"Leinster, Murray - Exploration Team" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

“Hi, Nugget,” said Roane ruefully. “I feel just about the way you do!”
Nugget brightened visibly. He frisked. He tended to gambol. He looked very hopefully up into Roane’s face—and he stood four feet high at the shoulder and would overtop Roane if he stood erect.
Roane reached out and patted Nugget’s head. It was the first time in all his life that he’d ever petted an animal.
He heard a snuffling sound behind him. Skin crawled at the back of his neck. He whirled.
Faro Nell regarded him—eighteen hundred pounds of she-bear only ten feet away and looking into his eyes. For one panicky instant Roane went cold all over. Then he realized that Faro Nell’s eyes were not burning. She was not snarling. She did not emit those blood-curdling sounds which the bare prospect of danger to Nugget had produced up on the rocky spur. She looked at him blandly. In fact, after a moment she swung off on some independent investigation of a matter that had aroused her curiosity.

The traveling party went on, Nugget frisking beside Roane and tending to bump into him out of pure cub-clumsiness. Now and again he looked adoringly at Roane, in the instant and overwhelming affection of the very young.
Roane trudged on. Presently he glanced behind again. Faro Nell was now ranging more widely. She was well satisfied to have Nugget in the immediate care of a man. From time to time he got on her nerves.
A little while later, Roane called ahead.
“Huyghens! Look here! I’ve been appointed nursemaid to Nugget!” Huyghens looked back.
“Oh, slap him a few times and he’ll go back to his mother.”
“The devil I will!” said Roane querulously. “I like it!”
The traveling party went on.
When night fell, they camped. There could be no fire, of course, because all the minute night-things about would come eagerly to dance in the glow. But there could not be darkness, equally, because night-walkers hunted in the dark. So Huyghens set out the barrier lamps which made a wall of twilight about their halting place, and the staglike creature Faro Nell had carried became their evening meal. Then they slept—at least the men did—and the bears dozed and snorted and waked and dozed again. But Semper sat immobile with his head under his wing on a tree limb. And presently there was a glorious cool hush and all the world glowed in morning light diffused through the jungle by a newly risen sun. And they arose, and traveled again.
This day they stopped stock-still for two hours while sphexes puzzled over the trail the bears had left. Huyghens discoursed calmly on the need for an anti-scent, to be used on the boots of men and the paws of bears,. which would make the following of their trails unpopular with sphexes. And Roane seized upon the idea and absorbedly suggested that a sphexrepellent odor might be worked out, which would make a human revolt-
ing to a sphex. If that were done—why—humans could go freely about unmolested.
“Like stink-bugs,” said Huyghens, sardonically. “A very intelligent idea! Very rational! You can feel proud!”
And suddenly Roane, very obscurely, was not proud of the idea at all. They camped again. On the third night they were at the base of that remarkable formation, the Sere Plateau, which from a distance looked like a mountain-range but was actually a desert tableland. And it was not reasonable for a desert to be raised high, while lowlands had rain, but on the fourth morning they found out why. They saw, far, far away, a truly monstrous mountain-mass at the end of the long-way expanse of the plateau. It was like the prow of a ship. It lay, so Huyghens observed, directly in line with the prevailing winds, and divided them as a ship’s prow divides the waters. The moisture-bearing air-currents flowed beside the plateau, not over it, and its interior was pure sere desert in the unscreened sunshine of high altitudes.

It took them a full day to get halfway up the slope. And here, twice as they climbed, Semper flew screaming over aggregations of sphexes to one side of them or the other. These were much larger groups than Huyghens had ever seen before—fifty to a hundred monstrosities together, where a dozen was a large hunting-pack elsewhere. He looked in the screen which showed him what Semper saw, four to five miles away. The sphexes padded uphill toward the Sere Plateau in a long line. Fifty— sixty—seventy tan-and-azure beasts out of hell.
“I’d hate to have that bunch jump us,” he said candidly to Roane. “I don’t think we’d stand a chance.”
“Here’s where a robot tank would be useful,” Roane observed.
“Anything armored,” conceded Huyghens. “One man in an armored station like mine would be safe. But if he killed a sphex he’d be besieged. He’d have to stay holed up, breathing the smell of dead sphex, until the odor had gone away. And he mustn’t kill any others or he’d be besieged until winter came.”
Roane did not suggest the advantages of robots in other directions. At that moment, for example, they were working their way up a slope which averaged fifty degrees. The bears climbed without effort despite their burdens. For the men it was infinite toil. Semper, the eagle, manifested impatience with bears and men alike, who crawled so slowly up an incline over which he soared.
He went ahead up the mountainside and teetered in the air-currents at the plateau’s edge. Huyghens looked in the visionplate by which he reported.
“How the devil:’ panted Roane—they had stopped for a breather, and the bears waited patiently for them—”do you train bears like these? I can understand Semper.”
“I don’t train them:’ said Huyghens, staring into the plate. ‘They’re mutations. In heredity the sex-linkage of physical characteristics is standard stuff. But there’s been some sound work done on the gene-linkage of psychological factors. There was need, on my home planet, for an animal who could fight like a fiend, live off the land, carry a pack and get along with men at least as well as dogs do. In the old days they’d have tried to breed the desired physical properties into an animal who already had the personality they wanted. Something like a giant dog, say. But back home they went at it the other way about. They picked the wanted physical characteristics and bred for the personality—the psychology. The job got done over a century ago—a Kodiak bear named Kodius Champion was the first real success. He had everything that was wanted. These bears are his descendants.”
“They look normal,” commented Roane.
“They are!” said Huyghens warmly. “Just as normal as an honest dog! They’re not trained, like Semper. They train themselves!” He looked back into the plate in his hands, which showed the ground five and six and seven thousand feet higher. “Semper, now, is a trained bird without too much brains. He’s educated—a glorified hawk. But the bears want to get along with men. They’re emotionally dependent on us! Like dogs. Semper’s a servant, but they’re companions and friends. He’s trained, but they’re loyal. He’s conditioned. They love us. He’d abandon me if he ever realized he could—he thinks he can only eat what men feed him. But the bears wouldn’t want to. They like us. I admit that I like them. Maybe because they like me.”
Roane said deliberately:
“Aren’t you a trifle loose-tongued, Huyghens? I’m a Colonial Survey officer. I have to arrest you sooner or later. You’ve told me something that will locate and convict the people who set you up here. It shouldn’t be hard to find where bears were bred for psychological mutations, and where a bear named Kodius Champion left descendants! I can find out where you came from now, Huyghens!”
Huyghens looked up from the plate with its tiny swaying television image, relayed from where Semper floated impatiently in mid-air.
“No harm done,” he said amiably. “I’m a criminal there, too. It’s officially on record that I kidnapped these bears and escaped with them. Which, on my home planet, is about as heinous a crime as a man can commit. It’s worse than horse-theft back on Earth in the old days. The kin
and cousins of my bears are highly thought of. I’m quite a criminal, back home.”
Roane stared.
“Did you steal them?” he demanded.
“Confidentially,” said Huyghens, “no. But prove it!” Then he said:
“Take a look in this plate. See what Semper can see up at the plateau’s edge.”

Roane squinted aloft, where the eagle flew in great sweeps and dashes. Somehow, by the experience of the past few days, Roane knew that Semper was screaming fiercely as he flew. He made a dart toward the plateau’s border.
Roane looked at the transmitter picture. It was only four inches by six, but it was perfectly without grain and in accurate color. It moved and turned as the camera-bearing eagle swooped and circled. For an instant the screen showed the steeply sloping mountainside, and off at one edge the party of men and bears could be seen as dots. Then it swept away and showed the top of the plateau.
There were sphexes. A pack of two hundred trotted toward the desert interior. They moved at leisure, in the open. The viewing camera reeled, and there were more. As Roane watched and as the bird flew higher, he could see still other sphexes moving up over the edge of the plateau from a small erosion-defile here and another one there. The Sere Plateau was alive with the hellish creatures. It was inconceivable that there should be game enough for them to live on. They were visible as herds of cattle would be visible on grazing planets.
It was simply impossible.
“Migrating,” observed Huyghens. “I said they did. They’re headed somewhere. Do you know, I doubt that it would be healthy for us to try to cross the plateau through such a swarm of sphexes?”
Roane swore, in abrupt change of mood.
“But the signal’s still coming through! Somebody’s alive over at the robot colony! Must we wait till the migration’s over?”
“We don’t know,” Huyghens pointed out, “that they’ll stay alive. They may need help badly. We have to get to them. But at the same time—”
He glanced at Sourdough Charley and Sitka Pete, clinging patiently to the mountainside while the men rested and talked. Sitka had managed to find a place to sit down, though one massive paw anchored him in his place.
Huyghens waved his arm, pointing in a new direction.
“Let’s go!” he called briskly. “Let’s go! Yonder! Hup!”