"Edmond Hamilton - Devolution" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

Whale.
They ate silently, and as wordlessly cleaned the pans with bunches of grass. Woodin got his pipe
going, the other two lit crumpled cigarettes, and then they sprawled for a time by the fire, listening to
chuckling, whispering river-sounds, the sighing sough of the higher hemlock branches, the lonesome
cheeping of insects.
Woodin finally knocked his pipe out on his boot-heel and sat up.
"All right," he said, "now we'll settle this argument we were having."
Ross looked a little shamefaced. "I guess I got too hot about it," he said subduedly. Then added,
all the same, you fellows do more than half disbelieve me."
Woodin shook his head calmly. "No, we don't, Ross. When you told us that you'd seen creatures
unlike anything ever heard of while flying over this wilderness, Gray and I both believed you.
"If we hadn't, do you think two busy biologists would have dropped their work to come up here
with you into these unending woods and look for the things you saw?"
"I know, I know," said the aviator unsatisfiedly. "You think I saw something queer and you're tak
a chance that it will be worth the trouble of coming up here after.
"But you don't believe what I've told you about the look of the things. You think that sounds too
queer to be true, don't you?"
For the first time Woodin hesitated in answering. "After all, Ross," he said in-directly, "one's eyes
play tricks when you're only glimpsing things for a moment from a plane a mile up."
"Glimpsing them?" echoed Ross. "I tell you, man, I saw them as clearly as I see you. A mile up, y
but I had my big binoculars with me and was using them when I saw them.
"It was near here, too, just east of the fork of the McNorton and the Little Whale. I was streaking s
in a hurry for I'd been three weeks up at that government mapping survey on Hudson's Bay. I wanted
place myself by the river fork, so I brought my plane down a little and used my binoculars."Then, do
there in a clearing by the river, I saw something glisten and saw- the things. I tell you, they were
incredible, but just the same I saw them clear! I forgot all about the river fork in the moment or two I
stared down at them.
"They were big, glistening things like heaps of shining jelly, so translucent that I could see the
ground through them. There were at least a dozen of them and when I saw them they were gliding ac
that little clearing, a floating, flowing movement.
"Then they disappeared under the trees. If there'd been a clearing big enough to land in within a
hundred miles, I'd have landed and looked for them, but there wasn't and I had to go on. But I wante
like the devil to find out what they were, and when I took the story to you two, you agreed to come u
here by canoe to search for them. But I don't think now you've ever fully believed me."

Woodin looked thoughtfully into the fire. "I think you saw something queer, all right, some quee
form of life. That's why I was willing to come up on this search.
"But things such as you describe, jelly-like, translucent, gliding over the ground like that-there's
nothing like that since the first protoplasmic creatures, the beginning of life on earth, glided over our
young world ages ago."
"If there were such things then, why couldn't they have left descendants like them?" Ross argued
Woodin shook his head. "Because they all vanished ages ago, changed into dif-ferent and higher
forms of life, starting the great upward climb of life that has reached its height in man.
"Those long-dead, single-celled protoplasmic creatures were the start, the crude, humble beginn
of our life. They passed away and their descendants were unlike them. We men are their descendant
Ross looked at him, frowning. "But where did they come from in the first place, those first living
things?"
Again Woodin shook his head. "That is one thing we biologists do not know and can hardly
speculate upon, the origin of those first protoplasmic forms of life.
"It's been suggested that they rose spontaneously from the chemicals of earth, yet this is disprove