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

approaching organism the kind which the something _meisterii_ ate, or the kind which devoured the
something _meisterii_? If the latter, what would he do about it?
For the present, at any rate, sitting where he was seemed to be indicated. The body he inhabited
made use of camouflage in its normal, or untenanted state, and was not equipped for speed. So
George held still and watched, keeping his eyes half closed, while he considered the possible
nature of the approaching animal.
The fact that it was nocturnal, he told himself, meant nothing. Moths were nocturnal; so were
bats--no, the devil with bats, they were carnivores.... The light-bearing creature came nearer,
and George saw the faint gleam of a pair of long, narrow eyes below the two stalks. Then the
creature opened its mouth.
It had a great many teeth.
George found himself crammed into some kind of crevice in a wall of rock, without any clear
recollection of how he had got there. He remembered a flurry of branches as the creature sprang at
him, and a moment's furious pain, and then nothing but vague, starlit glimpses of leaves and
earth.
The thing was impossible. How had he got away?
He puzzled over it until dawn came, and then, looking down at himself, he saw something that had
not been there before. Under the smooth edge of gelatinous flesh three or four projections of some
kind were visible. It struck George that his sensation of contact with the stone underneath him
had changed, too. he seemed to be standing on a number of tiny points instead of lying flat.
He flexed one of the projections experimentally, then thrust it out straight ahead of him. It
was a lumpy, single jointed caricature of a finger--or a leg.
George lay still for a long time and thought about it with as much coherence as he could muster.
Then he waggled the thing again It was there, and so were all the others, as solid and real as the
rest of him.
He moved forward experimentally, sending the same messages down to his finger-and-toe nerve ends
as before. His body lurched out of the cranny with a swiftness that very nearly tumbled him down
over the edge of a minor precipice.
Where he had crawled like a snail before, he now scuttled like an insect.
But how.... No doubt, in his terror when the thing with the teeth attacked, he had unconsciously
tried to run as if he still had legs. Was that all there was to it?
George thought of the carnivore again, and of the stalks supporting the organs which he had
thought might be eyes. That would do as an experiment. He closed his own eyes and imagined them
rising outward, imagined the mobile stalks growing growing.... He tried to convince himself that
he had eyes like that, had always had them--that everyone who was anyone had eyes on stalks.
Surely, something was happening?
George opened his eyes again, and found himself looking straight down at the ground, getting a
view so close up that it was blurred, out of focus. Impatiently, he tried to look up. All that
happened was that his field of vision moved forward a matter of ten or twelve centimeters.
It was at this point that a voice shattered the stillness. It sounded like someone trying to
shout through half a meter of lard. "Urghh! Lluhh! _Eeraghhr!_"'
George leaped convulsively, executed a neat turn and swept his eyes around a good two hundred
and forty degrees of arc. He saw nothing but rocks and lichens. On a closer inspection, it
appeared that a small green-and-orange larva or grub of some kind was moving past him. George
regarded it with suspicion for a long moment, until the voice broke out again:
"Ellfff! Ellffneee!"
The voice, somewhat higher this time, came from behind. George whirled again, swept his mobile
eyes around--
Around an impossible wide circuit. His eyes were on stalks, and they were mobile--whereas a
moment ago he had been staring at the ground, unable to look up. George's brain clattered into