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

gullies, most of them choked with the dusty-brown stalks of dead vegetation. As they started down
into one of these, George, who was third in line--Crumbs leading, then Bellis, and McCarty behind
George--stepped out onto a protruding slab of stone to examine a cluster of plant stalks rooted on
its far side.
His weight was only a little more than twenty kilograms on this planet, and the slab looked as
if it were firmly cemented into the wall of the gully. Just the same, he felt it shift under him
as soon as his weight was fully on it. He felt himself falling, shouted, and caught a flashing
glimpse of Gumbs and Bellis, standing as if caught by a high-speed camera. He heard a rattling of
stones as he went by. Then he saw what looked like a shabby blanket of leaves and dirt floating
toward him, and he remembered thinking, _It looks like a soft landing, anyhow...._ That was all,
until he woke up feeling as if he had been prematurely buried, with no part of him alive but his
eyes.
Much later, his frantic efforts to move had resulted in the first fractional success. From then
on, his field of vision had moved fairly steadily forward, perhaps a meter in every fifty minutes,
not counting the times when someone else's efforts had interfered with his own.
His conviction that nothing remained of the old George Meister except a nervous system was not
supported by observation, but the evidence was regrettably strong. To begin with, the anaesthesia
of the first hours had worn off, but his body was not reporting the position of the torso, head
and four limbs he had formerly owned. He had, instead, a vague impression of being flattened and
spread out over an enormous area. When he tried to move his fingers and toes, the response he got
was so multiplied that he felt like a centipede. He had no sense of cramped muscles, such as would
normally be expected after a long period of paralysis: and he was not breathing. Yet his brain was
evidently being well supplied with food and oxygen; he felt clear-headed, at ease and healthy.
He wasn't hungry, either, although he had been using energy steadily for a long time. There
were, he thought, two possible reasons for that, depending on how you looked at it ... one, that
he wasn't hungry because he no longer had any stomach lining to contract; two, that he wasn't
hungry because the organism he was riding in had been well nourished by the superfluous tissues
George had contributed. ...

Two hours later, when the sun was setting, it began to rain. George saw the big, slow-falling
drops and felt their dull impacts on his "skin." He didn't know whether rain would do him any
damage or not, rather thought not, but crawled under a bush with large, fringed leaves just to be
on the safe side. When the rain stopped it was dark, and he decided he might as well stay where he
was until morning. He did not feel tired, and it occurred to him to wonder whether he still needed
to sleep. He composed himself as well as he could to wait for the answer.
He was still wakeful after a long time had passed, but bad made no progress toward deciding
whether this answered the question or prevented it from being answered, when he saw a pair of dim
lights coming slowly and erratically toward him.
George watched them with an attentiveness compounded of professional interest and apprehension.
Gradually, as they came closer, he made out that the lights were attached to long, thin stalks
which grew from an ambiguous shape below--either light organs, like those of some deep-sea fish,
or simply luminescent eyes.
George noted a feeling of tension in himself which seemed to suggest that adrenalin or an
equivalent was being released somewhere in his system. He promised himself to follow this lead at
the first possible moment; meanwhile he had a more urgent problem to consider. Was this


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