"Colin Wilson - Spider World 01 - The Desert" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Colin)

form a carpet on the floor. The children perspired as they slept. The adults were indifferent to the
temperature; tension kept them at a high level of alertness. Twice during the day, Siris brought food --
prickly pears and the dried meat of desert rodents -- but they ate sparingly, their eyes fixed on the strip
of electric blue sky.
At mid-afternoon, Niall was keeping watch when he saw a balloon on the horizon. Minutes later,
another appeared to its left, then a third to its right. Soon the sky was full of balloons -- he stopped
counting when he reached twenty. The sheer number made his heart contract. He hissed to the others,
and they joined him, standing back a few feet from the aperture so that all could see.
Ulf said softly: "Why are there so many?"
Niall was puzzled that his father failed to see the answer. The spiders knew they were being
scanned by human eyes. It must have been infuriating for the Death Lords to know that down there in the
desert, their prey was watching them from some hidden shelter, and that there was no way of driving
them into the open. This armada of balloons was designed to cause terror. It might have succeeded in its
purpose if it had come from another direction, so as to approach unseen. But in the five minutes or so
that it took the balloons to pass overhead, the watchers had time to control their fear. The wind had now
risen, so the balloons passed over quickly. The fear stabbed at them for a moment, seeming to illuminate
them like a searchlight beam; then it had moved on.
From his vantage point at the side of the aperture, Niall could see that the balloons were spread
out in a symmetrical zigzag pattern. He knew instinctively why this was so. A solitary balloon had no
chance of getting an exact bearing on its prey. Its powers of observation extended downward in a kind of
cone, and unless a spider's attention was focused on the precise point from which it received an echo, it
had no way of knowing exactly where that echo had come from. It might be anywhere within a square
mile. But if two spiders received the echo simultaneously, each could judge its direction, and their prey
could be located at the point at which the two echoes converged. And if more than two balloons
received the echo, its source would be even more obvious.
Strangely enough, this insight gave Niall a curious satisfaction. It meant that he was beginning to
understand the minds of the spiders, that they no longer represented the terror of the unknown. But an
instinct warned him against too much self-satisfaction.
In the late afternoon, the two children stirred. Their faces were flushed from the heat, and their
throats were dry -- the usual after-effect of the ortis juice. Siris gave them water, and then, as a special
treat, the succulent fruit of the opuntia cactus, with its astringent flavour. After that, they were given more
of the drugged porridge and fell asleep again. Mara, the youngest, breathed quickly and her long hair was
damp with sweat. Her mother sat with her arm extended over her in a protective gesture. Mara was
everybody's favourite, and their protectiveness had grown stronger since they had almost lost her. Three
months ago, playing among the euphorbia bushes one evening, she had been attacked by a big yellow
scorpion. Niall, who had been gathering prickly pear, had heard Runa's screams and arrived in time to
see the scorpion disappearing into its lair under a rock, clutching the child's body in its enormous pincers.
The sight paralysed him with shock. He had often watched with morbid fascination as a scorpion
paralysed some creature with that overarching swing of its tail, then shredded and tore the carcase with
its chelicerae, the short, powerful claws below the mouth; after that, the wounds would be injected with a
digestive enzyme that reduced the tissues to a liquid so the scorpion could drink them. Now his first
impulse was to rush in and try to grab his sister; but the sight of that moist sting, still poised above the
creature's back, warned him that this would be suicide. He ran back to the burrow, shouting for his
father. Ulf acted with the control of a man whose life has often depended on his coolness. He called to
Veig: "Quick, bring fire." It seemed an unbelievably long interval of time before Veig emerged from the
burrow with a burning torch of grass. With arms full of the dry, straw-like esparto, they rushed and
stumbled through the cactuses to the scorpion's lair. This was underneath a large, flat stone. The creature
was waiting for them; they could see its row of eyes gleaming in the darkness, behind the huge pincers.
The torch had almost burned out; Ulf blew on it to light the esparto, then rushed unhesitatingly at the
entrance to the lair. The scorpion gave its dry, menacing hiss, and retreated before the flames and the