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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:
The ovoid shape came through the last layer of cloud-stuff in deep darkness. The clouds were higher than the mountains above Seen Valley, just then, but they cut off all sight of the moon or stars. The thing from the sky descended, and seemed to see the jagged mountaintops. It may have had some sort of drive in it, permitting it to maneuver at the end of its string It sheered away from the mountains and went down and down-bobbing a little as if the thread were slightly elastic-until it was a bare five hundred feet above the valley floor. There it paused, and' presently dropped another hundred feet, and then a hundred and fifty, and then quite slowly until it hung wavering in the darkness not more than forty feet or so above the valley-bottom. There it became still, as if thinking deeply or preparing for something important. Nobody saw it. The only human dwelling within thirty miles was Brady's shack, and he was over in San Felice waiting for Steve. Nobody heard it. Not even lizards or rattlesnakes or such. There weren't any. There had been rain here two days ago, but no trace of moisture remained. There was nothing living in the valley.
There came a small noise in the air. It was a faint, wavering, far-away muttering that gradually increased in volume. It rose to a droning hum, and the hum became a growl and the growl became a roar. Then the Chicago-to-Los-Angeles plane roared into view above the mountains to the east. It was well above the peaks, but barely below the ceiling of cloud. It was invisible, of course-merely a highup bellowing of motors and two winking wing-tip lights of red and green which swam toward the zenith while the thing from the sky hung motionless above the desolation of Seco Valley. Up aloft, apparently something happened. There was a momentary check, perhaps, in the sound of one of the four motors. But the plane did not check or swerve. A propeller hitting an impossible cord in mid-air and cutting through it with a whirling blade, might make such a momentary pause. But the plane drove on.
The thing from the sky, though, jerked violently upward. It lunged, and went careening off to one side, and then fell like a plummet to the floor of the valley. It crashed. Something crackled. There was a sound like an explosion, only wrong. It wasn't air expanding from high pressure, but air expanding into a near-vacuum. Then there was silence, and then a hurried, pattering noise as thousands upon thousands of feet of quarter-inch line came leaping down out of the night sky. It coiled over the smashed ovoid. It went wavering in huge loops and tanglings over a space a hundred feet across. The plane's navigation-lights swam across the sky. They went beyond the western mountain-tops and vanished. The sound of motors went down from a bellow to a growl, to a drone, to a hum, and then to a faint, faint muttering. Then it could not be heard any longer. There was silence in Seco Valley for a long time. Ultimately; though, something crawled painfully out of the smashed oval shape, and went helplessly around its outside. It tugged hopelessly at this and that. Then it waited, watching the sky. Nothing happened, though it waited by its shattered vehicle until almost daylight-until false dawn showed it the mountains all about. But when dawn came there was merely a cryptic mass of plastic wreckage, and thousands of feet of plastic cord-and nothing else. And nothing living was to be seen in Seen Valley.
That was Saturday. Sunday morning Steve Hansun arrived, with Brady and two burros and Brady's dog Gyp. They got to the edge of the valley while life in it was still conceivable-within an hour or two of sunrise. By eight o'clock the valley was warm, and by nine it was hot, and by ten it was like an oven heated by carbon arcs. After that it really got torrid. It wouldn't have been a joke to fry an egg on a sunbaked stone at midday. It would have been a practical method of cookery if any man could imagine eating in such heat. There were mirages, and the rocky hillsides beyond the valley danced insane sarabands from the heat, and the fact that rain had fallen here seemed merely an historical oddity. It had nothing to do with present fact.
Steve Hansun hoped differently. Botanists still find it amazing that plants can live as bone-dry seeds in Death Valley for ten years, and then sprout and blossom and fruit and go to seed again after just one of the decennial rainstorms. Seen Valley was drier still. If Steve could find plants which had survived thirty years of absolute aridity; if he could find plants springing up in Seen Valley after a rain, he would have made an important scientific discovery and could write a paper about it for a scientific publication which nobody would ever read. That was why he'd come.
He saw the wreckage out near the middle of the valley.
The two burros, then, were picking their way down a rocky trail that probably had never been used two dozen times since time began. Steve stared, and saw sunlight reflected from something polished, and a whitish indefinite something all around. He couldn't make out what he saw.
"What's that yonder?" he asked. "Could it be a crashed plane?'
Brady squinted, and said nothing.
"We'll take a look," said Steve. "There might be somebody still alive us it."
Brady didn't reply in words. The burros followed patiently to the valley floor. Gyp, the dog, sniffed at a sunbaked rock.
But he'd been in desert country before. He restrained himself.
The two men and the burros and the dog struck out across Seen Valley toward the wreckage.
The ground was uneven. They came upon wind-eroded boulders which barred their way. The had to back-trail and go around them. They came to dunes of powdery stuff and their feet sank into them as if into volcanic ash. By nine-when it was first really hot-they were only well started out from the valley's edge. By ten they were only part-way to the wreckage. The burros looked irritatingly resigned. Gyp panted heavily and his tail already drooped. By eleven, the dog was utterly dispirited. He trailed the burros in bitter misery, loping gingerly across scorching sand to find a bit of shadow where he could stand without singeing his paws, and then looking miserably for another place to which he could make another dash. The sun was a ball of intolerable fire. Exposed flesh stung when in full sunlight. Steve said:
"Nobody could live long in that plane."
Brady said:
"Ain't a plane. I saw it clear a while back."
Steve didn't ask what it could be. It was too hot to talk. As a botanist, he kept his eyes open for signs of vegetation. In Death Valley, the improbable dryland-plants appear as green threads on the third or fourth day after the once-a-decade rainfall. The rain here had been not quite three days since. Nothing showed, yet. But Steve watched carefully as the walked.
Everything was barren. Everything was desiccated past belief. The only sign of the rainfall was that in two or three places sheltered from the sun the ground still showed the pittings of raindrops. Once, too, Steve dug at a hollow place between two hillocks. A foot down he came to very, very faintly dampish soil. He continued to dig, and a foot further down came upon dryness again. There was a thin, underground layer of moisture from the rain. Nothing more.
He got up without words and followed after Brady. He noticed Gyp, his tail drooping, suffering miserably from the scorching sand beneath his paws.
It was half-past twelve when Brady came to a halt beside the thing they had headed for. He grunted expressively. Steve stared. It wasn't the plane he'd guessed at. He didn't know what it was. He saw some thousands of feet of thin, quarter-inch line. It wasn't woven of small fibres. It was one fibre. He saw a smashed object he couldn't reconstruct in his mind, because he wasn't prepared to imagine a plastic globe of five-foot diameter smashed flat in Seco Valley. He did see some piles of spilled or dumped stuff that looked like ashes. Only he thought absurdly of seeds.