"William Morrison - Bad Medicine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morrison William)

and brown in color, and there was no touch of green to relieve the ugly monotony.
 Trenholm and O'Hara remained at first on a well-traveled path. Then, from far off to the right, came
the whinnying of a megapod. They stopped suddenly.
"That's probably it," said Trenholm.
"Waloo heard it, and set out to capture it."
They turned off the path to the right. A small glowing helix came twisting slowly past them, shedding a
lurid violet light, and they gave it a wide berth. When excited, the helix had been known to wrap itself
with incredible speed around a man's arm or leg, and squeeze. There was terrific force in the luminescent
coils, and the usual result was that the arm or leg fell off, the stump cauterized by the radiation as neatly
as if done by a surgeon's electrodes.
In the distance they saw a megapod bound into the air, and come sailing down again slowly. Then
they heard a low whistle. That was undoubtedly Waloo.
The Saturnian was no more than a few hundred feet from them, and if they were lucky they would
see him in less than five minutes. As they made their way forward, however, a sudden shadow fell on
them. They stopped again and looked up.
Apparently descending from a spot in one of Saturn's rings, far to the left of them, a cloud of what
seemed to be dust was tracing a parabolic path in the air.
"I guess that's it," O'Hara said, and grasped the small metal object he had taken from the ship more
tightly. "Suppose we put our backs to one of those plants?" he suggested.
Trenholm shook his head.
"The prongs might slide down its sides," he pointed out. "We'd better stay as far out in the open as
we can. Save the energy in that projector."
The particles of dust came closer, so that they seemed like small black spheres. Then, while still high
up, the spheres distintegrated, and there were a thousand particles for each one that had existed before.
They fell less rapidly now, having encountered the resistance of the Saturnian air. But they fell
nevertheless, and when apparently only a mile up, the new particles, themselves grown to black spheres,
disintegrated in turn.
"Do they split again?" asked O'Hara.
"No. They're individual stinger animals now."

AS the animals drifted down, the Earthmen could make out their outlines. Each black leathery
balloon was almost two feet in diameter. There was no appearance of eyes or any other features. Behind
each balloon were three large purple streamers several yards in length.
It was these streamers, arranged like the prongs of a fork, that had given the animals their name, and
it was in them that the danger lay. A single touch of their purple fronds would incapacitate a Saturnian, or
kill an Earthman.
The prongs were coming closer now, seeming to fill the whole sky.
"Turn on the projector," Trenholm said.
O'Hara pressed a button, and held the projector over his head. They could see very little, for the
prongs blotted out most of the light, and the projector's radiation was ultra-violet. But they knew the
projector was working, for above them a prong suddenly came within range, and exploded!
The ultra-violet light had struck the black balloon, and both the leathery substance and the purple
streamers had dissolved into gas. O'Hara could smell a faint odor of sulfur compounds.
The prongs began to explode rapidly now, and for a moment the space above them became clear.
But other prongs came drifting in from all sides, and O'Hara could not let up for a second. When he tired,
Trenholm took the projector from him, and directed it against the silent throng of invaders.
A prong came within ten feet of them without exploding, and O'Hara tore it to pieces with a shot
from his electric gun.
'"The radiation is getting weak now," Trenholm snapped. "If they keep coming—"
A faint wind had sprung up suddenly, and all the prongs began to drift toward the left.