"Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - Wanderers and Travellers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Strugatski Arkady)

A. STRUGATSKY, B. STRUGATSKY

WANDERERS AND TRAVELLERS




Compilation
тАЬMolecular Caf├йтАЭ
Mir Publishers 1968
Translated from the Russian
(The translator is not indicated)



___________________________________________________
OCR: http://home.freeuk.com/russica2




The water in the pool was not very cold, but all the same I was frozen. I
had been sitting on the bottom, right under the steep bank, and for a
whole hour had been cautiously turning my head from side to side and
peering into the dim greenish twilight. I had to sit without moving, for
septopods are sensitive and suspicious animals, they are frightened off by
the slightest sound or any abrupt movement and will disappear, to return
only at night, when it is better not to have anything to do with them.
An eel was busying himself under my feet, and a dozen times a
pompous-looking striped perch swam past me and back again, stopping
each time and staring at me with his vacuous round eyes. As soon as he
was gone, a shoal of silvery small fry would appear and begin to graze just
above my head. My knees and shoulders were quite numb. I was afraid
that Masha might not wait any longer and would get into the water to
rescue me. I succeeded in conjuring up so vivid a picture of how she was
sitting all alone at the water's edge and waiting for me, how terrified she
was, and how she longed to dive in and find me, that I had already made
up my mind to come up, when at last a septopod swam out of the weed
twenty paces or so to the right of me.
It was a fairly large specimen, and appeared noiselessly and suddenly,
like a ghost, his round body foremost. His whitish mantle was pulsating
gently, in a limp and inert kind of way, as it sucked in and ejected the
water, and he rocked slightly from side to side as he moved. His tentacles
were tucked under him and their thin ends trailed after him resembling
tattered of old rag; and the slit of his eye, nearly covered by the eyelid,
shone dimly in the faint light. He was swimming slowly, as they do in the
daytime, in a strange and uncanny trance, not knowing, where he was
going or why. He was probably impelled by the most obscure and
primitive drives, like those, perhaps, that control the movements of
amoebae.