"G. Stanley Weinbaum - The Best of Stanley G Weinbaum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weinbaum Stanley G)

apparently.
'Then I saw another light shining on something that glittered and I went on to look at that, but it was
only a heap of shiny sand. I turned toward the entrance to leave, and the Devil take, me if it wasn't goner.
'I supposed the corridor had curved, or I'd stepped into a side passage. Anyway, I walked back in
that direction I thought we'd come, and all I saw was more dim-lit corridor. The place was a labyrinth!
There was nothing but twisting passages running every way, lit by occasional lights, and now and then a
creature running by, sometimes with a pushcart, sometimes without.
'Well, I wasn't much worried at first. Tweel and I had only come a few steps from the entrance. But
every move we made after that seemed to get us in deeper. Finally I tried following one of the creatures
with an empty cart, thinking that he'd be going out for his rubbish, but he ran around aimlessly, into one
passage and out another. When he started dashing around a pillar like one of these Japanese waltzing
mice, I gave up, dumped my water tank on the floor, and sat down.
'Tweel was as lost as I. I pointed up and he said 'No - no - no!' in a sort of helpless trill. And we
couldn't get any help from the natives. They paid no attention at all, except to assure us they were friends
- ouch!
 'Lord! I don't know how many hours or days we wandered around there! I slept twice from sheer
exhaustion; Tweel never seemed to need sleep. We tried following only the upward corridors, but they'd
run uphill a ways and then curve downwards. The temperature in that damned ant hill was constant; you
couldn't tell night from day and after my first sleep I didn't know whether I'd slept one hour or thirteen, so
I couldn't tell from my watch whether it was midnight or noon.
'We saw plenty of strange things. There were machines running in some of the corridors, but they
didn't seem to be doing anything - just wheels turning. And several times I saw two barrel-beasts with a
little one growing between them, joined to both.'
'Parthenogenesis!' exulted Leroy. 'Parthenogenesis by budding like les tulipes!'
'If you say so, Frenchy,' agreed Jarvis. 'The things never noticed us at all, except, as I say, to greet us
with 'We are v-r-r-riends! Ouch!' They seemed to have no homelife of any sort, but just scurried around
with their pushcarts, bringing in rubbish. And finally I discovered what they did with it.
'We'd had a little luck with a corridor, one that slanted upwards for a great distance. I was feeling
that we ought to be close to the surface when suddenly the passage debouched into a domed chamber,
the only one we'd seen. And man! - I felt like dancing when I saw what looked like daylight through a
crevice in the roof.
'There was a - a sort of machine in the chamber, just an enormous wheel that turned slowly, and one
of the creatures was in the act of dumping his rubbish below it. The wheel ground it with a crunch - sand,
stones, plants, all into powder that sifted away somewhere. While we watched, others filed in, repeating
the process, and that seemed to be all. No rhyme nor reason to the whole thing - but that's characteristic
of this crazy planet. And there was another fact that's almost too bizarre to believe.
'One of the creatures, having dumped his load, pushed his cart aside with a crash and calmly shoved
himself under the wheel! I watched him being crushed, too stupefied to make a sound, and a moment
later, another followed him! They were perfectly methodical about it, too; one of the cartless creatures
took the abandoned pushcart.
'Tweel didn't seem surprised; I pointed out the next suicide to him, and he just gave the most
human-like shrug imaginable, as much as to say, 'What can I do about it?' He must have known more or
less about these creatures.
'Then I saw something else. There was something beyond the wheel, something shining on a sort of
low pedestal. I walked over; there was a little crystal, about the size of an egg, fluorescing to beat
Tophet. The light from it stung my hands and face, almost like a static discharge, and then I noticed
another funny thing. Remember that wart I had on my left thumb? Look!' Jarvis extended his hand. 'It
dried up and fell off - just like that! And my abused nose - say, the pain went out of it like magic! The
thing had the property of hard ex-rays or gamma radiations, only more so; it destroyed diseased tissue
and left healthy tissue unharmed!