"Alan Dean Foster - Impossible Places" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

on the grass outside. He examined it closely, careful not to touch any of the small, squirming shapes that
were burrowing through what remained of what had once been a human form.
“Here, give me a hand.”
“What for?” The intern held a handkerchief over his face, protection against the odor.
“I want to look at the back.”
They used towels to protect their hands. Turning the body was a simple matter. Having been
consumed from the inside out, it weighed next to nothing. The sight thus revealed forced even the old
doctor to jump back involuntarily.
Beneath where the body had been lying, the entire bed was a seething mass of millions of tiny,
twitching brown shapes.
“Nematodes,” the doctor announced with a grunt, though if he was worth anything at all, his youthful
companion had already reached the same conclusion on his own. “Without question the worst
Secernentea infestation I have ever seen.” He leaned fearlessly over the boiling mass. “Here, see? The
mattress is stuffed with horsehair. That would provide sufficient protein for them to propagate within.
These unfortunate people were infected through the bed.” He extended a hand. “My case.”
The intern barely had enough presence of mind remaining to hand over the doctor’s kit. The old man
rummaged inside and removed a small stoppered tube and a tweezer. Carefully he extracted one of the
millions of swarming worms from the mattress, slipped it into the glass container, where it coiled and
twisted frantically, feeling for meat.
“This would appear to be a particularly virulent species. The selva is full of thousands of such
loathsome parasites, many of them still unclassified. See how they seek the darkness inside the bed? I
would venture to guess that this variety feeds nocturnally and is dormant during the day, which might
explain how an infection could be overlooked until it was too late. Treatable at a hospital, I should think,
but in the advanced stage such as we see here, immune to simple over-the-counter remedies.” His eyes
narrowed sorrowfully as he regarded the sack of skin and bones crumpled on the bed.
“Once infected, they were doomed. You would have thought that, living here, they would know about
this particular parasite and would have taken proper precautions to keep it out of their living quarters. It
always astonishes me how little interest some people have in their immediate surroundings.” He raised the
specimen. “Observe.”
The intern reluctantly took the glass tube, twirling it back and forth between his fingers as he studied its
single wiry, voracious occupant. “It doesn’t look like much, just one of them.”
“No,” agreed the doctor. “Not just one.” He stared at the heaving, pulsating mattress, tapped the glass
tube. “Notice how much it resembles nothing so innocuous as a human hair?”




DIESEL DREAM


When the big rig passes you on the road, do you ever pause to wonder what the driver of that
monster of an amalgam of rubber and steel and petroleum products is thinking? Do you think he’s
just looking out for you and your fellow drivers? What image do you have of him (or her)?
Chances are it’s wrong. He doesn’t look the way you think he probably looks, and he doesn’t
think the way you probably think he does.
Truckers are just folk, more independent than most. Seamen of the highway, sailing narrow
concrete seas, always impatient to make the next port of call and then as equally impatient to
leave it. They get places most of us never think about, dream dreams the rest of us don’t have the
time for.
Sometimes, rarely, ports and journeys and dreams all come together in the oddest ways and