"A. E. Van Vogt - The Voyage Of The Space Beagle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Vogt A E)

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html




TO FORD McCORMACK I ON AND ON Coeurl prowled. The black, moonless, almost
starless night yielded reluctantly before a grim reddish dawn that crept up
from his left. It was a vague light that gave no sense of approaching warmth.
It slowly revealed a nightmare landscape. Jagged black rock and a black,
lifeless plain took form around him. A pale red sun peered above the grotesque
horizon. Fingers of light probed among the shadows. And still there was no
sign of the family of id creatures that he had been trailing now for nearly a
hundred days. He stopped finally, chilled by the reality. His great forelegs
twitched with a shuddering movement that arched every razor-sharp claw. The
thick tentacles that grew from his shoulders undu-lated tautly. He twisted his
great cat head from side to side, while the hairlike tendrils that formed each
ear vibrated frantically, testing every vagrant breeze, every throb in the
ether. There was no response. He felt no swift tingling along his intricate
nervous system. There was no suggestion anywhere of the presence of the id
creatures, his only source of food on this desolate planet. Hopelessly, Coeurl
crouched, an enormous catlike figure silhouetted against the dim, reddish sky
line, like a distorted etching of a black tiger in a shadow world. What
dismayed him was the fact that he had lost touch. He possessed sensory
equipment that could normally detect organic id miles away. He recognized that
he was no longer normal. His overnight failure to maintain contact indicated a
physi-cal breakdown. This was the deadly sickness he had heard about. Seven
times in the past century he had found coeurls, too weak to move, their
otherwise immortal bodies emaciated and doomed for lack of food. Eagerly,
then, he had smashed their unresisting bodies, and taken what little id was
still keeping them alive. Coeurl shivered with excitement, remembering those
meals. Then he snarled audibly, a defiant sound that quavered on the air,
ech-oed and re-echoed among the rocks, and shuddered back along his nerves. It
was an instinctive expression of his will to live. And then, abruptly, he
stiffened. High above the distant horizon he saw a tiny glowing spot. It came
nearer. It grew rapidly, enormously, into a metal ball. It be-came a vast,
round ship. The great globe, shining like polished silver, hissed by above
Coeurl, slowing visibly. It receded over a black line of hills to the right,
hovered almost motionless for a second, then sank down out of sight. Coeurl
exploded from his startled immobility. With tigerish speed, he raced down
among the rocks. His round, black eyes burned with agonized desire. His ear
tendrils, despite their diminished powers, vibrated a message of id in such
quantities that his body felt sick with the pangs of his hunger. The distant
sun, pinkish now, was high in the purple and black sky when he crept up behind
a mass of rock and gazed from its shadows at the ruins of the city that
sprawled below him. The silvery ship, in spite of its size, looked small
against the great spread of the deserted, crumbling city. Yet about the ship
was a leashed aliveness, a dynamic quiescence that, after a moment, made it
stand out, dominating the foreground. It rested in a cradle made by its own
weight in the rocky, resisting plain which began abruptly at the outskirts of
the dead metropolis. Coeurl gazed at the two-legged beings who had come from