"Foster, Alan Dean - Flinx - Bloodhype" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

First Edition: March 1973

Eighth Printing: May 1984



Cover art by Darrell K. Sweet

******************************************************

For

Lynette Harrington

who lives around the corner

******************************************************

I eat, therefore I am.

Such was the extent of the Vom's consciousness.

This had not always been so, but at the moment there was no way the Vom
could become aware of it. The mechanical process of remembering required
energy the Vent did not have to spare. All of the tiny amount of radiant
energy from the system's sun that the Vom could convert was needed to
preserve the life?sense.

To do this the Vom had assumed a special configuration. At present it
varied in thickness from a few millimeters to several microns. It had done
this out of necessity, millennia ago. How many millennia? The Vom did not
know or remember.

It couldn't spare the energy.

The system hadn't always been dead. At one time this planet had harbored a
modestly successful ecosystem: plants and animals from the one?celled to
the very complex; vertebrates, invertebrates, things warm? and coldblooded,
gymnosperms, fungi, lichens, fliers, burrowers, crawlers, runners and
swimmers. It was ruled by an undistinguished if moderately intelligent
race. It had begun to die when the Vom arrived.

As to the method of arrival, the Vom could recall neither when nor how.
Dimly it could remember a state of former greatness, of which its present
self was less than a shadow. In that state it had dominated a thousand
systems.

Arriving in this one, it had toyed with the local dominants. Its persistent