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The Aliens [сборник]
- Автор: Лейнстер Мюррей
- Год: 1965
- Язык: английский
- Год: Berkley Medallion
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «The Aliens [сборник]». Краткое содержание книги:
None came. The fumes drifted out the cave-mouth. Then he saw that the thing on the floor was a weirdly constructed space-suit, and that the thing in it was not human and looked very tired. It was dead. Then he saw an almost typical tight beam projector, linked with heavy cables to a scanning device. He saw a model—all of five feet high—of the city he and Haynes had tried to reach. The model was of unbelievable delicacy and perfection. But the scanning system now was focused on a metal object which was a miniature Thing with claws and jaws and armor. . . . It was two feet long, and there was a cable control by which its movements could be directed. A solidity which was controlled by that ingenious mechanical toy could dig canals, or gather the crop from the tops of skit-trees—when enlarged in the projection to stand a hundred feet high at the shoulder—or it could tear apart a spaceship as a terrier rends a rat. . . .
There was more. Much more. But there was only the one small inhabitant, who wore a space-suit on his own planet. And he was dead.
Haynes called from the flier at the cave-mouth:
"Wentworth! What's happened? Are you alive? What's up?"
Wentworth went savagely out. He wanted to see how the Galloping Cow had withstood the attack. What he had seen last looked bad.
It was bad. The Galloping Cow was a carcass. Her engines were not too badly smashed, but her outer shell was scrap-iron, her frame was twisted wreckage, and there was no faintest hope that they could repair her in the field.
"And—I'm engaged to be married when we get back," said Haynes, white-faced. "We'll never get back in that."
Less than a month later, though, the Galloping Cow did head for home. Haynes, unwittingly, had made it possible. Examination of the solidity-projector revealed its principles, and Haynes—trying forlornly to make a joke—suggested that he model a statuette of the last inhabitant to be projected a mile or two high above the skit-tree plantations now forever useless. But he was commissioned to model something else entirely, and in his exuberance his fancy wandered afar. But McRae dourly permitted the model to stand, because he was in a hurry to start.
So that, some six weeks from the morning when Wentworth saw an impossible Thing moving in the gray dawn-light on an unnamed planet, the Galloping Cow was almost back in touch with humanity. Two weeks more, and the outposts of civilization on Rigel would be reached. A long, skeleton tower had been built out from the old ship's battered remnant. A scanner scanned, and a beam-type projector projected the image of Haynes' making to form a solid envelope of force-field about the ship. It was much larger than the original hull had been, there would be room and to spare on the voyage home. And Haynes was utterly happy.
"Think!" he said blissfully, in the scanning-room where the force-field envelope was maintained about the ship. "Two weeks and Rigel! Two months and home! Two months and one day and I'm a married man!"
Wentworth looked at the small moving object on which the scanners focused.
"You're a queer egg, Haynes," he said. "I don't believe you ever had a solemn thought in your head. Do you know what wiped out those people?"
"A boojum?" asked Haynes mildly. "Tell me."
"The biologists figured it out," said Haynes. "A plague. The last poor devil wore a space-suit to keep the germs out. It seems that some wrecked Earth ship drifted out to where one of their explorers found it. And they hauled it to ground. They learned a lot, but there were germs on board they weren't used to. Coryza, for instance. In their bodies it had an incubation period of about six months, and was highly contagious all the time. Then it turned lethal. They didn't know about it in time to establish quarantines. No wonder the poor devil wanted to kill us. We'd wiped out his race!"
"Too bad!" said Haynes. But he looked down at the small moving thing he had modeled for a new hull for the Galloping Cow. "You know," he said blithely, "I like this model. I may not be the best sculptor in the world—as an amateur I wouldn't expect it. But for a while after we land on earth I'm surely going to be the most famous!"
And he beamed at the jerkily moving object which was the model for the hull of the Galloping Cow. It was twelve hundred feet long, as it was projected about the old ship's engine-room and remaining portions. It had a stiffly extended tail and an outstretched neck and curved horns. Its legs extended and kicked, and extended and kicked.
The Galloping Cow, in fact, exactly fitted her name by her outward appearance, as she galloped steadily earthward through emptiness.
Thing from the Sky
MAYBE THE THING from the sky landed where it did because rain had fallen in Seco Valley for the second recorded time in sixty years. Or maybe that was only coincidence. The rainfall did bring Steve Hansun to the valley, though he hardly expected to find anything but sun-scorched rock and sun-baked sand and such impossible desert conditions that even lizards and rattlesnakes would stay away from it. Seco is Spanish for dry, and Seen Valley is hell on earth. Even Death Valley-forty miles away-is a place of' lush vegetation and flowing fountains by comparison. But there had been a rainfall in Seen Valley, and for hours the parched, dust-caked rocks showed many colors and the sand drank greedily of pelting raindrops. For a space there was a steaming mist over the driest place on earth. Maybe the thing from the sky was drawn by it.
Maybe.
Steve Hansen heard about the rain after it happened. He was Research Assistant in the Arid-Area Plants Section of a college which shall be nameless. He was working on a possible variation of the prickly pear-it was to be without prickles-which could thrive in desert regions and serve as cattle-food without each pod having to have its spines seared off with a gasoline torch. He knew Death Valley, and Seco Valley too, and he'd made a bargain with a hard-rock miner named Brady who stubbornly worked a claim some ten miles north from Seen Valley and seven thousand feet higher above sea-level.
So… On a certain day the hard-rock man, Brady, saw clouds banking up all over the area of which Seen Valley was a part. It was freakish. Presently there was a parting of the clouds and Brady could see that rain was failing… Death Valley has rain-a good rain-as often as once in ten years. Naturalists and biologists gloat over the plants which spring up instantly after it and bloom for a couple of weeks before they shrivel and go back to dust in Death Valley's normal desiccation. But nobody had ever seen plants in Seen Valley.
It never rains there. So Brady made amazedly sure that it was raining, and then headed across the mountains to keep the terms of his bargain with Steve.
That was one day-Wednesday. He sent a telegram to Steve about the rain and got an answer as fast as the wires could bring it. Steve was on the way~ That was Thursday. Brady hung around the town of San Felice waiting for Steve's arrival. That was Friday. Friday night the thing from the sky arrived.
It wasn't a thing that could fly, itself, though something that could fly must have been involved in its arrival. It appeared over Seen Valley by night, dangling from a slender thread which reached up through a cloud-bank, and up through the stratosphere, and on up past the tropopause, and nobody can guess how many miles beyond that. The thread was very remarkable. It wasn't more than a quarter of an inch thick, but it sustained its own weight in a length that would have snapped steel cable like string and it held up, be-sides, an oval, nearly globular object that was five feet in diameter and had windows and hatches underneath.