"Charles R Tanner - Tumithak Of The Towers Of Fire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tanner Charles R)

fact.
There must have been thirty of to machines at which the workers busied
themselves. On the side of the machines nearest the workers, a complicated
series of thermometer-like tubes appeared, a half-dozen levers, and a small
hopper. Each worker was engaged in slowly pouring into the hopper a substance
that had the appearance of powdered iron, meanwhile watching carefully the
gauges, his free hand hovering over the levers.
Most of the workers were old men, weak old men with looks of hopeless despair on
their faces. Others, a few, were younger looking, but the same look of almost
resigned hopelessness covered their faces. Indeed, there were but four in the
entire company whose faces showed any signs of vigor or of hope. And these four
sat close to the platform and the bottom of the steps, where their masters might
keep a sharp eye on them and be ready at a moment's notice to whip back any
signs of rebellion.
Their masters! There were two of them, standing on untiring limbs on the low
dais-like platform at the foot of the stairs, with their assistants squatting at
their feet. Strange as those assistants would seem to men of today, their
strangeness was nothing compared to that of their masters.
For their masters were not men at all, but shelks, savage but intelligent beasts
from another world, who had ruled over the Surface from time immemorial. They
were crustacean-like creatures; indeed, they might have been mistaken for
gigantic lobsters at a distance. They had ten limbs, hairless and not at all
unlike greatly elongated fingers.
Their bodies, reddish in hue, were shaped a good deal like a wasp's abdomen, and
seated directly upon that body, with no sign of a neck, was a head that was
startling in its resemblance to a human one.
Save for the fact that it was hairless and had a grim thinness to the lips that
no man had ever had, a sheik's head might have been that of a man.
Their assistants were men. At least, they had the form of men. Butnone of the
toiling slaves considered them as such. To them they were mogs--fawning,
dog-like descendants of the men who had surrendered to the shelks in that
ancient day when the beasts of Venus had conquered earth and driven the most of
the race into the pits and corridors where they still lived.
Time and breeding had changed the mogs considerably. Few of them were less than
six and a half feet tall, and most of them were closer to seven. Their hair was
black and they wore full black beards, and all were as lean and supple as
greyhounds. And like greyhounds, their chests were developed out of all
proportions to the rest of their bodies, which were bony and gaunt.
So the workers toiled at their machines, and the shelks and mogs sat and
watched, drowsily; and the mogs even dozed. For they knew well that no man would
dare to raise his hand against their masters. Besides, the masters were armed
with the terrible fire-hoses, curious weapons consisting of a small box which
was strapped on each sheik's back, from which emerged a hose that ended in a
long tube thrust in a scabbard. Deadly weapons these were indeed, for they could
throw a searing beam of heat that, even at a hundred yards, was fatal.
OF THE four younger toilers, the mightiest was Otaro. He had been a slave of the
shelks but a few weeks. Before that he had been the chief of the Kraylings, a
powerful tribe of pit dwellers who lived in a man-pit many miles from where he
now toiled. Like all the Kraylings--indeed, like all the toilers in this room,
who had once been Kraylings, too--he was black-skinned and woolly-haired. Unlike