"Damon Knight - Four in one (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Knight Damon)

stumbled into the most interesting organism on this planet.
Something _meisterii_, he thought. He had not settled on a species name--he would have to learn
more about it before he decided--but _meisterii_ certainly. It was his discovery, and nobody could
take it away from him. Or unhappily--him away from it.
It was a really lovely organism, though. Primitive--less structure of its own than a jellyfish,
and only on a planet with light surface gravity, like this one, could it ever have hauled itself
up out of the sea. No brain, no nervous system at all, apparently. But it had the perfect
survival mechanism. It simply let its rivals develop highly organized nervous tissue, sat in one
place (looking exactly like a deposit of leaves and other clutter) until one of them fell into it,
and then took all the benefit.
It wasn't parasitism, either; it was a true symbiosis, on a higher level than any other planet,
so far as George knew, had ever developed. The captive brain was nourished by the captor;
wherefore it served the captive's interest to move the captor toward food and away from danger.


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_You steer me, I feed you._ It was fair.
They were close to the plant now, almost touching it. George inspected it; as he had thought, it
was a common grass type, of no particular interest.
Now his body was tilting itself up a ridge he knew to be low, although from his eye level it
looked tremendous. He climbed it laboriously and found himself looking down into still another
gully. This could go on, no doubt, indefinitely. The question was, did he have any choice?
He looked at the shadows cast by the low-hanging sun, He was heading approximately northwest, or
directly away from the encampment. He was only a few hundred meters away; even at a crawl, he
could make the distance easily enough ... if he turned back.
He felt uneasy at the thought, and didn't know why. Then it struck him that his appearance was
not obviously that of a human being in distress; the chances were that he looked rather more like
a monster which had eaten and partially digested one or more people.
If he crawled into camp in his present condition, it was a certainty that he would be shot at
before any questions were asked, and only a minor possibility that narcotic gas would be used
instead of a machine rifle.
No, he decided, he was on the right course. The idea was to get away from camp so that he
wouldn't be found by the relief party which was probably searching for him now. Get away, bury
himself in the forest, and study his new body: find out how it worked and what he could do with
it, whether there actually were others in it with him, and if so, if there was any way of opening
communications with them.
It would take a long time, he thought, but he could do it, Limply, like a puddle of mush oozing
over the edge of a tablecloth, George started down into the gully.
The circumstances leading up to George's fall into the something _meisterii_ were, briefly, as
follows:
Until as late as the mid-twenty-first century, a game invented by the ancient Japanese was still
played by millions in the eastern hemisphere of Terra. The game was called _go_. Although its
rules were almost childishly simple, its strategy included more permutations and was more
difficult to master than that of chess.
_Go_ was played, at the height of its development--just before the geological catastrophe that
wiped out most of its devotees--on a board with nine hundred shallow holes, using small pill-
shaped counters. At each turn, one of the two players placed a counter on the board, wherever he
chose, the object being to capture as much territory as possible by surrounding it completely.