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

across your valley. Chance for some fresh cool water and food instead of this
radio-transmitted hot water and sawdust, I told myself; so here I am."
"There is no world beyond this valley," the girl cried. "Only a desert of
sun-baked rocks and looming red and yellow cliffs lies beyond."
I looked down at her and smiled. Apparently her people had been out of touch
with the world for many years and had taught her nothing of civilization. (Many
people have fled from the complexity of modern life into the wilderness, there
to live the simple wholesome life of an earlier happier age.) Perhaps they had
hidden here to shield her deformity from the world....
So, while I weighted down my D grav cylinder with several hundred pounds of
rocks until my return, the girl, Inya, told me of the valley and the thousand or
more Nephites who lived there.
Many ages ago, she told me, strange, wicked beings, the Wolf Hunters, she called
them, had driven the Nephites into N'voo and sealed the outer pass forever. Then
the power of the peepstones, Urim and Thummim, was called upon by the priests of
the Temple and all the outer world blasted to a cinder.
And the Wolf Hunters, I learned, had long, sturdy legs even as did I! The
Nephites, all of them, were legless!
No wonder she had called me a monster, I realized; slowly I began to piece
together a true pictures of what had happened many years before.
Banished here to this isolated canyon by the Mormon Wolf Hunters some time in
the Nineteenth Century, these people had, through the course of many
generations, weeded out all normal offspring by ruthlessly destroying them. Even
as the children of six-fingered parents were likewise so afflicted, and armless
parents often bore armless offspring, so these people ran true to their freakish
heredity....
LATER Inya led me to the central village, her smooth strong arms carrying her
along at a pace that taxed my legs, and shortly I was surrounded by a waist-high
crowd of muttering human torsos. After a time her father, Nab Tul, led me away
to his home and gave me food and a place to sleep.
After that, as I walked about the village or roamed the valley three or four
armed men were always close by. When I walked or ran they were always beside or
ahead of me, their great shoulder and arm muscles working as smoothly and
powerfully as my own lower extremities.
They could spring across the irrigation ditches or brooks as easily as could I
and in tests of strength they could always best me. So, since I was so well
guarded, I did not try to return to my D grav cylinder and escape. In a few
days, I decided, when their vigilance had slackened, I would slip away to my
cylinder, free it of excess weight, and float out of the valley again as I had
come.
I had reckoned without Inya, however. Being with her every day soon made me
forget my plan to leave the valley--I was in love!
So I worked with the legless men in their fields and made many friends among
them. All thought of leaving the canyon and Inya was banished from my mind. We
were planning a little cabin and . . .
I MUST think it over," I told Nab Tul. "Tonight after we have eaten I will give
you my answer."
The skin of my body was clammy with cold sweat as I staggered away up the valley
to the distant corn fields where I was working....Lose my legs, never to walk
again? Creep along on my weak hands and the tender stumps of my legs?