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

rare specimen. He had to get to the beach to do what he could to preserve it. It would be named after
himтАФFelis CarveriтАФdoubtless.

A sound behind him brought him to an abrupt halt. He peered cautiously back through the branch-roofed
tunnel. He was being trailed. Something, bestial or human, lurked back there in the forest shadows. He
saw it тАФor themтАФdimly, as formless as darker shades in the shifting array that marked the wind-stirred
leaves.

For the first time, the successive mysteries began to induce a sense of menace. He increased his pace.
The shadows slid and skittered behind him, and, lest he ascribe the thing to fancy, a low cry of some sort,
a subdued howl, rose in the dusk of the forest at his left, and was answered at his right.

He dared not run, knowing that the appearance of fear too often brought a charge from both beasts and
primitive humans. He moved as quickly as he could without the effect of flight from danger, and at last
saw the beach. There in the opening he would at least distinguish his pursuers, if they chose to attack.

But they didn't. He backed away from the wall of vegetation, but no forms followed him. Yet they were
there. All the way back to the box and the remains of his fire, he knew that just within the cover of the
leaves lurked wild forms.
The situation began to prey on his mind. He couldn't simply remain on the beach indefinitely, waiting for
an attack. Sooner or later he'd have to sleep, and thenтАФBetter to provoke the attack at once, see what
sort of creatures he faced, and try to drive them off or exterminate them. He had, after all, plenty of
ammunition.

He raised his gun, aimed at the skittering shadow, and fired. There was a howl that was indubitably
bestial; before it had quivered into silence, others answered. Then Carver started violently backward, as
the bushes quivered to the passage of bodies, and he saw what sort of beings had lurked there.

A line of perhaps a dozen forms leaped from the fringe of underbrush to the sand. For the space of a
breath they were motionless, and Carver knew that he was in the grip of a zoologist's nightmare, for no
other explanation was at all adequate.

The pack was vaguely doglike; but by no means did its members resemble the indigenous hunting dogs of
New Zealand, nor the dingoes of Australia. Nor, for that matter, did they resemble any other dogs in his
experience, nor, if the truth be told, any dogs at all, except perhaps in their lupine method of attack, their
subdued yelps, their slavering mouths, and the arrangement of their teethтАФwhat Carver could see of that
arrangement.

But the fact that bore home to him now was another stunning repetition of all his observations of Austin
IslandтАФthey did not resemble each other! Indeed, it occurred to Carver with the devastating force of a
blow that, so far on this mad island, he had seen no two living creatures, animal or vegetable, that
appeared to belong to related species!

The nondescript pack inched forward. He saw the wildest extremes among the creaturesтАФbeings with
long hind legs and short forelimbs; a creature with hairless, thorn-scarred skin and a face like the
half-human visage of a werewolf; a tiny, rat-sized thing that yelped with a shrill, yapping voice; and a
mighty, barrel-chested creature whose body seemed almost designed for erect posture, and who loped
on its hinder limbs with its fore-paws touching the ground at intervals like the knuckles of an orangutan.
That particular being was a horrible, yellow-fanged monstrosity, and Carver chose it for his first bullet.