Campbell, John W Jr - The Invaders

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 29.63KB 8 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

The Invaders

jan and meg had wandered off a bit from the others. They lay on a bank now, the soft grass feeling cool and

somewhat tickly on their bronzed skins. Meg was eating an orange slowly, and every now and then sitting

up to wash her fingers of the sticky juice in the clear little stream flowing from the spring, a quarter of a

mile up the valley. Jan watched her every move, every graceful bend of her arms and back and neck with

an interest and a strange tenseness he could not understand, and which vaguely bothered him.

"Meg," he said softly. Meg did not turn her head all the way round to him, but looked sidewise, her eyes

dancing, still smih'ng and sucking at the sweet, bright fruit. "Meg," he said again softly. She made a face

and began to turn her back on him.

He laughed suddenly and held her close. "Meg—"

For a moment she held him, too, then suddenly she was strug-gling wildly, trying to say something, her

mouth smothered by his kisses. It was several seconds before Jan realized she meant it. Then abruptly he

released her and looked in the direction her startled eyes followed—straight up.

There was a patch of sky, blue as a sapphire, deep and so clear it seemed some perfectly transparent

crystal, not the milky blue of the sky over a city, as we know it.

And it was framed in a ragged, wavering frame of deep, clear, green leaves, and fronds. There were

palms, and orange and other fruit trees.

And far, far above there was something gleaming, gleaming with the hard sheen that those rare bits of

mirror-metal which they found in the Ancient Places had. It was something big, Jan knew, by the way it

moved slowly and yet gave an impression of speed. He did not reason it out—but he knew it was huge.

And it was

shaped like a banana, only a straight banana, and more rounded.

Jan helped Meg to her feet, and both stood watching the strange thing. It came down, very slowly, and

very gently, like a bird cir-cling to earth. It seemed headed straight for them, settling slowly. Hastily, Jan

and Meg moved over, out of its way, till the great thing floated gently down. First the palm fronds and tree

leaves wavered, and sank, and the grass all below seemed to be pressed down. Jan and Meg felt a strange

pressure that made them unac-countably uneasy as they watched it. They stepped even farther back,

among the trees.

The thing was huge. The clearing was nearly half a mile across, and a mile and a quarter long, yet the

great thing made even that vast place seem none too large. At last it settled below the trees, and halted,

then dropped quite softly to the grass.

For minutes it remained motionless, and, the strange pressure gone, Jan and Meg came out slowly, hand

in hand, straight and slim, their bodies bronzed by the semitropic sunlight. Slowly they advanced, looking

curiously at the shining metal bulk.

Abruptly they started as a great section in the wall swung out-ward. Five strange things came out,

warily, watchfully. They were tall, taller than Jan, nearly seven feet tall, and their bodies were small in the

abdomen, and large in the chest. Their limbs were long and straight, and seemed more jointed than human

limbs, but they were covered with cloths, as the Gaht-men covered themselves in the ceremonies, only

these were finer cloths.

Their heads were large, rounded, they had no nose, and their ears were cup shaped, flexible and moving

constantly. They had no covering on hands or feet, and both were prehensile. As the leader turned

somewhat, Jan saw, wonderingly, that he had a long, thin tail, as prehensile and useful as the tail of a

monkey. He was carry-ing something in it. Faintly, Jan envied him.

And Jan saw further, that he had three eyes! One eye on every side, so that he could see in all

directions at once. A very strange creature, Jan thought.

Meg was curious; she wanted to see them more closely. She was pulling at his hand now, and Jan

followed, somewhat cautiously, feeling a peculiar emotion, something like the way he felt when he fell, as

though he were going to be bumped.

The five strange beings watched them intently, two eyes of each focused on them, and curious little

sticks raised in the prehensile hands, pointing at them.

"Who are you?" asked Meg, her voice soft and silvery in Jan's

ears. The five made no direct answer. Only the leader said some-thing in a strange way, like the

Mez-kahns—the brown men from the south—something Jan could not understand.

"You aren't Mez-kahns?" asked Meg doubtfully.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Campbell, John W Jr - The Invaders.pdf

共8页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Campbell, John W Jr - The Invaders

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: