"Henry Kuttner - Clash by Night (SS Collection) UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

Scott hesitated. 'Very well. I'm ... uh ... starting to ache.' He stood up. 'Oh, one thing I forgot. We've heard rumours that Starling's outfit is using atomic power.'
Mendez's mouth twisted into a grimace of distaste. 'Hadn't heard that. Know anything about it, gentlemen?'
Heads were shaken. One officer said, 'I've heard a little talk about it, but only talk, so far.'
Mendez said, 'After this war, we'll investigate further. If there's truth in the story, we'll join you, of course, in mopping up the Starlings. No court-martial is necessary for that crime!'
'Thanks. I'll get in touch with other Companies and see what they've heard. Now, if you'll excuse me-'
He saluted and went out, exultation flaming within him. The bargain had been a good one - for the Doonemen badly needed the Mob's help against the Helldivers. Cine Rhys would be satisfied with the arrangement.
An orderly took him to the baths, where a rubdown relaxed his aching muscles. Presently he was on the quay again, climbing into the flitterboat. A glance behind him showed that the gears of war were beginning to grind. There was little he could see, but men were moving about through the courtyard with purposeful strides, to the shops, to administration, to the laboratories. The battlewagons were anchored down the coast, Scott knew, in a protected bay, but they would soon move out to their rendezvous with the Doones.
Kane, at the controls of the flitterboat, said, 'They repaired the auxiliary unit for us, sir.'
'Courtesies of the trade.' Scott lifted a friendly hand to the men on the quay as the boat slid toward open water. 'The Doone fort, now. Know it?'
'Yes, sir. Are ... are the Mob fighting with us, if I may ask?'
'They are. And they're a grand lot of fighters. You're going to see action, Kane. When you hear battle stations next, it's going to mean one of the sweetest scraps that happened on Venus. Push down that throttle - we're in a hurry!'
The flitterboat raced southwest at top speed, its course marked by the flying V of spray.
'One last fight,' Scott thought to himself. Tm glad it's going to be a good one.'
IV
We eat and drink our own damnation.
-The Book of Common Prayer
The motor failed when they were about eight miles from the Doone fort.
It was a catastrophe rather than merely a failure. The overstrained and overheated engine, running at top speed, blew back. The previous accident, at the subsea volcano, had brought out hidden flaws in the alloy which the Mob's repair men had failed to detect, when they replaced the smashed single unit. Sheer luck had the flitterboat poised on a swell when the crack-up happened. The engine blew out and down, ripping the bow to shreds. Had they been bow-deep, the blast would have been unfortunate for Scott and the pilot- more so than it was.
They were perhaps a half mile from the shore. Scott was deafened by the explosion and simultaneously saw the horizon swinging in a drunken swoop. The boat turned turtle, the shell smacking into water with a loud cracking sound. But the plastic held. Both men were tangled together on what had been their ceiling, sliding forward as the flitterboat began to sink bow first. Steam sizzled from the ruined engine.
Kane managed to touch one of the emergency buttons.
The shell was, of course, jammed, but a few of the segments slid aside, admitting a gush of acrid sea water. For a moment they struggled there, fighting the crosscurrents till the air had been displaced. Scott, peering through cloudy green gloom, saw Kane's dark shadow twist and kick out through a gap. He followed.
Beneath him the black hulk of the boat dropped slowly and was gone. His head broke surface, and he gasped for breath, shaking droplets from his lashes and granting around. Where was Kane?
The boy appeared, his helmet gone, sleek hair plastered to his forehead. Scott caught his eye and pulled the trigger on his life vest, the inflatable undergarment which was always worn under the blouse on sea duty. As chemicals mixed, light gas rushed into the vest, lifting Scott higher in the water. He felt the collar cushion inflate against the back of his head- the skull-fitting pillow that allowed shipwrecked men to float and rest without danger of drowning in their sleep. But he had no need for this now.
Kane, he saw, had triggered his own life vest. Scott hurled himself up, searching for signs of life. There weren't any. The grey-green sea lay desolate to the misty horizon. A half mile away was a mottled chartreuse wall that marked the jungle. Above and beyond that dim sulphurous red lit the clouds.
Scott got out his leaf-bladed smatchet, gesturing for Kane to do the same. The boy did not seem worried. No doubt this was merely an exciting adventure for him, Scott thought wryly. Oh, well.
Gripping the smatchet between his teeth, the captain began to swim shoreward. Kane kept at his side. Once Scott warned his companion to stillness and bent forward, burying his face in the water and peering down at a great dim shadow that coiled away and was gone - a sea snake, but, luckily, not hungry. The oceans of Venus were perilous with teeming, ferocious life. Precautions were fairly useless. When a man was once in the water, it was up to him to get out of it as rapidly as possible.
Scott touched a small cylinder attached to his belt and felt bubbles rushing against his palm. He was slightly relieved. When he had inflated the vest, his tube of compressed gas had automatically begun to release, sending out a foul-smelling vapour that permeated the water for some distance around. The principle was that of the skunk adjusted to the environment of the squid, and dangerous undersea life was supposed to be driven away by the Mellison tubes; but it didn't work with carrion eaters like the snakes. Scott averted his nose. The gadgets were named Mellison tubes, but the men called them Stinkers, a far more appropriate term.
Tides on Venus are unpredictable. The clouded planet has no moon, but it is closer to the Sun than Earth. As a rule the tides are mild, except during volcanic activity, when tidal waves sweep the shores. Scott, keeping a weather eye out for danger, rode the waves in toward the beach, searching the strip of dull blackness for signs of life.
Nothing.
He scrambled out at last, shaking himself like a dog, and instantly changed the clip in his automatic for high explosive. The weapon, of course, was watertight - a necessity on Venus. As Kane sat down with a grunt and deflated his vest, Scott stood eyeing the wall of jungle thirty feet away. It stopped there abruptly, for nothing could grow on black sand.
The rush and whisper of the waves made the only sound. Most of the trees were liana-like, ekeing out a precarious existence, as the saying went, by taking in each other's washing. The moment one of them showed signs of solidity, it was immediately assailed by parasitic vines flinging themselves madly upward to reach the filtered sunlight of Venus. The leaves did not begin for thirty feet above the ground; they made a regular roof up there, lying like crazy shingles, and would have shut out all light had they not been of light translucent green. Whitish tendrils crawled like reaching serpents from tree to tree, tentacles of vegetable octopi. There were two types of Venusian fauna: the giants who could crash through the forest, and the supple, small
ground-dwellers- insects and reptiles mostly- who depended on poison sacs for self-protection. Neither kind was pleasant company.
There were flying creatures, too, but these lived in the upper strata, among the leaves. And there were ambiguous horrors that lived in the deep mud and the stagnant pools under the forest, but no one knew much about these.
'Well,' Scott said, 'that's that.'
Kane nodded. 'I guess I should have checked the motors.'
'You wouldn't have found anything. Latent flaws - it would have taken black night to bring 'em out. Just one of those things. Keep your gas mask handy, now. If we get anywhere near poison flowers and the wind's blowing this way, we're apt to keel over like that.' Scott opened a waterproof wallet and took out a strip of sensitized litmus, which he clipped to his wrist. 'If this turns blue, that means gas, even if we don't smell it.'
'Yes, sir. What now?'
'We-ell- the boat's gone. We can't telaudio for help.' Scott fingered the blade of his smatchet and slipped it into the belt sheath. 'We head for the fort. Eight miles. Two hours, if we can stick to the beach and if we don't run into trouble. More than that if Signal Rock's ahead of us, because we'll have to detour inland in that case.' He drew out a collapsible single-lenser telescope and looked south-west along the shore. 'Uh-huh. We detour.'
A breath of sickening sweetness gusted down from the jungle roof. From above, Scott knew, the forest looked surprisingly lovely. It always reminded him of an antique candlewick spread he had once bought Jeana - immense rainbow flowers scattered over a background of pale green. Even among the flora competition was keen; the plants vied in producing colours and scents that would attract the winged carriers of pollen.
There would always be frontiers, Scott thought. But they might remain unconquered for a long time, here on Venus. The Keeps were enough for the undersea folk; they were self-sustaining. And the Free Companions had no need to
carve out empires on the continents. They were fighters, not agrarians. Land hunger was no longer a part of the race. It might come again, but not in the time of the Keeps.
The jungles of Venus held secrets he would never know. Men can conquer lands from the air, but they cannot hold them by that method. It would take a long, slow period of encroachment, during which the forest and all it represented would be driven back, step by painful step - and that belonged to a day to come, a time Scott would not know. The savage world would be tamed. But not now- not yet.
At the moment it was untamed and very dangerous. Scott stripped off his tunic and wrung water from it. His clothing would not dry in this saturated air, despite the winds. His trousers clung to him stickily, clammy coldness in their folds.
'Ready, Kane?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Then let's go.'
They went south-west, along the beach, at a steady, easy lope that devoured miles. Speed and alertness were necessary in equal proportion. From time to time Scott scanned the sea with his telescope, hoping to sight a vessel. He saw nothing. The ships would be in harbour, readying for the battle; and planes would be grounded for installation of the new telaudio device Cine Rhys had mentioned.
Signal Rock loomed ahead, an outthrust crag with eroded, unscalable sides towering two hundred feet and more. The black strip of sand ended there. From the rock there was a straight drop into deep water, cut up by a turmoil of currents. It was impossible to take the sea detour; there was nothing else for it but to swerve inland, a dangerous but inevitable course. Scott postponed the plunge as long as possible, till the scarp of Signal Rock, jet black with leprous silvery patches on its surface, barred the way. With a quizzical look at Kane he turned sharply to his right and headed for the jungle.
'Half a mile of forest equals a hundred miles of beach hiking,' he remarked.
'That bad, sir? I've never tackled it.'