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

Tathuol nodded.
"Yes. Come." He led them back, through twisting corridors, through rooms where terrified Lanoor whispered and asked questions. They had heard the screams of the maddened shleath. The news was spreading. Then they reached a barred gate, a grillwork of locked bars that closed off the corridor. Beyond it they looked into a great courtyard a quarter of a mile across. The vast ramifications of the palace surrounded it on every side. And in it half a hundred of the giant shleath wavered and stirred uneasily, crowding down at the gate beyond which they had heard the strange shrieks of their fellows.
Somehow those giant masses of jelly had a brain and understanding. And they were restless. The glow-lamps cast only dim sparkles of light on hulking masses of greenish jelly. And, out in the middle of the court, silver metal on the Ion, the ship that had brought Penton and Blake to this world, glistened faintly.
"Oh, for the wings of an angel! How in blazes are we going to get there?" Blake mourned.
Penton began tossing the black and silver and gold of the spiders methodically through the bars. One-five-a dozen. Some fell short, some long of their mark. It was hard to aim at an angle on a light world of unfamiliar gravity. Then two in quick succession landed.
"Back-back to the entranceway where we can get into the courtyard," Penton yelled over the shrieks of the two monsters. A giant began stamping. The whole palace shook to the thud of his tread. Then it stopped. Human feet began running somewhere, and the shouts of the Shaloor pierced the roaring that came from the inner court. Penton hesitated. Then he gathered all the spider webs, and threw them into the yard below, spinning them all over the court. Dozens of them skimmered into the night to fall with soft, clinking rustles. Three times he scored hits. But now restless, wandering shleath were accidentally touching the stinging electric traps.
The radiating copper and zinc wires reaching out from the rubber egg at the center were charged by the little battery protected in the black, elastic shell. The first electric batteries on this worldl And these shleath, the mighty, indestructible shleath howled in malignant terror. They had no true skin, they were vast masses of naked, unprotected protoplasm. Each touch of those charged wires sent a minute electric current charging through their vast masses-torturing, unbearable current.
It was happening there in the courtyard as Penton had known it would. The vast yard was boiling with the protoplasmic Titans, their weird, gold-shot bulks glistening in the dim lights, their weird, anguished cries shrilling in the night. Outside the palace a vast echo was rolling back, the vast angry roar of the aroused Lanoor rebels. Here below, as the elephantine bulks of the restlessly moving shleath touched one of the electrically charged webs, the shocking current made it writhe and heave. Frantically they sought escape,
escape that was barred by the glass walls, by the special doors.
Shaloor were appearing at the lower gates, ordering them, directing them. Abruptly a mighty, shining bulk rolled down to the pompous midget, and whipped him into extinction with its glistening pseudopod. And the Thing howled. A shock-disc touched it. Every move of its sprawled bulk touched one of the scattered shock-discs. From other gratings about the great court Fholkuun's reinforcements were tossing in the webs now; the court was paved with them.
The shleath found only one escape. They were dividing now, splitting and dwindling, splitting till their jellied bulks covered more, but smaller areas. Smaller, smaller they1 became as more and more of the webs fell. They could slip between them now, find some surcease from the unknown horror of electric currents whose tiniest trickle made them writhe in agony.
Penton watched in silence. The fifty, and seventy-five-foot Titans had dwindled, screaming. None was larger than a two-foot globe of jelly!
"Put on those boots," said Penton softly, "and come on." From his waist, he himself unstrapped the network of charged wires, and wrapped them about his legs. From his belt two sets of wires dangled, connecting the leggings to five tiny cells. "Now, PTiolkuun, where is the man with the rope? We can go down there now, if we can open this grill. No shleath will dare to touch us now. This grill is bolted in two places, and I think the atomic flash has still power enough to burn two."
The atomic flashlight was changed now; two heavy copper leads had been soldered to its terminals. As they touched the steel bolts, the hissing green flame of the copper arc shrilled into the metal, twice. The flash tube, its storage device of twisted atoms intended only for the light task of providing illumination, hummed and grew warm. The bolt sputtered suddenly and fell molten. The lurid green flare ate at another bar.
It glowed red, then white-and parted. Another-and
Penton dropped the flash tube with a curse. It glowed for a moment, and died, its last dregs of energy exhausted. Together the Earthmen heaved at the weakened grill. The grating moved a fraction of an inch protestingly, and held. Again and again the two men heaved; finally all the Lanoor who could reach it added their strength.
Then, from a distant grating, a violet beam of death
reached out, and crackled the stone twenty feet from them.
Penton ran. "Damn," he groaned. "They've spotted that
grating, and they won't let us near it now. We've got to try
some other way. I wonder-"
He started down the corridor, turned back to the next grating, and tried it. It was locked as solidly.
"Tathuol, can you lead me to a grating where there are some Shaloor posted, at least one of whom has one of our weapons?"
The Lanoor thought a moment. "I can lead you to the one from which they fired just a while ago."
"Good. P'hoUcuun, if you have a brave man, tell him to stay at that grate we left, and test it every few minutes until we give him the signal to stop. He has to keep out of the way of the beam, but he has to keep the man who is running it interested. Anybody want the job?" P'holkuun laughed mirthlessly.
"I doubt it. Go ahead, I will take care of it. If my luck is bad, remember your promise to free my people."
"Right, my friend." Penton nodded slowly. "They will be, before the sun rises. But-be spry." Penton took the Lanoor's hand in a firm grasp for a moment, then followed Tathuol. Through the rabbit-warren palace they dodged. Once they met a searching party of half a dozen Shaloor armed with the little yellow tubes that carried the deadly White Flower -and had kept out of sight. But Tathuol knew the maze-like routes of the building far better than did those lords by proxy, for their strange, crossed vision made walking difficult, and they hated it.
"Beyond that turn," the Lanoor said at last, "is the grating
we saw the Shaloor fire from. I cannot guarantee that he is still there."
"Let us just hope so, then. We-ah, he is." A brief, soft glare of violet shot out from the corridor's end. Noiselessly Penton rounded the corner, Blake close behind him. Four Shaloor stood watching, looking out across the courtyard to a distant gateway where metal bars shone dully red. Cracked, blistered stone told of the violence of the pistol they used.
"He is trying to get us to melt that gate away," said one of the Shaloor uneasily.
"Much good may it do him. I'll get him the next time he shows, because I haven't changed the direction since the last shot. I-"
Penton's powerful arms wrapped two of the bean-stalk giants while Blake caught the others. Instantly six of the Lanoor who had followed them descended and in the space of seconds, the Shaloor glared in anger from their bonds.
Penton examined the gun he held.
"It's one of ours. Needs a new charge, too; not more than ten second's life left. This one is set for steel, too, and we haven't any. Well-"
With a knife for a screwdriver, and two bits of metal in pinching fingers for a wrench, Penton opened the butt of the weapon, and pulled out the tiny reel that carried the iron-wire fuel. Then he adjusted four tiny screws and tore a strip of the copper wire from his protective leggings. With Blake's aid he stretched it cautiously. It was good copper, and it fined down several gauges before it broke. Then he inserted that into the reel, and clamped the gun together.
"Now, if my memory is good, and I have the right constants for the slow release of the copper's energy, we'll get out in fine style. And if it isn't-we'll go out in fine style," he added grimly.
Penton aimed the gun at the grate, and pulled the trigger. Instantly the beam shot forth, a blazing inferno of light that volatilized the grating almost instantly, speared through to
the courtyard below, and sent up bubbling smoke. The squealing anger of the shleath changed to a vast shrieking. Penton hurled the weapon to the floor. Slowly a glow built up in it, a glow that spread from the tip of the barrel to the breech, and the smoke of the wiring rose from it.
Blake and Penton were two hundred feet down the corridor when the incredible sharpness of the explosion wave hurled them along for twenty feet, like peas from a peashooter. The clatter of falling masonry grumbled behind them, and even the steady wail of the shleath quieted momentarily.
Penton picked himself up gingerly.
"Not bad," he said judicially, "not perfect, but not bad. It might have been, to put it mildly, somewhat worse. We're lucky the town's still here."
Over tumbled blocks of stone that made a perfect ladder, the two men scrambled down to the courtyard. Undamaged, the Ion lay some fifty feet from the end of the slide that had crumbled half one wall of the yard.
It was not a path of roses. The Shaloor were on the job, and only their incredibly confused eyesight made it possible. Consistently, half the beams and bullets tore into the enraged shleath behind them, and half spattered before them. None came near them.
Ten feet from the entrance Penton gasped, and fell. His unprotected hand was grabbed instantly by a shleath, before Blake could lift him to his feet again. The touch of Blake's boot drove it away as Penton spoke: "They have the range. Get in that ship, you fool-they got my leg with a bullet."
"Uh-huh," said Blake. "You talk funny. Hold on. Even on a light world you are heavy-"
From a height of some five hundred feet, Blake looked down. Then he turned on the spotlight, and looked at the courtyard below. He adjusted some controls, and when the spotlight exactly covered that yard, he pulled a small tumbler. The light turned violet, and the heaving, greenish floor turned brown and became quiescent. The light went
out. Blake pulled the microphone near him, and spoke softly, words that roared from the loudspeaker in the outer skin of the ship.
"Fholkuun, if you will come up alone in a plane tomorrow at dawn, we'll meet you. I could take that palace apart, but most of the inhabitants seem to be your folk. In the meantime, I have to pull a bullet out of Penton's leg. Tomorrow at dawn, in a plane from the local port."