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

The thing dropped without a sound; the slug had split its skull. As the report echoed back and forth
between the hills on the east and west extremities of Austin, the pack answered with a threatening chorus
of bays, howls, growls, and shrieks. They shrank back momentarily from their companion's body, then
came menacingly forward.

Again Carver fired. A red-eyed hopping creature yelped and crumpled. The line halted nervously,
divided now by two dead forms. Their cries were no more than a muffled growling as they eyed him with
red and yellowish orbs.

He started suddenly as a different sound rose, a cry whose nature he could not determine, though it
seemed to come from a point where the forested bank rose sharply in a little cliff. It was as if some
watcher urged on the nondescript pack, for they gathered courage again to advance. And it was at this
moment that a viciously flung stone caught the man painfully on the shoulder.

He staggered, then scanned the line of brush. A missile meant humankind. The mad island harbored
something more than aberrant beasts.

A second cry sounded, and another stone hummed past his ear. But this time he had caught the flash of
movement at the top of the cliff, and he fired instantly.

There was a scream. A human figure reeled from the cover of foliage, swayed, and pitched headlong into
the brush at the base, ten feet below. The pack of creatures broke howling, as if their courage had
vanished before this evidence of power. They fled like shadows into the forest.

But something about the figure that had fallen from the cliff struck Carver as strange. He frowned, waiting
a moment to assure himself that the nondescript pack had fled, and that no other menace lurked in the
brush, then he darted toward the place where his assailant had fallen.

The figure was human, beyond doubtтАФor was it? Here on this mad island where species seemed to take
any form, Carver hesitated to make even that assumption. He bent over his fallen foe, who lay face
down, then turned the body over. He stared.

It was a girl. Her face, still as the features of the Buddha of Nikko, was young and lovely as a Venetian
bronze figurine, with delicate features that even in unconsciousness had a wildness apparent in them. Her
eyes, closed though they were, betrayed a slight, dryadlike slant.

The girl was white, though her skin was sun-darkened almost to a golden hue. Carver was certain of her
color, nevertheless, for at the edges of her single garmentтАФan untanned hide of leopard-like fur, already
stiffening and crackingтАФher skin showed whiter.

Had he killed her? Curiously perturbed, he sought for the wound, and found it, at last, in a scarcely
bleeding graze above her right knee. His shot had merely spun her off balance; it was the ten-foot fall
from the cliff that had done the damage, of which the visible evidence was a reddening bruise of her left
temple. But she was living. He swung her hastily into his arms and bore her across the beach, away from
the brush in which her motley pack was doubtless still lurking.

He shook his nearly empty canteen, then tilted her head to pour water between her lips. Instantly her
eyes flickered open, and for a moment she stared quite uncomprehendingly into Carver's eyes, not twelve
inches from her own. Then her eyes widened, not so much in terror as in startled bewilderment; she
twisted violently from his arms, tried twice to rise, and twice fell back as her legs refused to support her.