"Joseph Green - The Crier of Crystal" - читать интересную книгу автора (Green Joseph)

Conscience Allan Odegaard heard a brittle tinkling, a loud warning sounded by elfin chimes, as his
pur-suer brushed a crystalline flowering plant. He stopped at the end of a small clearing and turned to
con-front the danger. This deaf hunting animal had been on his trail for sev-eral minutes.
It was going to be close. The vege-tation was thick and the carnivore would appear only a few
meters away. Allan drew the spare pistol with his left hand and held it ready for a second shot. Bodies
composed of siliceous tissue resisted even the cutting heat of a laser, and the small crystal in a handgun
had to cool five seconds between pulses. Cappy Doyle had told him the scientists at this isolated
research station always carried two weapons when working in the jungle. The ability to fire twice had
saved lives that would have been lost in five seconds.
The powerful infrared lamp on the helmet of Allan's protective cov-erall sent a broad beam across
the small open space, illuminating the wall of brush on the opposite side. His goggles, ground to accept
wavelengths in a narrow band around the 10 12 frequency, kept out all visible light. The infrared beam did
not reflect off crystalline, or glass surfaces, as badly as white light, and he could see clearly.
The sounds of pursuit stopped. There was a slow movement at the rear of the clearing as a large
head approached the edge of the brush.
The hunter paused, testing the wind, unaware that it could be seen by its intended prey. The huge
mouth was open, and Allan saw a round silver tongue curling over pyramid-shaped teeth of unbreakable
glass. And then a strong breeze started behind the human's back and carried his odor directly to the
animal. They were so close he could see the skin crinkling around the flaring nostrils, hear the snuffling
sound of heavy intakes. And then the wrinkled flesh smoothed out, and Allan knew with the certainty
gained from encounters with strange beasts on a hundred worlds that it was not going to at-tack. To the
carnivore his strong scent indicated a mistake. It signaled that he was not only alarmingly strange, but
inedible.
Allan had a sudden dangerous im-pulse and yielded to it immediately, before reflection cost him his
chance. He bolstered the left-hand gun and pulled down his goggles.
It was like opening a doorway into the softly lighted heart of a diamond. This planet had no moon,
but stars hanging thick and close in the clear night sky provided a diffused illumi-nation. Crystal was a
unique world, where life had evolved with silicon instead of carbon as the anchor ele-ment. The
proportions of hydrogen and nitrogen in living tissue were similar to his own, but the oxygen content had
dropped from 76 to 68 percent and been replaced by metal-lic elements. Physically the planet was a
virtual twin of Earth, and the structure and activity of its flora and fauna amazingly similar. But what on
Earth would have been a tree became on Crystal a giant chandelier, with a trunk of shimmering crystal
and leaves of tinted glass. The wind-rippled branches covered with innu-merable tiny jewels, bending
plant tissue where the metallics in every scale of bark colored the light and reflected it from a thousand
glisten-ing facets. In the daylight it was blinding, a visual fury of changing light of every color and intensity.
A minute of open-eye exposure would burn out the color receptors in the fovea; five would blind a
person. No one went outdoors without goggles similar to the ones he was wearing, ground to admit only
a few wavelengths.
Even in the softer starlight the dis-play was dazzling. After a few sec-onds Allan recognized the head
of the hunter by the pattern of the teeth, glittering like diamond pyra-mids in what to the animal's
pro-tected eyes seemed shadow. And as Allan watched the mouth, that could cut him in two with one
bite, slowly closed and the head receded, fading from view. There was a low sibilant rustling as hanging
vines of vitreous crystal parted, and the fading sounds of padded feet on blades of glass.
Reluctantly, Allan pushed the gog-gles back over his eyes, and the vis-ually dangerous beauty around
him faded. The silence also died as the small jungle creatures who had qui-etly awaited the outcome of
the stalk went back to their nightly business. And Allan had to return to his. He lived for moments like
these, when some strange beauty burst on senses dulled by the monotony of months in space, or his
work threw him into a situation so startling and new it surpassed previous human ex-perience. But as a
Practical Philosopher he had a job to do, and little time in which to accomplish it. A Space Service
neverlander was due next day, bringing World Council Member Celal Kaylin of Turkey, chairman of a