"Alan Dean Foster & Eric Frank Russell - Design for Great Day" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

At considerable altitude above the stolid mass of the sprawling city roamed its aerial patrol, a number of
tiny, almost invisible dots weaving a tangle of vapor trails. There were more now than there had been a
little while ago, as distant craft continued to assemble in tardy response to the laggard alarm that had
finally announced the visitor’s presence, but the latest arrivals were as confused and concerned as their
predecessors.

The dots displayed the irritated restlessness of a swarm of disturbed gnats, for their crews were
uncomfortably aware of the strange invader now sitting motionless on the plain far below. Their
speculation was driven by a greater urgency than that of the soldiers on the ground, for they were acutely
aware that they had missed something, and would be called to account for it sooner rather than later.

It was not that any one of them had been derelict in his duty, which was to serve as the homeworld’s last
line of defense against suspicious intruders. Their mission was to watch the immediate vicinity of the
planet, to query any artificial object that came within a certain distance, and to reduce it to glowing gas
and powder if adequate explanations for its presence were not immediately forthcoming. As a rule this
was a task they carried out with great skill and pride. The tiny vessel now resting undisturbed on the
surface below was a very visible debunker of the first accomplishment and impugner of the latter.

Now there was nothing the pilots and their crews could do about it. They were up in the stratosphere, the
intruder was safely down on the ground: an altogether unacceptable state of affairs. Indeed, they would
have intercepted it had that been possible, which it wasn’t.

How can one block the path of an unexpected and unannounced object moving with such stupendous
rapidity that its trace registers as a mere flick on an advanced predictor screen some seconds after the
source has passed? The patrol’s integrated systems were only now beginning to generate figures on the
intruder’s size and velocity. Data on the first seemed to fluctuate, which made no sense at all. The
second... the second made considerably less than zero sense. The fact that a dozen different sets of
instruments confirmed the figures rendered them no less nonsensical. The patrol’s ranking officer ordered
all findings withheld until some sense could be made of them. He was not about to risk what had up to
that time been a distinguished career by giving the stamp of approval to such lunacy.

Blessed by a refreshing lack of any need to display drive and intelligence, the troops on the ground
suffered no such pangs. They kept careful watch and awaited the arrival of someone who was permitted
the initiative that they were denied. This was an entirely comfortable state of affairs that, as far as they
were concerned, could last until the millennium. As long as no activity was evident on the part of the little
ship, correspondingly little reaction was demanded of them. This constituted a battlefield condition with
which they were reasonably content.

All of them had either four legs and two arms or four arms and two legs, according to the need of the
moment. That is to say: the front pair of underbody limbs could be employed as either feet or hands, like
those of a baboon. Superior life does not establish itself by benefit of brains alone; manual dexterity is
equally essential. The quasi-quad-rupeds of this world had a barely adequate supply of the former
compensated by more than enough of the latter.

Where multiple limbs protruded through simple, dun-colored clothing they were covered in short, bristly
light-brown fur. Darker ruffs were present at wrists and ankles as well as along the broad reach of
shoulders and sternum. Their skulls were mounted on thick but flexible necks that emerged from between
the fore pair of shoulders. Two dark, efficient eyes that were better at close-up work than at seeing for
distance flanked a unique pattern of small multiple nasal openings above the wide slit of a mouth.