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

The boulder seemed to take forever to fall. George tried twice more, with all his strength, to move out of its path. Then, instinctively, he put his arms up straight under it.
At the last possible instant he moved them to the left, away from the center of the toppling gray mass.
It struck.
George felt his arms breaking like twigs, and saw a looming grayness that blotted out the sky; he felt a sledgehammer impact that made the earth shudder beneath him.
He heard a splattering sound.
And he was still alive. That astonishing fact kept him fully occupied for a long time after the boulder had clattered its way down the slope into silence. Then, finally, he looked down to his right.
The resistance of his stiffened arms, even while they broke, had been barely enough to lever the falling body over, a distance of some thirty centimeters.... The right half of the monster was a flattened, shattered ruin. He could see a few flecks of pasty gray matter, melting now into green-brown translucence as the mass flowed slowly together again.
In twenty minutes the last remnants of a superfluous spinal cord had been reabsorbed, the monster had collected itself back into its normal lens shape, and George's pain was diminishing. In five minutes more his mended arms were strong enough to use. They were also more convincingly shaped and colored than before--the tendons, the fingernails, even the wrinkles of the skin were in good order. In ordinary circumstances this discovery would have left George happily bemused for hours; now, in his impatience, he barely noticed it. He climbed to the top of the bank.
Thirty meters away a humped green-brown body like his own lay motionless on the dry grass.
It contained, of course, only one brain. Whose?
McCarty's, almost certainly; Vivian hadn't had a chance.
But then how did it happen that there was no visible trace of McCarty's arm?
Unnerved, George walked around the creature for a closer inspection.
On the far side he encountered two dark-brown eyes, with an oddly unfinished appearance. They focused on him after an instant, and the whole body quivered slightly, moving toward him.
Vivian's eyes had been brown; George remembered them distinctly. Brown eyes with heavy dark lashes in a tapering slender face.... But did that prove anything? What color had McCarty's eyes been? He couldn't remember for certain.
There was only one way to find out. George moved doser, hoping fervently that the something _meisterii_ was at least advanced enough to conjugate, instead of trying to devour members of its own species....
The two bodies touched, clung and began to flow together. Watching, George saw the fissioning process reverse itself: from paired lenses the alien flesh melted into a slipper shape, to an ovoid, to lens shape again. His brain and the other drifted closer together, the spinal cords crossing at right angles.
And it was only then that he noticed an oddity about the other brain: it seemed to be lighter and larger than his, the outline a trifle sharper.
"Vivian?" he said doubtfully. "Is that you?" No answer. He tried again, and again. Finally:
"George! Oh, dear--I want to cry, but I can't seem to do it."
"No lachrymal glands," George said automatically. "Uh, Vivian?"
"Yes, George." That warm voice again....
"What happened to Miss McCarty? How did you--I mean, what happened?"
"I don't know. She's gone, isn't she? I haven't heard her for a long time."
"Yes," said George, "she's gone. You mean you don't _know?_ Tell me what you did."
"Well, I wanted to make an arm, because you told me to,but I didn't think I had time enough. So I made a skull instead. And those thing to cover my spine--"
"Vertebrae." _Now why,_ he thought dazedly, _didn't I think of that?_ "And then?" he said.
"I think I'm crying now," she said. "Yes, I am. It's such a relief. And then, after that, nothing. She was still hurting me, and I just lay here and thought how wonderful it would be if she weren't here with me. And then, after a while, she wasn't. Then I grew eyes to look for you."
The explanation, it seemed to George, was more perplexing than the enigma. Staring around in a vague search for enlightenment, he caught sight of something that had escaped his notice before. Two meters to his left, just visible in the grass, was a damp-looking grayish lump, with a suggestion of a stringy extension trailing off from it. .
There must, he decided suddenly, be some mechanism in the something _meisterii_ for disposing of tenants who failed to adapt themselves--brains that went into catatonia, or hysteria, or suicidal frenzy. An eviction clause.
Somehow, Vivian had managed to stimulate that mechanism--to convince the organism that McCarty's brain was not only superfluous but dangerous--"poisonous" was the word.
Miss McCarty---it was the final ignominy--had not been digested, but excreted.

By sunset, twelve hours later, they had made a good deal of progress. They had reached an understanding very agreeable to them both; they had hunted down another herd of the pseudo-pigs for their noon meal; and, for divergent reasons---on George's side because the monster's normal metabolism was grossly inefficient when it had to move quickly, and on Vivian's because she refused to believe that any man could be attracted to her in her present condition--they had begun a serious attempt to reshape themselves.
The first trials were extraordinarily difficult, the rest surprisingly easy. Again and again they had to let themselves collapse back into amoeboid masses, victims of some omitted or malfunctioning organ; but each failure smoothed the road; eventually they were able to stand breathless but breathing, swaying but erect, face to face--two protean giants in the fortunate dimness, two sketches of self-created Man.
They had also put thirty kilometers between themselves and the Federation camp. Standing on the crest of a ridge and looking southward across the shallow valley, George could see a faint funereal glow: the mining machines chewing out metals to feed the fabricators that spawn a billion ships.
"We'll never go back, will we?" said Vivian.
"No," said George soberly. "They'll come to us, in time. We have lots of time. We're the future."
And one thing more, a Small thing, but important to George; it marked his sense of accomplishment, of one phase ended and a new one begun. He had finally completed the name of his discovery--not, as it turned anything _meisterii_ at all. _Spes hominis_:
Man's hope.