"Frank Herbert - The Green Brain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

down toward the river. He turned toward it, stumbled against one of two men carrying a pig
in a net slung between them. Part of the skin simulation on his right upper leg gave way. He
could feel it begin to slip down inside his trousers.
The man he'd hit took two backward steps, almost dropped the pig.
'Careful!' the man shouted.
The man's companion said, 'Damn drunks.'
The pig set up a squirming, squealing distraction.
In this moment, he slipped past the men on to the dirt track, shuffled toward the river.
He could see water down there now boiling with aeration from the barrier niters, the foam of
sonic disruption on its surface.
Behind him, one of the pig carriers said, 'I don't think he was drunk, Carlos. His skin felt
dry and hot. Maybe he was sick.'
He heard and understood, tried to increase his speed. The lost segment of skin simulation
had slipped halfway down his leg. A disruptive loosening of shoulder and back muscles
threatened his balance.
The track turned around an embankment of raw dirt dark brown with dampness and
dipped into a tunnel through ferns and bushes. The men with the pig no longer could see
him, he knew. He grabbed at his trousers where the leg surface was slipping, scurried
through the green tunnel.
Where the tunnel ended he caught sight of his first mutated bee. It was dead, having
entered this barrier vibration area without any protection against that deadliness. The bee
was one of the butterfly type with iridescent yellow and orange wings. It lay in the cup of a
green leaf at the center of a shaft of sunlight.
He shuffled past, having recorded the bee's shape and color. His kind had considered the
bees as a possible way, but there were serious drawbacks. A bee could not reason with
humans. And humans had to listen to reason soon, else all life would end.
 There came the sound of someone hurrying down the path behind him. Heavy footsteps
pounded the earth.
Pursuit?
Why would they pursue? Have I been discovered?
A sensation akin to panic fluttered through him, lent his parts a burst of energy. But he
was reduced to slow shuffling and soon it would be only a crawling progress. Every eye he
could use searched the greenery for a place of concealment.
A thin break darkened the fern wall on his left. Tiny human footprints led into it -
children. He forced his way through the ferns there, found himself on a low narrow path
along the embankment. Two toy aircars, red and blue, lay abandoned on the path. His
staggering foot pressed into the dirt.
The low path led close to a wall of black dirt festooned with creepers. It turned sharply as
the dirt wall turned and emerged on to the lip of a shallow cave. More toys lay in the green
gloom at the cave's mouth.
He knelt, crawled over the toys into the blessed dankness, lay there waiting.
Presently, the pounding footsteps hurried past a few meters below. Voices reached up to
him.
'He was headed for the river. Think he was going to jump in?'
'Who knows? But I think me for sure he was sick.'
'Here! Down this way; somebody's been down this way.'
The voices grew indistinct, blended with the bubbling sound of water.
The men were going on down the path. They had missed his hiding place. But why had
they pursued? He hadn't seriously injured that man. Surely they didn't suspect.
But speculation had to wait.