"Biped" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wells Basil)

BIPED
by Basil Wells
(Author of "Rebirth of Man," "Winged Warriors," etc.)
It was a monster who come among those peaceful people, a monster that walked on
two legs!



"STRANGE MAN," spoke gray-bearded Nab Tul, Elder of N'voo Canyon, "we have come
to a decision. Tonight you must choose what your fate will be. You must go to
the Temple, where the priests of Urim and Thummim will destroy your monstrous
body, or you must consent to have those useless lower limbs amputated.
"It is not good," he continued, "that a monster roam among us, affrighting our
women and children. We of Nephi have come to like you. You are a good, though
clumsy, worker in the corn fields and in the orchards.
"We hope you will decide to remain with us, for, despite your physical handicaps
several of our young women have admitted a definite interest in you. One in
particular," and he smiled.
I knew whom he meant very well--Inya Tul, his granddaughter. And I loved her
too. We had planned to build a home somewhere in the canyon some time in the
future. But now...!
ONLY two months before I had come drifting down into N'voo Canyon, an uncharted
hidden oasis in the savage wastelands just north of the Four Corners along the
Colorado River, and landed beside a shady pool where Inya swam alone.
She had screamed and swum be neath a screening wall of willows, only her shapely
shoulders and damp red curls thrusting out through that leafy covering. Never,
in all the cities of Greater America, had I seen a more lovely face than hers .
. .
"Go away," she had cried. "I am bathing here."
"So I gather," I replied with a grin, and loosened the wide straps that
harnessed me to my D grav cylinder. Carefully I moored my cylinder to a
projecting branch of a nearby cottonwood tree and then turned my back.
"Go ahead," I shouted, "and jerk on your clothes."
Shortly afterward I heard her soft steps approaching and turned to meet her. I
gasped. Never, in all the known world of the Twenty-second Century, had I beheld
so lovely and feminine a girl as was Inya--yet she was but a half-woman!
From her waist down there was nothing, save a pair of shapeless withered feet,
beneath her brief, woven-leather kilt!
Her firm, high-breasted bosom was confined by a laced jacket of pale gray
homespun, and on her long, firm-fleshed brown arms were heavy leather mittens.
She walked, as would a normal person, on her two palms, placing one arm before
the other as she proceeded; not like the usual legless cripple who hitches along
on his stumps. Her walk was graceful and dainty like herself, and after the
first moment of revulsion I was filled with admiration.
"Where do you come from, Monster ?" she demanded angrily. "The priests of Urim
and Thummim will hear of this. It is their duty to destroy such as you in
infancy, and you are man-grown."
"I am from the outside world," I told her. "And my name is Morton Whipple. I was
prospecting for gold and other precious metals here in Utah, pulling the D grav
unit that I use to descend and ascend into the sheerest canyons, when I stumbled