"Raymond Z. Gallun - Seeds of Dusk" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gallun Raymond Z)

the east, to creep with protracted slowness across the sky, shedding but
the barest trace of warmth. Night came, beautiful and purple and
mysterious, yet bleak as the crystalline spirit of an easy death.
Through the ages. EarthтАЩs rate of rotation had been much decreased by
the tidal drag of Solar and Lunar gravities. The attraction of the Moon
was now much increased, since the satellite was nearer to Terra than it
had been in former times. Because of the decreased rate of rotation, the
days and nights were correspondingly lengthened.
All the world around the spore plant was a realm of bleak, unpeopled
desolation. Only once, while the winter lasted, did anything happen to
break the stark monotony. One evening, at moonrise, a slender metal car
flew across the sky with the speed of a bullet. A thin propelling streamer of
fire trailed in its wake, and the pale moonglow was reflected from its
prow. A shrill, mechanical scream made the rarefied atmosphere vibrate,
as the craft approached to a point above the desert gully, passed, and
hurtled away, to leave behind it only a startling silence and an aching
memory.
For the spore plant did remember. Doubtless there was a touch of fear
in that memory, for fear is a universal emotion, closely connected with the
law of self-preservation, which is engrained in the texture of all life,
regardless of its nature or origin.
Men. Or rather, the cold, cruel, cunning little beings who were the
children of men. The Itorloo, they called themselves. The invader could not
have known their form as yet, or the name of the creatures from which
they were descended. But it could guess something of their powers from
the flying machine they had built. Inherited memory must have played a
part in giving the queer thing from across the void this dim
comprehension. On other worlds its ancestors had encountered animal
folk possessing a similar science. And the spore plant was surely aware
that here on Earth the builders of this speeding craft were its most deadly
enemies.
The Itorloo, however, inhabiting their vast underground cities, had no
knowledge that their planet had received an alien visitationтАФone which
might have deadly potentialities. And in this failure to know, the little
spore plant, hidden in a gully where no Itorloo foot had been set in a
thousand years, was safe.
Now there was nothing for it to do but grow and prepare to reproduce
its kind, to be watchful for lesser enemies, and to develop its own peculiar
powers.



It is not to be supposed that it must always lack, by its very nature, an
understanding of physics and chemistry and biological science. It
possessed no test tubes, or delicate instruments, as such things were
understood by men. But it was gifted with somethingтАФcall it an
introspective senseтАФwhich enabled it to study in minute detail every
single chemical and physical process that went on within its own
substance. It could feel not only the juices coursing sluggishly through its
tissues, but it could feel, too, in a kind of atomic pattern, the change of