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

"Bah! Walking and talking, eh?" He seized a stone from the pebbled beach and sent it spinning into the
nearest mass of dusky green. "Let's hear 'em say a few cuss words, then."

The stone tore through leaves and creepers, and the gentle crash died into motionless silence. Or not
entirely motionless; for a moment something dark and tiny fluttered there, and then soared briefly into
black silhouette against the sky. It was small as a sparrow, but bat-like, with membranous wings. Yet
Carver stared at it amazed, for it trailed a twelve-inch tail, thin as a pencil, but certainly an appendage no
normal bat ought to possess.

For a moment or two the creature fluttered awkwardly in the sunlight, its strange tail lashing, and then it
swooped again into the dusk of the forest whence his missile had frightened it. There was only an echo of
its wild, shrill cry remaining, something that sounded like "Wheer! Whe-e-e-r!"

"What the devil!" said Carver. "There are two species of Chiroptera in New Zealand and neighboring
islands, and that was neither of them! No bat has a tail like that!"

Kolu and Malloa were wailing in chorus. The creature had been too small to induce outright panic, but it
had flashed against the sky with a sinister appearance of abnormality. It was a monstrosity, an aberration,
and the minds of Polynesians were not such as to face unknown strangeness without fear. Nor for that
matter, reflected Carver, were the minds of whites; he shrugged away a queer feeling of apprehension. It
would be sheer stupidity to permit the fears of Kolu and Malloa to influence a perfectly sane zoologist.

"Shut up!" he snapped. "We'll have to trap that fellow, or one of his cousins. I'll want a specimen of his
tribe. Rhimolophidae, I'll bet a trade dollar, but a brand-new species. We'll net one tonight."

The voices of the two brown islanders rose in terror. Carver cut in sharply on the protests and
expostulations and fragmentary descriptions of the horrors of bunyips, walking and talking trees, and the
bat-winged spirits of evil.

"Come on," 'he said gruffly. "Turn out the stuff in the proa. I'll look along the beach for a stream of fresh
water. Mawson reported water on the north side of the island."

Malloa and Kolu were muttering as he turned away. Before him the beach stretched white in the late
afternoon sun; at his left rolled the blue Pacific and at his right slumbered the strange, dark, dusky
quarter; he noted curiously the all but infinite variety of the vegetable forms, marveling that there was
scarcely a tree or snrub that he could identify with any variety common on Macquarie or the Auddands,
or far-away New Zealand. But, of course, he mused, he was no botanist.

Anyway, remote islands often produced their own particular varieties of flora and fauna. That was part of
Darwin's original evolution theory, this idea of isolation. Look at Mauritius and its dodo, and the
Galapagos turtles, or for that matter, the kiwi of New Zealand, or the gigantic, extinct moa. And yetтАФhe
frowned over the thoughtтАФone never found an island that was entirely covered by its own unique forms
of plant life. Windblown seeds of ocean borne debris always caused an interchange of vegetation among
islands; birds carried seeds clinging to their feathers, and even the occasional human visitors aided in the
exchange.

Besides, a careful observer like Mawson in 1911 would certainly have reported the peculiarities of
Austin Island. He hadn't; nor, for that matter, had the whalers, who touched here at intervals as they
headed into the antarctic, brought back any reports. Of course, whalers had become very rare of late
years; it might have been a decade or more since one had made anchorage at Austin. Yet what change