"Norton, Andre - Flight in Yiktor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

Toggor's answer never came in words such as those that

had struck Dung. Rather it was feeling: pain, fear, and
sometimes but very seldom, a rough kind of contentment.
Thus Dung thought "good," even "help," which Toggor
somehow seized upon avidly, as if Dung had indeed flung

open his place of hopeless captivity.

The handful of legs folded tightly to the haired body was
visible. Those vicious-looking claws at the end of the first four
were clamped together as the creature answered Dung's reas-
surance rather than the more concise broadcast of the woman.

The smux was no tiling of beauty. Had he grown larger he

FLIGHT IN YIKTOR 7

might have been such a monster as to set human kind to
flight. His body, covered with spiky hairs thick enough to
look like quills, was a grayish red like a fire coal smoldering
in ashes. Each quill was tipped also with a darker red as if
blood-dipped. There were eight of the long hairy legs, the
fore pairs equipped with claws which were sawtoothed on the
inner sides.

His body was two ovals attached, the smaller fore one to
larger hind one with a waist no thicker than two of his legs
held side by side. His eyes--all six of them--were now
retracted into his ball of head, concealing the stalks on which
they were mounted. All in all he was ugly, and, with that
ugliness, he gave off the promise of quick and vicious attack.

Now his abdomen dragged on the floor of the cage, and
Dung knew Toggor was both filthy and hungry. To be dropped
into a rounded half sphere with another of his kind and a
piece of raw meat flung in for a victory prize should arouse
every fighting instinct of the smux. At Dung's thrust of
thought he raised one foreleg and clicked the claw there in
entreaty--a friend had food.

Russtif kept his hand well away from the prod. Would he


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dare to move when these two strangers were here? Dung did
not know, but breaking the long-held rule of his own sur-
vival, he wadded together the bit of offal he had sneaked