a few centimeters, then froze.

Pressing himself back in the pilot's seat, Luke braced himself with both hands and kicked. That accomplished nothing save to send shooting pains up both legs. All that remained was the standard exit, if it hadn't been too badly jammed. Reaching up with both hands, he shoved the release mechanism, then pushed. Nothing. He paused, panting as he considered his alternatives.

The cockpit hood began to lift by itself. Squirming frantically, Luke tried to find his pistol. A querulous beep reassured him. "Artoo Detoo!"

A curved metallic hood looked down at him, the single red electronic eye studying him anxiously. "Yes, I'm okayЕ I think."

Using Artoo's center leg as a brace, Luke pulled himself up and out. Clearing his legs, he got to his feet and found himself standing on top of the grounded X-wing. He rested his back against the curve of the great, overhanging branch.

A mournful whistle-honk sounded and he glanced down at Artoo, who clung securely to the metal hull nearby. "I don't know what you're saying, Artoo, without Threepio to translate for us. But I can guess." His gaze turned outward. "I don't know where he and the Princess are. I'm not even sure where we are."

Slowly he took stock of the surface of Mimban. Dense growth rose all around, but it was clumped in large pockets, instead of presenting a continuous front like a normal jungle. There was ample open space. Mimban, or at least the section where he'd come down, was part swamp, part jungle, part bog.

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 suitЕ 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.