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

The instruments in the craft showed a temperature at minus eleven degrees Fahrenheit as the first of the
sample gatherers was fired towards the darker smudge between the two dunes. The small rocket was
propelled by liquid nitrogen pressure, and as it left, the nitrogen compressor, powered by the same
nuclear generator which ran everything on the craft, sucked in more air from outside, to compress and
liquefy.
The small rocket arced out, between the dunes, and landed amidst the darker tones of the camera lens. It
sat a few moments, the last of the nitrogen bubbling off, and then a small grapple and net affair slid out,
scooped, opened and closed. An activator signaled for the craft to start the winch that would draw the
collector back.

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Krvl straightened at the sound. A high thin pop, and then a thud quite near. He looked in the direction of
the sound.

There was a slight hiss. He saw deepfrost form around a depression in the midst of the xr crawl. As he
watched, xrs began crawling toward the depression, first a few, then more and more, then a virtual riot of
them. And with the sun blazing.

All thoughts of xr gathering were forgotten. This was a new and strange thing. As mysterious as the xr
scream early this day.

He/she/it walked toward the moving xrs. Krvl scanned the horizon for other signs of strangeness. Out a
ways, between the nearest dunes, he saw a much larger depression, and a solitary, curiously flattened xr.
More newness.

He stopped. A group of xrs was being gathered, folded, compacted, crushed into a tight mass before
him.

The folding stopped. Then the mass moved, without walking, toward the edge of the xr crawl.

Krvl looked and watched and followed, but could not decide what or how this thing happened.

An invisibility. He reasoned.

Krvl pulled out his twelfth and thirteenth Haze eyes.

He stopped at what he saw. His Haze eyes were good only when the air cleared and the Hazelight came
down. Using them now, though, he could barely make out the countryside, but was taken aback at the
other thing he saw.

A creature sat far off between the two dunes. With one of its feet it was standing atop the crushed xr,
and had extended a claw from itself into the xr patch, where the claw had scooped up some of the things
and was pulling them back towards itself.

Carefully, Krvl followed the claw as it was pulled back into the Haze creature. It had no business
bothering his crawl.

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