"Damon Knight - Four In One" - читать интересную книгу автора (Knight Damon)

George opened his eyes, genuinely alarmed. A hundred meters away, facing him across the shallow slope of rocky ground, was a uniformed man just emerging from a stand of black, bamboolike spears. As George raised his eye stalks, the man paused, stared back at him, then shouted and raised his rifle.
George ran. Instantly there was a babble of voices inside him, and the muscles of his "legs" went into wild spasms. "Run, dammit!" he said frantically. "There's a trooper with--"
The rifle went off with a deafening roar, and George felt a sudden hideous pain aft of his spine. Vivian Bellis screamed. The struggle for possession of their common legs stopped, and they scuttled full speed ahead for the cover of a nearby boulder. The rifle roared again, and George heard rock splinters screeching through the foliage overhead. Then they were plunging down the side of a gully, up the other slope, over a low hummock and into a forest of tall, bare-limbed trees.
George spotted a leaf-filled hollow and headed far it, fighting somebody "else's desire to keep on running in a straight line.'They plopped into the hollow and stayed there while three running men went past them, and for an hour afterward.

Vivian was moaning steadily. Raising his eye stalks cautiously, George was able to see that several jagged splinters of stone had penetrated the monster's gelatinous flesh near the far rim.... They had been very lucky. The shot had apparently been a near miss--accountable only on the grounds that the trooper had been shooting downhill at a moving target--and had shattered the boulder behind them.
Looking more closely, George observed something which excited his professional interest. The whole surface of the monster appeared to be in constant slow ferment: tiny pits opening and closing as if the flesh were boiling ... except that here the bubbles of air were not forcing their way outward, but were being engulfed at the surface and pressed down into the interior.
He could also see, deep under the mottled surface of the huge lens-shaped body, four vague clots of darkness which must be the living brains of Gumbs, Bellis, McCarty--and Meister.
Yes, there was one which was radially opposite his own eye-stalks. It was an odd thing, George reflected, to be looking at your own brain. No doubt you could get used to it in time.
The four dark spots were arranged close together in an almost perfect square at the center of the lens. The spinal cords, barely visible, crossed between them and rayed outward from the center.
_Pattern,_ George thought. The thing was designed to make use of more than one nervous system. It arranged them in an orderly fashion, with the brains inward for greater protection-and perhaps for another reason. Perhaps there was even a provision for conscious cooperation among the passengers: a matrix that somehow promoted the growth of communication cells between the separate brains.... If that were so, it would account for their ready success with telepathy. George wished most acutely that he could get inside and find out.
Vivian's pain was diminishing. Hers was the brain opposite George's, and she had taken most of the effect of the rock splinters. But the fragments were sinking now, slowly, through the gelid substance of the monster's tissues. Watching carefully, George could see them move. When they got to the bottom, they would be excreted, no doubt--just as the indigestible parts of their clothing and equipment had been.
George wondered idly which of the remaining two brains was McCarty's and which Gumbs's. The answer was easy to find. To George's left, as he looked back toward the center of the mound, was a pair of blue eyes set flush with the surface. They had lids apparently grown from the monster's substance, but thickened and opaque.
To his right, George could make out two tiny openings, extending a few centimeters into the body, which could only be Miss McCarty's ears. George had an impulse to see if he could devise a method of dropping dirt into them.
Anyhow, the question of returning to camp had been settled, at least for the moment. McCarty said nothing more about growing a set of speech organs, although George was sure she herself was determined to keep on trying.
He didn't think she would succeed. Whatever the mechanism was by which these changes in bodily structure were accomplished, it seemed probable that amateurs like themselves could succeed only under the pressure of considerable emotional strain, and then only with comparatively simple tasks which involved one new structure at a time. And as he had already told McCarty, the speech organs in man were extraordinarily diverse and complicated.
It occurred to George that the thing just might be done by creating a thin membrane to serve as a diaphragm, and an air chamber behind it, with a set of muscles to produce the necessary vibrations and modulate them. He kept the notion to himself.
He didn't want to go back. George was a rare bird: a scientist who was actually fitted for his work and loved it for its own sake. And at the moment he was sitting squarely in the middle of the most powerful research tool that had ever existed in his field: a protean organism, with the observer inside it, able to order its structure and watch the results; able to devise theories of function and test them on the tissues of what was effectively his own body--able to construct new organs, new adaptations to environment!
George saw himself at the point of an enormous cone of new knowledge; and some of the possibilities he glimpsed humbled and awed him.
He _couldn't_ go back even if it were possible to do it without getting killed. If only he had fallen into the damned thing alone--No, then the others would have pulled him out and killed the monster.
There were, he felt, too many problems demanding solutions all at once. It was hard to concentrate; his mind kept slipping maddeningly out of focus.
Vivian, whose pain had stopped some time ago, began to wail again. Gumbs snapped at her. McCarty cursed both of them. George himself felt that he had had very nearly all he could take-cooped up with three idiots who had no more sense than to-
"Wait a minute," he said. "Do you all feel the same way? Irritable? Jumpy? As if you'd been working for sixty hours straight and were too tired to sleep?" "Stop talking like a video ad," Vivian said angrily. "Haven't we got enough trouble without--"
"We're hungry," George interrupted. "We didn't realize it, because we haven't got the organs that usually signal hunger. But the last thing this body ate was _us,_ and that was at least twenty hours ago. We've got to find something to ingest."
"Good Lord, you're right," said Gumbs. "But if this thing only eats people--I mean to say--"
"It never met any people until we landed," George said curtly. "Any protein should do, but the only way we can find out is to try. The sooner we start, the better." He started off in what he hoped was the direction they had been following all along-directly away from camp. At least, he thought, if they put enough distance behind them, they might get thoroughly lost.

III

They moved out of the trees and down the long slope of a valley, over a wiry carpet of dead grasses, until they reached a watercourse in which a thin trickle was still flowing. Far down the bank, partly screened by clumps of skeletal shrubbery, George saw a group of animals that looked vaguely like miniature pigs. He told the others about it, and started cautiously in that direction.
"Which way is the wind blowing, Vivian?" he asked. "Can you feel it?"
She said, "No. I could before, when we were going downhill, but now I think we're facing into it."
"Good," said George. "We may be able to sneak up on them."
"But--we're not going to eat _animals,_ are we?"
"Yes, how about it, Meister?" Gumbs put in. "I don't say I'm a squeamish fellow, but after all--"
George, who felt a little squeamish himself--like all the others, he had been brought up on a diet of yeasts and synthetic protein--said testily, "What else can we do? You've got eyes--you can see that it's autumn here. Autumn after a hot summer, at that. Trees bare, streams dried up. We eat meat, or go without--unless you'd rather hunt for insects?"
Gumbs, shocked to the core, muttered for a while and then gave up.
Seen at closer range, the animals looked less porcine and even less appetizing than before. They had lean, segmented, pinkish-gray bodies, four short legs, flaring ears, and blunt scimitarlike snouts with which they were rooting in the ground, occasionally turning up something which they gulped, ears flapping.
George counted thirty Of them, grouped fairly closely in a little space of clear ground between the bushes and the river. They moved slowly, but their short legs looked powerful; he guessed that they could run when they had to.
He inched forward, keeping his eye stalks low, stopping instantly whenever one of the beasts looked up. Moving with increasing caution, he had got to within ten meters of the nearest when McCarty said abruptly:
"Meister, has it occurred to you to wonder just _how_ we are going to eat these animals?"
"Don't be foolish," he said irritably. "We'll--" He stopped.
Wait a minute--did the thing's normal method of assimilation stop as soon as it got a tenant? Were they Supposed to grow fangs and a gullet and all the rest of the apparatus? Impossible; they'd starve to death first. But on the other hand--_damn_ this fuzzy-headed feeling--wouldn't it have to stop, to prevent the tenant from being digested with his first meal?
"Well?" McCarty demanded.
That was wrong, George knew but he couldn't say why; and it was a distinctly unpleasant thought. 0r-- even worse, suppose the meal became the tenant, and the tenant the meal?
The nearest animal's head went up, and four tiny red eyes stared directly at George. The floppy ears snapped to attention.
It was no time for speculation. "He's seen us!" George shouted mentally. "_Run!_"
The scene exploded into motion. One instant they were lying still in the prickly dry grass; the next they were Skimming at express-train speed across the ground, with the herd galloping away straight ahead of them. The hams of the nearest beasts loomed up closer and closer, bounding furiously; then they had run it down and vaulted over it.
Casting an eye backward, George saw that it was lying motionless in the grass--unconscious or dead.
They ran down another one. _The anaesthetic,_ George thought lucidly. _One touch does it._ And another, and another. _Of course we can digest them,_ he thought with relief. _It has to be selective to begin with, or it couldn't have separated out our nervous tissue._