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

discovering, studying, investigatingтАФwhat? For them this Universe is their
own home. For millions of years they've been living there, as we've been
living on our Earth, and they can only wonder at usтАФwhat are these beings
doing here amongst the stars?"
He broke off suddenly and jumped to his feet, listening to something. I
started involuntarily.
"That's thunder," said Masha softly, gaping at him, open-mouthed.
"Thunder. There'll be a storm soon."
He was still listening and scanning the sky.
"No, it's not thunder," he said at last, and sat down again. "It's a liner.
See it, over there?"
A bright streak flashed across the blue pile of clouds and vanished. And
again there was a faint rumbling in the sky.
"And now sit and wait," he said, incomprehensibly. He looked at me
and smiled, but in his eyes there was a look of sadness and suspense. Then
it passed and his eyes again took on their former trusting expression.
"And what do you do, Stanislav Ivanovich?" he asked.
I decided he wanted to change the subject, so I started telling him
about the septopods. That they belonged to a sub-class of a dibranchiate,
class of cephalopods and represent a special, hitherto unknown, family of
the order of octopuses. Their main features were a reduction of the third
left tentacle, opposite the third hectocotylized right one, three rows of
suckers on the arms, a complete absence of coelome, an extraordinarily
powerful development of the venous hearts, the maximum concentration
for cephalopods of the central nervous system, and various other, less
important, peculiarities. They had been discovered not long before, when
a number of them appeared off the east and south-east coasts of Asia, and
a year later they were being found in the lower reaches of the great
riversтАФthe Mekong, Yangtse, Hwang Ho, and Amur, and also in lakes that
were a fair distance from the sea-coastтАФin this one, for instance. And this
is remarkable, because ordinary cephalopods are highly stenogalinaceous,
and even avoid the arctic waters with their reduced salinity. Also, they
hardly ever come out on dry land. But the fact remained: septopods feel
quite happy in fresh water and they do come out on to the shore. They get
into boats and on to , bridges, and not long ago two were found in the
forest about thirty kilometres from here. - Masha was not listeningтАФshe
had heard it all from me before. She went into the tent and brought out
the 'minivox' and switched it to automatic reception. She was obviously
impatient to pick up the Voice of the Void.
But Gorbovsky was paying great attention to what I was saying.
"Were those two alive?" he asked. "No, they were found dead. The forest
here is a game reserve. The septopods had been trampled and half-eaten
by wild boar. But they were still alive thirty kilometres away from water!
The mantle cavity of both of them was stuffed with damp weed. That,
apparently, is the way they lay in a certain store of water for their journey
across dry land. The weed was of the species that grows in lakes. There is
no doubt that these septopods had come from these very lakes and were
on their way deeper into the country to the south. I must mention that
every single specimen so far captured has been an adult male. Not a single
female, nor young septopod. Probably the females and the young cannot