"Kevin O'Donnel Jr. - The Journeys of McGill Feighan 01 - Caverns" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Donnell Jr Kevin)

what the master wanted, the master got. It contented itself with licking the
dust off the highway, and found it nutritious, if bland.
The hovercars that howled past flashed windows full of gaping faces, but
it didn't mind. It had been traveling now for some five years (in its own
reckoning), and for that long it had been drawing stare-equivalents. In some
places the inhabitants pointed; in others, they averted their buttocks; in still
others, they writhed in the dusty sand until acrid crystals coated every
square centimeter of their hidesтАФbut in each case, the notion behind the
gesture was the same. SurpriseтАФastonishmentтАФ and closer inspection of
the odd being.
So it wheeled toward the heartland, splashing here and there through icy
puddles of melting snow, especially in the higher regions of Pennsylvania.
Smelling the air of forest and city, it watched the colors flash byтАФthe greens
of plants, the browns of treetrunks and soil, the variegated rusts, tans, and
blacks of rock outcroppingsтАж it stored these impressions like a squirrel its
nuts, preserved them for later winters on its home planet, when there'd be
little else to do but lie in a frozen burrow and untangle its chromosomes for
the spring fission.
Turning off 80 onto 71, it rode that north into downtown Cleveland. The
ancient Memorial Shoreway amused it, for a while, until it found its bearings
and the off-ramp, and exited two blocks from Lake wood Hospital.
Yes, exactly as instructed. It was nighttime, and lights shone with
awesome profligacy, lights and crowds and crawling traffic that slowed even
further when the gastropod cruised past like a float in search of the Rose
Bowl Parade. A policewoman flagged it down. After pointing out that it
lacked a driver's license, registration, and license plates, she ordered it to
follow her to the station. Demurring, it presented its passchip, in which the
visa declared that self-propelled beings needed no such documentation.
The cop scratched her helmeted head, sighed at the size of the traffic jam
accumulating, and waved it on.
So into the hospital parking lot it rolled, the overhead lights gleaming off
its ochre skin. The building matched the Far Being's description brick for
brick. Trundling around to the far side, it snuggled against the foundations.
The ivy it crushed tasted delicious; well-tended gardens were always more
savory than wildlife.
Soaking up the building's vented heat, it extruded, from the middle of its
back, a pseudopod that became an Indian fakir's rope that became a
periscope. Up it went, and up, and up, until it peered through the windows
of the maternity ward. Fat women here, a skinny exhausted one there,
white-clad nurses, next room, ah, yes, the children, row upon cribbed row of
them.
The pseudopod flattened against the glass of the window, dimpled up a
thousand tiny suckers, and heaved! The frame ripped out of the wall with a
rending crash. A nurse screamed. An orderly dropped a tray, spun on his
heel, and clattered away.
It gently set the window on the asphalt and returned to the breached wall.
Again the pseudopod reshaped itself, this time into an elephant's trunk. It
entered the gaping hole. What was the number? Four.
It counted down from the near wall. One, two, threeтАФ ah, four. The
limb-tip poured over the baby in the crib, coating him like pancake batter.