"Alan Dean Foster - Humanx 2 - Cachalot" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

hook.

A shape was barely visible down in the dark water.
Whatever it was, it was moving very quickly. It came
nearer, growing until it was altogether too large. The
old man's eyes grew wide above the gray mustache.
He flung away the pole and the laboriously fashioned
reel. The rod bounced once on the end of the bobbing
pier before tumbling into the water.

Mustapha ignored it as he ran toward the town. His
raised voice was matched by the sudden cry of the
town's defense sirens. He did not make it beyond the
end of the pier. As it turned out, it would not have
made any difference if he had.

Two days later the first of Rorqual Towne's wander-
ing fisherfleet returned, a gatherer loaded several heads
high with the magical Coreen plant and many crates of
sleset-of-the-pennanent-spice. The wealth the cargo
represented was now rendered meaningless to the men

CACHALOT 5

and women of the ship's crew by what they did not
find.

Though they crossed and recrossed anxiously and
tearfully above Swinburne Shoals, they found no sign
of Mustapha Ali. Nor did they find their families or
sweethearts, not a single one of the eight hundred in-
habitants of Rorqual Towne.

Shattered bits of household goods, a few scraps of
clothing, fragments of homes, and pieces of families
mixed in with chunks of gray-white eggshell polymer,
were all that remained of the town. These, an engima,
and the memory of once happy lives.

And for some on the woe-laden boat, the worst of it
was the knowledge that this was not the first time . . .

Far, far above the scrap of green sea once occupied
by Rorqual Towne, a vast, quiet shape rested silently
in a much more diffuse ocean. The occupants of the
bulbous metal form were divorced by time and dis-
tance from that oceanic tragedy and its cousins.

A comparatively tiny, sharp shadow of the gleaming
hulk detached itself from the great stem and dropped