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

"I hope so," said Woodin yawningly. "Then we'll see just how good your eyesight is f
a mile up, and whether you've yanked two respectable scientists up here for nothing."
Later as he lay in his blankets in the little tent, listening to Gray and Ross snore and
looking sleepily out at the glowing fire embers, Woodin wondered again about that. Wh
had Ross actually seen in that fleeting glimpse from his speeding plane? Something quee
Woodin was sure of that, so sure that he'd come on this hard trip to find it. But what
exactly?
Not protoplasmic things such as he described. That couldn't be, of course. Or could it? If things l
that had existed once, why couldn't they-couldn't they-?
Woodin didn't know he'd been sleeping until he was awakened by Gray's cry. It wasn't a nice cry
was the hoarse yell of someone suddenly assaulted by bone-freezing terror.
He opened his eyes at that cry to see the Incredible looming against the stars in the open door of
tent. A dark, amorphous mass humped there in the open-ing, glistening all over in the starlight, and
gliding into the tent. Behind it were oth-ers like it.
Things happened very quickly then. They seemed to Woodin to happen not consecutively but in
succession of swift, clicking scenes like the successive pictures of a motion picture film.
Gray's pistol roared red flame at the first viscous monster entering the tent, and the momentary f
showed the looming, glistening bulk of the thing, and Gray's panic-frozen face, and Ross clawing in h
blankets for his pistol.

Then that scene was over and instantly there was another one, Gray and Ross both stiffening
suddenly as though petrified, both falling heavily over. Woodin knew they were both dead now, but
didn't know how he knew it The glistening monsters were coming on into the tent.
He ripped up the wall of the tent and plunged out into the cold starlight of the clearing. He ran t
steps, he didn't know in what direction, and then he stopped. He didn't know why he stopped dead,
he did.
He stood there, his brain desperately urging his limbs to fly, but his limbs would not obey. He
couldn't even turn, could not move a muscle of his body. He stood, his face toward the starlit gleam o
the river, stricken by a strange and utter paralysis.
Woodin heard rustling, gliding movements in the tent behind him. Now from behind, there came in
the line of his vision several of the glistening things. They were gathering around him, a dozen of them it
seemed, and he now could see them quite clearly.
They weren't nightmares, no. They were real as real, poised here around him, humped, amorpho
masses of viscous, translucent jelly. Each was about four feet tall and three in diameter, though their
shapes kept constantly changing slightly, making dimensions hard to guess.
At the center of each translucent mass was a dark, disk-like blob or nucleus. There was nothing e
to the creatures, no limbs or sense-organs. He saw that they could protrude pseudopods, though, for
who held the bodies of Gray and Ross in such tentacles, were now bringing them out and laying them
down beside Woodin.
Woodin, still quite unable to move a muscle, could see the frozen, twisted faces of the two men
and could see the pistols still gripped in their dead hands. And then as he looked on Ro
face he remembered.
The things the aviator had seen from his plane, the jelly-creatures the three had come
north to search for, they were the monsters around him! But how had they killed Ross an
Gray, how were they holding him petrified like this, who were they?
"We will permit you to move, but you must not try to escape."
Woodin's dazed brain numbed further with wonder. Who had said those words to him
He had heard nothing, yet he had thought he heard.
"We will let you move but you must not attempt to escape or harm us."
He did hear those words in his mind, even though his ears heard no sound. And now