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

'I know that,' grunted Harrison.
'Yes, but Leroy didn't, and I spent our first couple of hours trying to explain it to him. By the time he
understood (if he does yet) we were past Cimmerium and over that Xanthus, desert, and then we
crossed the canal with the mud city and the barrel-shaped citizens and the place where Tweel had shot
the dream-beast. And nothing would do for Pierre here but that we put down so he could practice his
biology on the remains. So we did.
'The thing was still there. No sign of decay; couldn't be, of course, without bacterial forms of life, and
Leroy says that Mars is as sterile as an operating table.'
'Comme le coeur d'une fileuse,' corrected the little biologist, who was beginning to regain a trace of
his usual energy. 'Like an old maid's heart!'
'However,' resumed Jarvis, 'about a hundred of the little gray-green biopods had fastened onto the
thing and were growing and branching. Leroy found a stick and knocked 'em off, and each branch broke
away and became a biopod crawling around with the others. So he poked around at the creature, while I
looked away from it; even dead, that rope-armed devil gave me the creeps. And then came the surprise;
the thing was part plant!'
'C'est vrai!' confirmed the biologist. 'It's true!'
'It was a big cousin of the biopods,' continued Jarvis. 'Leroy was quite excited; he figures that all
Martian life is of that sort - neither plant nor animal. Life here never differentiated, he says; everything has
both natures in it, even the barrel-creatures - even Tweel! I think he's right, especially when I recall how
Tweel rested, sticking his beak in the ground and staying that way all night. I never saw him eat or drink,
either; perhaps his beak was more in the nature of a root, and he got his nourishment that way.'
'Sounds nutty to me,' observed Harrison.
'Well,' continued Jarvis, 'we broke up a few of the other growths and they acted the same way - the
pieces crawled around, only much slower than the biopods, and then stuck themselves in the ground.
Then Leroy had to catch a sample of the walking grass, and we were ready to leave when a parade of
the barrel creatures rushed by with their pushcarts. They hadn't forgotten me, either; they all drummed
out, 'We are v-r-r-iends - ouch!' just as they had before. Leroy wanted to shoot one and cut it up, but I
remembered the battle Tweel and I had had with them, and vetoed the idea. But he did hit on a possible
explanation as to what they did with all the rubbish they gathered.'
'Made mud-pies, I guess,' grunted the captain.
'More or less,' agreed Jarvis. 'They use it for food, Leroy thinks. If they're part vegetable, you see,
that's what they'd want - soil with organic remains in it to make it fertile. That's why they ground up sand
and biopods and other growths all together. See?'
'Dimly,' countered Harrison. 'How about the suicides?'
'Leroy had a hunch there, too. The suicides jump into the grinder when the mixture has too much
sand and gravel; they throw themselves in to adjust the proportions.'
'Rats!' said Harrison disgustedly. 'Why couldn't they bring in some extra branches from outside?'
'Because suicide is easier. You've got to remember that these creatures can't be judged by earthly
standards; they probably don't feel pain, and they haven't got what we'd call individuality. Any intelligence
they have is the property of the whole community - like an ant-heap. That's it! Ants are willing to die for
their ant-hill; so are these creatures.'
'So are men,' observed the captain, 'if it comes to that.'
'Yes, but men aren't exactly eager. It takes some emotion like patriotism to work 'em to the point of
dying for their country; these things do it all in the day's work.' He paused.
'Well, we took some pictures of the dream-beast and the barrel-creatures, and then we started
along. We sailed over Xanthus, keeping as close to the meridian of the Ares as we could, and pretty
soon we crossed the trail of the pyramidbuilder. So we circled back to let Leroy take a look at it, and
when we found it, we landed. The thing had completed just two rows of bricks since Tweel and I left it,
and there it was, breathing in silicon and breathing out bricks as if it had eternity to do it in - which it has.
Leroy wanted to dissect it with a Boland explosive bullet, but I thought that anything that had lived for ten