"Wolfe, Gene - The Urth Of The New Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

different from the stooped figure of the salamander that
had once nearly burned me alive in Thrax. I expected it to
rear erect and reveal the blazing heart within.
It did not, and until too late I did not fire. For a moment
we waited motionless; then it fled, bouncing and scrambling
across the boxes and barrels like an awkward puppy
in pursuit of the lively ball that was itself. With that vile
instinct every man has to kill whatever may fear him, I
fired. The beam--potentially deadly still, though I had
reduced it to its lowest strength to seal the leaden coffer--split
the air and set a solid-looking ingot to clanging like
a gong. But the creature, whatever it was, was a dozen ells
away at least, and in another moment it had disappeared
behind a statue swathed in protective wrappings.
Someone shouted, and I thought I recognized Gunnie's
husky contralto. There was a sound like a singing arrow,
then a yell from another throat.
The shaggy creature came bounding back, but this time,
having regained my senses, I did not shoot. Purn appeared
and fired his caliver, swinging it like a fowling piece.
Instead of the bolt I expected, it shot forth a cord,
something flexible and swiff that looked black in the
strange light and flew with the singing I had heard a
moment before.
This black cord struck the shaggy creature and wrapped
it with a loop or two, but seemed to produce no other
result. Purn gave a shout and leaped like a grasshopper. It
had not occurred to me before that in this vast place I
could leap myself just as I had on deck, but I imitated him
now (mostly because I did not wish to lose contact with
Sidero before I had revenged myself) and nearly dashed
out my brains against the ceiling.
While I was in the air, however, I had a magnificent view
of the hold beneath me. There was the shaggy creature,
which might have been fallow under Urth's sun, streaked
with black yet still skipping with frantic energy; even as I
saw him, Sidero's caliver blotched him more. There was
Purn nearly upon him, and Idas and Gunnie, the latter
firing even as she ran in great leaps, from high place to high
place across the jumbled cargo.
I dropped near them, climbed unsteadily atop the tilted
breach of a mountain carronade, and hardly saw the
shaggy creature scrambling toward me until it had
bounced almost into my arms. I say "almost" because I did
not actually grasp it, and certainly it did not grasp me.
Nevertheless, we remained together--the black cords adhered
to my clothing as well as to the flat strips (neither fur
nor feathers) of the shaggy creature.
A moment after we had tumbled from the carronade, I
discovered another property of the cords: stretched, they