"Campbell, John W Jr - Who Goes There" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell John W Jr)

left, and he's fixed now."


"Chemicals? Chemical tests?"
McReady shook his head. "Our chemistry isn't that good. I tried the microscope, you know."


Garry nodded. "Monster-dog and real dog were identical. But -you've got to go on. What are we going to do after dinner?"
Van Wall had joined them quietly. "Rotation sleeping. Half the crowd asleep; half awake. I wonder how many of us are monsters? All the dogs were. We thought we were
safe, but somehow it got Copper -or you." Van Wall's eyes flashed uneasily. "It may have gotten every one of you -all of you but myself may be wondering,
looking. No, that's not possible. You'd just spring then. I'd be helpless. We
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humans must somehow have the greater numbers now. But -" he stopped.
McReady laughed shortly. "You're doing what Norris complained of in me. Leaving it hanging. 'But if one more is changed -that may shift the balance of power. ' It
doesn't fight. I don't think it ever fights. It must be a peaceable thing, in its own inimitable way. It never had to, because it always gained its end."


Van Wall's mouth twisted in a sickly grin. "You're suggesting then, that perhaps it already has the greater numbers, but is just waiting -waiting, all of them -all
of you, for all I know -waiting till I, the last human, drop my wariness in sleep. Mac, did you notice their eyes, all looking at us?"


Garry sighed. "You haven't been sitting here for four straight hours, while all their eyes silently weighed the information that one of us two, Copper or I, is a
monster certainly -perhaps both of us."


Clark repeated his request. "Will you stop that bird's noise? He's driving me nuts. Make him tone down, anyway."


"Still praying?" McReady asked.
"Still praying," Clark groaned. "He hasn't stopped for a second. I don't mind his praying if it relieves him, but he yells, he sings psalms and hymns and shouts
prayers. He thinks God can't hear well way down here."


"Maybe He can't," Barclay grunted. "Or he'd have done something about this thing loosed from hell."


"Somebody's going to try that test you mentioned, if you don't stop him," Clark stated grimly. "I think a cleaver in the head would be as positive a test as a
bullet in the heart."


"Go ahead with the food. I'll see what I can do. There may be something in the cabinets." McReady moved wearily toward the corner Copper had used as his
dispensary. Three tall cabinets of rought boards, two locked, were the repositories of the camp's medical supplies. Twelve years ago McReady had
graduated, had started for an internship, and been diverted to meteorology. Copper was a picked man, a man who knew his professions thoroughly and modernly. More
than half the drugs available were totally unfamiliar to McReady; many of the others he had forgotten. There was no huge medical library here, no series of
journals available to learn the things that did not merit inclusion in the small library he had been forced to content himself with. Books are heavy, and every
ounce of supplies had been freighted in by air.