"Howard Waldrop - The Lunchbox" - читать интересную книгу автора (Waldrop Howard)

The scanning camera on top turned completely every two minutes. It recorded a scene each twenty
degrees of arc and sent them back after two minutes of rumination within the devices that made up the
innards of the Viking.

The pictures were marvelously sharp and clear, and showed a rolled landscape of dunes. Readings gave
back a temperature of -27┬░F but the temperature was slowly rising in the fairly bright morning sunlight.

==========

Krvl seeped across warm dunes. He would have to hurry to gather xrs before they died completely in the
hot burning sunlight that would come in an hour. Krvl liked to hunt in the morning better than the evening,
though chances of getting a near-live xr were much less. This morning, Krvl also wanted to find the thing
that had made the xr scream. He had heard a small sound like it often when he retrieved a half-live xr for
his meal from the ice vein that ran through his den. But never from above, in the open, at night, that loud.

He suggled down a dune. Already it was warmer. In thirty minutes the heat would become unbearable.
He would have to hurry. Krvl liked the summer least of all the times.

He came into view of the xr crawl.

==========

The close-up lens of the Viking began to turn slowly, photographing then relaying pictures back to Earth.
First was a photograph showing the third leg of the Viking which showed a discoloration, a darker
smudge protruding from beneath the landing leg. When the photograph was relayed a matter of minutes
later, the interpreters became tense for the first time. They immediately sent signals to the machine to take
a much closer series of pictures of the third leg of the craft.

The scanning camera, meanwhile, showed a patch of darker smudges in a dip between two dunes.

Excitement ran high. The bottom of the Viking opened and a long sticky string uncurled on the ground.
The interpreting people got down to work.

They tried to get the long string as near as possible to the third leg of the craft. They tried, but got no
closer than four inches.

The string withdrew up into the craft like a long tongue.

==========

The xrs had shifted a lot during the night. Krvl came over the dunes and saw the thick webbing of them
strewn over miles and miles of desert.

He opened his pouch and began gathering them up, putting them inside with the small ends up. He would
look back ever so often, and those that had not moved their large ends up, he took out and dropped
back to the desert. The sun was very very warm now.

He would have to hurry, or they would lose the rebirth fluid into the air through evaporation.

==========