"Mike Resnick & David Gerrold - Jellyfish" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

Hi-ho!

The result was a moment—actually a century and a half—of
unthinkable silence. During that time, three separate seedings came to
fruition, fed upon themselves, shredded themselves in hunger, and died
without ever approaching sentience. The Tryllifandillorians noted the events
with interest, and at some point in the future planned to base a whole cycle
of frelching on the tragedy of the three lost generations.

But at the moment, the existence of an external awareness of their
non-existence was such an unsettling realization that the entire species was
struck with a profound curiosity. Who or what in the entire Sevagram had
leapt to such an incisive achievement without traversing any of the
neces-sary steps that should precede such an enlightenment?

It would have to be investigated.

Hi-ho!

Filk stopped. He had typed five hundred and seven words. He had
completed two pages and half of a third. He still had a page and a half to
go.

He did not know what to type next. He had run out of ideas before he
had run out of paper.

This was not an uncommon event. Many of Filk’s ideas were simply
unable to sustain eight hundred words of examination. He had that in
common with E. A. van der Vogel, another advo-cate of
eight-hundred-words-and-out. And if an idea ran short, that was evidence
that it wasn’t worth the investment of any more time. Neverthe-less, if he
didn’t type four full pages, Filk felt incomplete.

In moments like these, Filk found it useful to stop and boil water.
Sometimes a sentence would pop into his head before the water boiled
and he would return to the typewriter and resume typing. If the sentence
were the first of a long inevitable string of sentences, the kettle would boil
itself dry, unnoticed by Filk.

But if a sentence didn’t pop into his head, then Filk would end up
sipping peppermint-flavored tea or forking noodles out of a Styrofoam cup
while he stared at the crack in the opposite wall that looked a little bit like the
northwestern coast of Australia.

Today, before he could put the kettle on to boil, before he had even
risen from the bed where he sat facing the typewriter on the TV tray, there
was a knock on the door. Not exactly a knock. More of a slithery sound. But
the intention was a knock.

Filk rarely answered the door. When he answered the door, people