"Henry Kuttner - Clash by Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

'Shoot, Kane!' he snapped. 'Quick! Shoot at it!'
Kane obeyed, though he had to guess at his target. Mud geysered up, suddenly crimson-stained.
Scott, still firing, gripped the boy's arm and ran him back at a breakneck pace.
The echoes died. Once more the distant elfin drums whispered through the green gloom.
'We got it,' Scott said, after a pause.
'We did?' the other asked blankly. 'What-'
'Mud-wolf, I think. The only way to kill those things is to get 'em before they get out of the
mud. They're fast and they die hard. However-' He warily went forward. There was nothing to see.
The mud had collapsed into a deeper
saucer, but the holes blasted by the high-x bullets had filled in. Here and there were traces of
thready crimson.
'Never a dull moment,' Scott remarked. His crooked grin eased the tension. Kane chuckled and
followed the captain's example in replacing his half-used clip with a full one.
The narrow spine of Signal Rock extended inland for a quarter mile before it became scalable. They
reached that point finally, helping each other climb, and finding1 themselves, at the summit,
still well below the leafy ceiling of the trees. The black surface of the rock was painfully hot,
stinging their palms as they climbed, and even striking through their shoe soles.
'Halfway point, captain?'
'Yeah. But don't let that cheer you. It doesn't get any better till we hit the beach again. We'll
probably need some fever shots when we reach the fort, just in case. Oh-oh, Mask, Kane, quick.'
Scott lifted his arm. On his wrist the band of litmus had turned blue.
With trained accuracy they donned the respirators. Scott felt a faint stinging on his exposed
skin, but that wasn't serious. Still, it would be painful later. He beckoned to Kane, slid down
the face of the rock, used the pole to test the mud below, and jumped lightly. He dropped in the
sticky whiteness and rolled over hastily, plastering himself from head to foot. Kane did the same.
Mud wouldn't neutralize the poison flowers' gas, but it would absorb most of it before it reached
the skin.
Scott headed toward the beach, a grotesque figure. Mud dripped on the eye plate, and he scrubbed
it away with a handful of white grass. He used the pole constantly to test the footing ahead.
Nevertheless the mud betrayed him. The pole broke through suddenly, and as Scott automatically
threw his weight back, the ground fell away under his feet. He had time for a crazy feeling of
relief that this was quicksand, not a mud-wolf's den, and then the clinging, treacherous stuff had
sucked him down knee-deep. He fell back, keeping his
grip on the pole and swinging the other end in an arc toward Kane.
The boy seized it in both hands and threw himself flat. His foot hooked over an exposed root.
Scott, craning his neck at a painfully awkward angle and trying to see through the mud-smeared
vision plates, kept a rat-trap grip on his end of the pole, hoping its slickness would not slip


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through his fingers.
He was drawn down farther, and then Kane's anchorage began to help. The boy tried to pull the pole
toward him, hand over hand. Scott shook his head. He was a good deal stronger than Kane, and the
latter would need all his strength to keep a tight grip on the pole.
Something stirred in the shadows behind Kane. Scott instinctively let go with one hand, and, with
the other, got out his gun. It had a sealed mechanism, so the mud hadn't harmed the firing, and
the muzzle had a one-way trap. He fired at the movement behind Kane, heard a muffled tumult, and
waited till it had died. The boy, after a startled look behind him, had not stirred.