"Campbell, John W Jr - The Double_Minds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell John W Jr)

"Lead the way, man."
Again they started, through more devious, involved passages than they had taken before. Through rooms where Lanoor servants looked, saw them, and looked blindly away, through rooms where startled Lanoor women rose angrily from sleep, and quieted with a grim smile as they saw who invaded their rooms. Down narrow corridors, through smoking kitchens. Down a long corridor-
"No, I tell you, no!" a Lanoor's voice shouted in exasperation. "They have not come this way. Why should they? They will go some other way if they have a particle of sense, and they will go entirely away if they know what I know." And then came the angry curses of a Shaloor. Abruptly they dived into a side lane, and P'holkuun grinned.
"The Shaloor cannot hear well. Nor see, for all of that. But the Lanoor hear us." *
"P'holkuun! Who-ah, it is you," the Lanoor's voice continued. "They are waiting for you at the gate now with three shleath in hiding. Go back. You must try at some other time. The city has heard, and it is roaring with rebellion. The Shaloor are preparing to bring out the shleath as the
crowd grows outside the palace. But go back. They are ready for you, and they have a new weapon."
P'holkuun looked at the new Lanoor recruit uneasily.
"Did you hear that, Earthman?" he asked Penton.
"Did you hear of the new weapon, Lanoor?" returned Penton. "Do you think they will ever know less than they know now? Be less ready to meet you with strange weapons? Do you think you can ever have a better chance than with the men who invented the weapons you fear? And know more about them than all the Shaloor on the planet? If ever in time you have had a breath of hope, you have it now. Come on before that breath expires." Penton started on down the corridor. "And you don't have to worry about the shleath. They will be more worry to the Shaloor than to you."
"Then stop. That is the door that leads to the hall of the S'logth gate. If you open the door, the shleath will be in here at once."
"What is out there, thenF' Blake demanded.
"There are, apparently, three shleath, and the Lord of Worlds only knows how many Shaloor, waiting to shoot, gas, bomb, and kill us in every other conceivable way,"
"Where are the ShaloorF
"They will be in the high gallery. The S'logh gate goes up three stories, but we are on the first, since only thus can one enter the inner courtyard. They will be on the second and third galleries, and they will be watching for us. We cannot enter here until, somehow, the Shaloor are driven out."
"How do we get to the third floor gallery, then?"
P'holkuun looked to the Lanoor secretary who had joined them, Tathuol. The man shook his head.
"I can try. But it will do little good, since there we will be unable to reach and enter" the gate we should pass through, because we can't reach the floor. And the Shaloor may have the steel grills in the way."
"If I once get my hands on one of the weapons they Stole from our ship," said Blake grimly, "all the Shaloor on the planet, and all the shleath, steel grills, stone walls and
assorted animals and plants won't stop me. Just get me near one of those Shaloor."
The way was a winding, climbing corridor, and it led them through back rooms and twisting flights of stairs. It led them up trap-doors in closets, and in impossible ways. Finally Tathuol halted.
"That is the door. There will be half a hundred Shaloor waiting for us out there."
"Don't disappoint them, then. Come on!" Penton yanked open the door, and jumped out, low. Fully the promised fifty Shaloor turned toward him, raising their guns. Instantly the walls were peppered with shot, and, with a queer hissing, droning hum, a beam of pale, deepest violet stabbed through the air. Not toward Penton, but across the great hallway to a hanging balcony on the far side! Someone howled in agony there, and together, Blake and Penton charged down the hundred foot length of the balcony.
It was only some twenty feet wide, and between them, with P'holkuun in effective action, the balcony was cleared in less than fifteen seconds. Cleared, for the Shaloor jerked and moved on the courtyard floor, eighty feet below.
Penton stared about him. Across the courtyard, four similar balconies hung at the same level, and four more below. On his right, on this same side, another balcony clung to the dark stone wall, and two more on the left. Four below him. The great ceiling arched low above his head, studded with hundreds of glowing lights. And in the great hall below, three monstrous things pulsed and staggered, three things like green, gold and purple amoebas fifty feet in diameter.
They were surging and wavering madly, and then suddenly they stopped and ran together. Horribly they merged into a single, frightful mass of pulsing, nauseous flesh. An oozing, angry mass of protoplasm, it charged for the wall, and miraculously sent a vast finger of jelly-stuff sprouting swiftly upward, past the balcony, toward them!
Abruptly, Penton heard the clanking sounds of dropped metal, soft moans of terror, and scampering feet. The Lanoor were leaving. Only P'holkuun and a half dozen others stood,
white-faced, beside the Earthmen. "The shleath^-coming -" said P'holkuun stiffly.
Penton crouched. The wall of the balcony, some four feet high, was carved with an intricate design of flowers and trees, and intricate spaces cut through the stone. There was an angry silence in the court. Only the soft, horrible shluffing, slobbering sounds of that vast monstrosity climbing the wall. It had dwindled to a twenty foot thing of green jelly with a purple, angry bruiselike knot in its middle, with golden thread shot through it. But up the stone wall, to within a few feet of the balcony, the questing mustard-green, pseudo-podal arm clung tenaciously to the minute grips it found. Penton crouched and waited, peering through the tiny holes.
"Pick up three of those webs, Blake," said Penton, softly. "And wait until that thing reaches up here."
Somehow P'holkuun made himself move. He handed Pen-ton a half-dozen of the flimsy, interwoven webs of silver and copper wires. They looked like metal spider webs with black, rubbery spiders clumped at their centers.
Then the vast arm reached up to the balcony. Thick fingers of slime reached through the openings of the balcony wall, and waved with a horrible suggestion of individual, hateful life. The great, green wave curled smoothly over the wall, and sprouted thick tentacles that stabbed out toward the Earthman as he rose. In his hand the flash, with its projecting, copper terminals, blackened by the burning arc that had fused the lock, gleamed dimly.
He thrust his hand toward one of those jelly-ropes, and braced as the thing clamped visciously about him. Then he pressed the .button that shot fifty volts of powerful current into the vast mass of protoplasm.
Somehow it screamed. The city quieted to that ineffable shriek. An unspeakable hatred was in it, and an indescribable terror. The rope turned livid yellow, and contracted so swiftly that the mass on the floor jerked halfway up the wall to meet it, and fell with a liquid splashing plop. The mass heaved; it split into three separate pieces, then half a dozen, and they all howled.
Accurately, Penton tossed one of the metal webs so that it fell onto the center of one of the pulsing, writhing things on the floor. The shleath shrieked with the same unspeakable, evil hatred, and the same awful terror, but somehow it whined; it begged. It scuttled into a corner and cowered
there.
And another one of the blind, terror-stricken things touched the spider of black, and gold, and silver. It leaped five feet into the air, and splintered on the floor. The great shleath split into a hundred tiny things that rolled and scuttled and bounded with little evil squeaks of terror as they accidentally touched the black spider.
The larger ones were coming under control. Reluctantly, angrily they moved about, incorporating the smaller ones into their vast bulks. They joined again to two vast masses that charged for the wall. Penton dropped another of the webs. Then, in swift succession, two more.
There was point to their anger now. They howled, but they howled with directed anger. From the horribly stinging balcony they turned to the masters that drove them on. A wave of slime engulfed the lower balcony directly below the Earthmen. Penton watched the struggling Shaloor turn horribly red as their mouths gaped open in the thick, transparent jelly. They turned red, and stained the green about them, and struggled jerkily, then feebly; and through the clouding redness that grew in the green jelly, vague, shadowy things that might have been white bone here, or bared vital organs there, began to show.
Penton turned away. The shleath was stretching out an arm toward the nearby balcony below, where milling Shaloor shot hissing pistols at it, and finally-something white blossomed in the greenness. The shleath seemed to suck in the whiteness and engulf it, but the white splotch grew, and spread with an awesome rapidity. The shleath writhed and spewed out the mass of white and green life stuff. Then the rope looped out again.
Softly violet, softly humming, the beam of one of the stolen pistols stabbed from the balcony. It struck the court-
yard below, and wandered wildly, erratically about while the wave of green washed over the balcony. Again a white splotch blossomed, and again. Twice the thing spit them forth with masses of its own stuff. Then the white blossomed on an infected Shaloor, and he fell screaming, tearing at his leg, as the stuff whirled through his veins. He writhed over the edge of the balcony, and lay beside the white tufts of ejected tissue from the shleath, white as they, and growing soft and downy.
V BIFOCAL VISION
ABRUPTLY THE wildly wavering beam of the UV pistol snapped out. Tensely Penton watched as a pseudopod of the shleath lapped up a Shaloor. The one with the stolen weapon seemed to be concentrating, his brows wrinkled in fear-filled thought. With both hands, he held the pistol, and abruptly swept it around the shleath. It exploded into flare, and the shleath howled in agony again. Dense, nauseous smoke welled up from the flaring spot where the ultra-violet beam tore into it, bubbling horribly. The thing dropped from the balcony, splitting into a hundred parts as it fell.
Blake spoke softly.
"I've been usefully engaged. There are about fifty less Shaloor. They have been too busy to watch, and these guns work. There was only one UV pistol here, and that went over the edge with one of the Shaloor."
"P'holkuun, you said they couldn't see?" Penton asked softly. "What do you mean?"
"They can see. But they don't point right. They never drive, they never fly planes. They seldom write, or do experiments themselves. We do not understand fully. But there is something the matter with their eyes."
"Thank God for that," said Penton. "I think I know what it is. They've joined the two halves of the brain, and are far
more brilliant than any creature has a right to be, but they pay for it. Only one half the brain does all the thinking. That's true enough. But both halves see, and both halves hear. Both halves help with moving the body about. Somehow, when they cross those two halves of the brain for greater keenness, they see double. They probably hear double, too. They can't coordinate arm and eye well. They forced themselves to learn to move a bit, but they can't make themselves see straight.
"They are more intelligent, no doubt of that, for they have more UV guns than we made. They figured out that unknown system to that extent in one week's time. But they not only see double, but by some psychological trick, they see the wrong image best! They missed us when we appeared suddenly. That Shaloor that tried to kill the shleath with the UV gun shot up all the court but for the spot where the creature was. They can't move quickly, and they can't see straight. That gives us a far better chance, and changes my plans a bit. PTiolkuun, can we get somewhere where we can throw the webs into the inner court? Let's finish the job."