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

'Nuts!' repeated the captain. 'Just daffy!'
'Yeah? Wait and see. A couple of times I've thought that perhaps we-' He paused, and then resumed
his narrative. 'Anyway, I finally gave it up, and got into my thermo-skin to sleep. The fire hadn't kept me
any too warm, but that damned sleeping bag did. Got stuffy five minutes after I closed myself in. I opened
it a little and bingo! Some eighty-below-zero air hit my nose, and that's when I got this pleasant little
frostbite to add to the bump I acquired during the crash of my rocket.
'I don't know what Tweel made of my sleeping. He sat around, but when I woke up, he was gone.
I'd just crawled out of my bag, though, when I heard some twittering, and there he came, sailing down
from that three-story Thyle cliff to alight on his beak beside me. I pointed to myself and toward the north,
and he pointed at himself and toward the south, and when I loaded up and started away, he came along.
'Man, how he traveled! A hundred and fifty feet at a jump, sailing through the air stretched out like a
spear, and landing on his beak. He seemed surprised at my plodding, but after a few moments he fell in
beside me, only every few minutes he'd go into one of his leaps, and stick his nose into the sand a block
ahead of me. Then he'd come shooting back at me; it made me nervous at first to see that beak of his
coming at me like a spear, but he always ended in the sand at my side.
'So the two of us plugged along across the Mare Chronium. Same sort of place as this - same crazy
plants and same little green biopods growing in the sand, or crawling out of your way. We talked - not
that we understood each other, you know, but just for company. I sang songs, and I suspected Tweel
did too; at least, some of his trillings and twitterings had a subtle sort of rhythm.
'Then, for variety, Tweel would display his smattering of English words. He'd point to an outcropping
and say 'rock,' and point to a pebble and say it again; or he'd touch my arm and say 'Tick,' and then
repeat it. He seemed terrifically amused that the same word meant the same thing twice in succession, or
that the same word could apply to two different objects. It set me wondering if perhaps his language
wasn't like the primitive speech of some earth people - you know, Captain, like the Negritoes, for
instance, who haven't any generic words. No word for food or water or man - words for good food and
bad food, or rainwater and seawater, or strong man and weak man - but no names for general classes.
They're too primitive to understand that rain water and seawater are just different aspects of the same
thing. But that wasn't the case with Tweel; it was just that we were somehow mysteriously different - our
minds were alien to each other. And yet - we liked each other!'
'Looney, that's all,' remarked Harrison. 'That's why you two were so fond of each other.'
'Well, I like you!' countered Jarvis wickedly. 'Anyway,' he resumed, 'don't get the idea that there was
anything screwy about Tweel. In fact, I'm not so sure but that he couldn't teach our highly praised human
intelligence a trick or two. Oh, he wasn't an intellectual superman, I guess; but don't overlook the point
that he managed to understand a little of my mental workings, and I never even got a glimmering of his.'
'Because he didn't have any!' suggested the captain, while Putz and Leroy blinked attentively.
'You can judge of that when I'm through,' said Jarvis. 'Well, we plugged along across the Mare
Chronium all that day, and all the next. Mare Chronium - Sea of Time! Say, I was willing to agree with
Schiaparelli's name by the end of that march! Just that gray, endless plain of weird plants, and never a
sign of any other life. It was so monotonous that I was even glad to see the desert of Xanthus toward the
evening of the second day.
'I was fair worn out, but Tweel seemed as fresh as ever, for all I never saw him drink or eat. I think
he could have crossed the Mare Chronium in a couple of hours with those block-long nosedives of his,
but he stuck along with me. I offered him some water once or twice; he took the cup from me and
sucked the liquid into his beak, and then carefully squirted it all back into the cup and gravely returned it.
'Just as we sighted Xanthus, or the cliffs that bounded it, one of those nasty sand clouds blew along,
not as bad as the one we had here, but mean to travel against. I pulled the transparent flap of my
thermo-skin bag across my face and managed pretty well, and I noticed that Tweel used some feathery
appendages growing like a mustache at the base of his beak to cover his nostrils, and some similar fuzz to
shield his eyes.'
'He is a desert creature,' ejaculated the little biologist, Leroy.