"Stanley G. Weinbaum - Proteus Island" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weinbaum Stanley G)

She obeyed his gesture rather than his voice. She sat on the sand before him, gazing up with a trace of
fear but more of wariness in her honey-hued eyes.

"Where are your people?" he asked sharply, pointing at her and then waving in an inclusive gesture at the
forest.

She stared without comprehension, and he varied his symbolism. "Your home, then?" he pantomimed the
act of sleeping.

The result was the same, simply a troubled look from her glorious eyes.

"Now what the devil!" he muttered. "You have a name, haven't you? A name? Look!" He tapped his
chest. "Alan. Get it? Alan. Alan."

That she understood instantly. "Alan," she repeated dutifully, looking up at him.

But when he attempted to make her assign a name to herself, he failed utterly. The only effect of his
efforts was a deepening of the perplexity in her features. He reverted, at last, to the effort to make her
indicate in some fashion the place of her home and people, varying his gestures in every way he could
devise. And at last she seemed to comprehend.

She rose doubtfully to her feet and uttered a strange, low, mournful cry. It was answered instantly from
the brush, and Carver stiffened as he saw the emergence of that same motley pack of nondescript beings.
They must have been watching, lurking just beyond view. Again they circled the two slain members as
they advanced.

Carver whipped out his revolver. His movement was followed by a wail of anguish from the girl, who
flung herself before him, arms outspread as if to shield the wild pack from the menace of the weapon.
She faced him fearfully, yet defiantly, and there was puzzled questioning in her face as well. It was as if
she accused the man of ordering her to summon her companions only to threaten them with death.

He stared. "O.K.," he said at last. "What's a couple of rare specimens on an island that's covered with
'em? Send 'em away."

She obeyed his gesture of command. The weird pack slunk silently from view, and the girl backed
hesitantly away as if to follow them, but halted abruptly at Carver's word. Her attitude was a curious one,
partly fear, but more largely composed, it seemed, of a sort of fascination, as if she did not quite
understand the zoologist's nature.

This was a feeling he shared to a certain extent, for there was certainly something mysterious in
encountering a white girl on this mad Austin Island. It was as if there were one specimen, and only one,
of every species in the world here on this tiny islet, and she were the representative of humanity. But still
he frowned perplexedly into her wild, amber eyes.

It occurred to him again that on the part of Austin he had traversed he had seen no two creatures alike.
Was this girl, too, a mutant, a variant of some species other than human, who had through mere chance
adopted a perfect human form? As, for instance, the doglike cat whose body still lay on the sand where
he had flung it. Was she, perhaps, the sole representative of the human form on the island, Eve before
Adam, in the garden? There had been a woman before Adam, he mused.