LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

“Now, Junior, once you’re settled you’ll realize the importance of being easy in your mind about your offspring’s parentage. Remember, a niche in brine saves trying. Nothing like choosing your location well in the first place. Study the currents around your prospective site—particularly their direction and force at such crucial times as flood-tide. Try to make sure you and your future mate won’t be too close down-current from anybody else’s site, since in a case like that accidents can happen. You understand, Junior?”

      “Uh-huh,” acknowledged Junior. “That’s what the fellows mean when they say don’t let anybody get the drop on you.”

      “Well!” said Pater in flat disapproval.

      “But it all seems sort of silly,” said Junior stubbornly. “I’d rather just keep moving around, and not have to do all that figuring. And the ocean’s full of things I haven’t seen yet. I don’t want to grow down!”

      Mater paled with shock. Pater gave his spawn a scalding, scandalized look. “You’ll learn! You can’t beat Biology,” he said thickly, creditably keeping his voice down. “Junior, you may go!”

      Junior bobbled off, and Pater admonished Mater sternly, “We must have patience, my dear! All children pass through these larval stages....”

      “Yes, dear,” sighed Mater.

      At long last, Junior seemed to have resigned himself to making the best of it.

      With considerable exertions, hampered by his increasing bottom-heaviness, he was fetching loads of stones, seaweed and other debris to a spot downslope, and there laboring over what promised to be a fairly ambitious cairn. Judging by what they could see of it, his homesite might even prove a credit to the colony (so went Pater’s thoughts) and attract a mate who would be a good catch (thus Mater mused).

      Junior was still to be seen at times along the reef in company with his free-swimming friends among the other polyps, at some of whom his parents had always looked askance, fearing they were by no means well-bred. In fact, there was strong suspicion that some of them—waifs from the disreputable Shallows district in the hazardous reaches just below the tide-mark—had never been bred at all, but were products of budding, a practice frowned on in polite society.

      However, Junior’s appearance and rate of locomotion made it clear he would soon be done with juvenile follies. As Pater repeated with satisfaction—you can’t beat Biology; as one becomes more and more bottle-shaped, the romantic illusions of youth must inevitably perish.

      “I always knew there was sound stuff in the youngster,” declared Pater expansively.

      “At least he won’t be able to go around with those ragamuffins much longer,” breathed Mater thankfully.

      “What does the young fool think he’s doing, fiddling round with soapstone?” grumbled Pater, peering critically through the green to try to make out the details of Junior’s building. “Doesn’t he know it’s apt to slip its place in a year or two?”

      “Look, dear,” hissed Mater acidly, “isn’t that the little polyp who was so rude once?... I wish she wouldn’t keep watching Junior like that. Our northwest neighbor heard positively that she’s the child of an only parent!”

      “Never mind.” Pater turned to reassure her. “Once Junior is properly rooted, his self-respect will cause him to keep riffraff at a distance. It’s a matter of Psychology, my dear; the vertical position makes all the difference in one’s thinking.”

      The great day arrived. Laboriously Junior put a few finishing touches to his construction—which, so far as could be seen from a distance, had turned out decent-looking enough, though it was rather questionably original in design: lower and flatter than was customary.

      With one more look at his handiwork, Junior turned bottom-end-down and sank wearily onto the finished site. After a minute, he paddled experimentally, but flailing tentacles failed to lift him. He was already rooted, and growing more solidly so by the moment.

      “Congratulations!” cried the neighbors. Pater and Mater bowed this way and that in acknowledgment. Mater waved a condescending tentacle to the three maiden aunts.

      “I told you so!” said Pater triumphantly.

      “Yes, dear....” said Mater meekly.

      Suddenly there were outcries of alarm from the dwellers down-reef. A wave of dismay swept audibly through all the nearer part of the colony. Pater and Mater looked around, and froze.

      Junior had begun paddling again, but this time in a most peculiar manner—with a rotary twist and sidewise scoop which looked awkward, but which he performed so deftly that he must have practiced it. Fixed upright as he was now on the platform he had built, he looked for all the world as if he were trying to swim sidewise.

      “He’s gone mad!” squeaked Mater.

      “I ...” gulped Pater, “I’m afraid not.”

      At least, they saw, there was method in Junior’s actions. He went on paddling in the same fashion and now he, and his platform with him, were farther away than they had been, and growing more remote as they stared.

      Parts of the homesite that was not a homesite revolved in some way incomprehensible to eyes that had never seen the like. And the whole affair trundled along, rocking at bumps in the sandy bottom, and squeaking painfully; nevertheless, it moved.

      The polyps watching from the reef swam out and frolicked after Junior, watching his contrivance go and chattering eager questions, while their parents bawled at them to keep away from that.

      The three maiden aunts shrieked faintly and swooned in one another’s tentacles. The colony was shaken as it had not been since the tidal wave.

      “COME BACK!” thundered Pater. “You CAN’T do that!”

      “Come back!” shrilled Mater. “You can’t do that!”

      “Come back!” gabbled the neighbors. “You can’t do that!”

      But Junior was past listening to reason. Junior was on wheels.

Death Wish, by Ned Lang

      THE space freighter Queen Dierdre was a great, squat, pockmarked vessel of the Earth-Mars run and she never gave anyone a bit of trouble. That should have been sufficient warning to Mr. Watkins, her engineer. Watkins was fond of saying that there are two kinds of equipment—the kind that fails bit by bit, and the kind that fails all at once.

      Watkins was short and red-faced, magnificently mustached, and always a little out of breath. With a cigar in his hand, over a glass of beer, he talked most cynically about his ship, in the immemorial fashion of engineers. But in reality, Watkins was foolishly infatuated with Dierdre, idealized her, humanized her, and couldn’t conceive of anything serious ever happening.

      On this particular run, Dierdre soared away from Terra at the proper speed; Mr. Watkins signaled that fuel was being consumed at the proper rate; and Captain Somers cut the engines at the proper moment indicated by Mr. Rajcik, the navigator.

      As soon as Point Able had been reached and the engines stopped, Somers frowned and studied his complex control board. He was a thin and meticulous man, and he operated his ship with mechanical perfection. He was well liked in the front offices of Mikkelsen Space Lines, where Old Man Mikkelsen pointed to Captain Somers’ reports as models of neatness and efficiency. On Mars, he stayed at the Officers’ Club, eschewing the stews and dives of Marsport. On Earth, he lived in a little Vermont cottage and enjoyed the quiet companionship of two cats, a Japanese houseboy, and a wife.

      HIS instructions read true. And yet he sensed something wrong. Somers knew every creak, rattle and groan that Dierdre was capable of making. During blastoff, he had heard something different. In space, something different had to be wrong.

      “Mr. Rajcik,” he said, turning to his

Скачать книгу