"Theodore Sturgeon - The Girl Had Guts" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sturgeon Theodore)

of things that the arrangement could stand a lot of bumps and friction. Probably it was an unlucky
combination of small things all harmless in themselves but having a critical-mass characteristic that nobody
knew about. Maybe it was Clement's sick spell that triggered it; maybe the Flents suddenly went into one
of those oh-God-what-did-I-ever-see-in-you phases that come over married people who are never
separated; maybe it was Amy's sudden crazy yen for Joe Flent and her confusion over it. Probably the
worst thing of all was that Joe Flent might have sensed how she felt and caught fire too. I don't know. I
guess, like I said, that they all happened at once.

Clement getting sick like that. He was out after bio specimens and spotted a primate. They're fairly rare
on Mullygantz II, big ugly devils maybe five feet tall but so fat they outweigh a man two to one. They're
mottled pink and gray, and hairless, and they have a face that looks like an angry gorilla when it's relaxed
and a ridiculous row of little pointed teeth instead of fangs. They get around pretty good in the trees, but
they're easy to outrun on the ground because they never learned to use their arms and knuckles like the
great apes but waddle over the ground with their arms held up in the air to get them out of the way. It
fools you. They look so damn silly that you forget they might be dangerous.

So anyway, Clement surprised one on the ground and had it headed for the open fields before it knew
what was happening. He ran it to a standstill, just by getting between it and the trees and then
approaching it. The primate did all the running; Clement just maneuvered it until it was totally pooped and
squatted down to wait its doom. Actually all the doom it would have gotten from Clement was to get
stunned, hypoed, examined, and turned loose, but of course it had no way of knowing that. It just sat
there in the grass looking stupid and ludicrous and harmless in an ugly sort of way, and when Clement put
out his hand it didn't move, and when he patted it on the neck it just trembled. He was slowly
withdrawing his hand to get his stun gun out when he said something or laughedтАФanyway, made a sound,
and the thing bit him.

Those little bitty teeth weren't what they seemed. The gums are retractile and the teeth are really not teeth
at all but serrated bone with all those little needles slanting inward like a shark's. The jaw muscles are
pretty flabby, fortunately, or he'd have lost an elbow, but all the same, it was a bad bite. Clement couldn't
get loose, and he couldn't reach around himself to get to the stun gun, so he drew his flame pistol,
thumbed it around to "low", and scorched the primate's throat with it. That was Clement, never wanting
to do any more damage than he had to. The primate opened its mouth to protect its throat and Clement
got free. He jumped back and twisted his foot and fell, and something burned him on the side of the face
like a lick of hellfire. He scrabbled back out of the way and got to his feet. The primate was galloping for
the woods on its stumpy little legs with its long arms up over its headтАФeven then Clement thought it was
funny. Then something else went for him in the long grass and he took a big leap out of its way.

He later wrote very careful notes on this thing. It was wet and it was nasty and it stunk beyond words.
He said you could search your memory long afterwards and locate separate smells in that overall stench
the way you can with the instruments of an orchestra. There was butyl mercaptan and rotten celery,
excrement, formic acid, decayed meat, and that certain smell which is like the taste of some brasses. The
burn on his cheek smelt like hydrochloric acid at work on a hydrocarbon; just what it was.

The thing was irregularly spherical or ovoid, but soft and squashy. Fluids of various kinds oozed from it
here and thereтАФcolorless and watery, clotted yellow like soft-boiled eggs, and blood. It bled more than
anything ought to that needs blood; it bled in gouts from openings at random, and it bled cutaneously,
droplets forming on its surface like the sweat on a glass of ice water. Cutaneously, did I say? That's not
what Clement reported. It looked skinlessтАФflayed was the word he used. Much of its surface was
striated muscle fiber, apparently unprotected. In two places that he could see was naked brown tissue
like liver, drooling and dripping excretions of its own.