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

I worked among the rustling yellow corn stalks that afternoon, my
fellow-workers' heads and squat torsos hidden among those dying rows; I tried to
imagine how it would feel to be little more than three feet tall, and the flesh
of my body crawled. . . . I shuddered and swung the corn-knife viciously, as
though it were a machete, mowing down the leafy clumps of cornstalks about me.
My eyes ranged along the canyon--nine miles long and more than a mile in width;
the winding emerald bands of willow, cottonwood, aspen and cedar along the
narrow irrigation ditches and winding brooks; the upper slopes, terrace upon
terrace, thick with the dark green ranks of towering evergreen forests, and
above it all the soaring, unscalable sheerness of the encircling iron-red walls
and lofty, lemon-colored crags.
Further to the north, where a projecting wall of rock shouldered out into the
valley, a narrow canyon--a deep cleft into ruined red cliffs tottering
overhead--opened. It was there that I had landed beside the rocky pool where
Inya and the other girls of the valley played and swam all through the summer.
And there, where I had concealed my D grav unit beneath the weight of many flat
stones, I decided to go.
Forgotten now were Inya and our plans for the future. Only the blind urge to
escape from this hellish valley and the mutilation that awaited me was in my
mind. I looked about the field.
THE nearest Nephite was a hundred yards away, half-hidden from me by the
intervening rows of corn. Quietly then I bent down and slipped away through the
field toward that looming red butte and the escape that awaited beyond its
walls.
I left the shelter of the brownleaved stalks several hundred feet further along
the way, and went plunging away across muddy ditches and reddish rocky soil
toward my goal. A thousand feet or more I raced ere my flight was discovered;
then ten or twelve of the workers, unarmed save for the heavy cornknives slung
between their shoulder blades, came racing in long, prodigious bounds after me.
Fast as I ran yet their muscular arms carried them at a swifter pace and they
were rapidly overhauling me when I darted into the narrow side canyon.
Some of them swung their longarmed bodies forward in mighty leaps; touched their
grotesque withered feet to the ground momentarily, and swung forward again;
while others ran as a man runs, their arms twinkling swiftly forward along the
uneven ground.
They drew closer behind; two of them far in advance of the others shouted for me
to halt at once, but I spurted onward faster than before. The grassy little
glade beside the pool lay but a few feet ahead now.
But despair was in my heart. Before I could free the D grav of its burden of
rocks, adjust the harness, and spring into the air, they would be upon me.
Perhaps I could jerk my Z gun from the pack, however, and send its paralyzing
bolts of electricity smashing into them.
Then I was beside my cache and the blood drained from my stricken brain for a
moment.... The D grav and all my equipment was gone!
I turned to face the legless men, whipping the corn-knife from its sheath along
my backbone, and leaping toward them. Better to go down fighting, I thought,
than live on a crippled torso.
My first blow sheared through the wrist of Dav, fleetest of my pursuers, and
then I was engaged in a duel with the other man. Now at last my superior height
and ability to move about as I willed told in my favor and before his fellows