Slides
In the vicinity of the radiation laboratory began to appear more and more sliders. Local residents believe that the punishment of the Lord. Slides are dying under the wheels of cars, sometimes they kill people, but not everyone is able to raise his hand to slide, and for good reason...
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Description
"Sliders" (orig. "The Crawlers"), also known as the "House of foundlings" (orig. "Foundling Home") is a science fiction short story by American writer Philip K. dick, first published in the journal "Imagination" (eng. "Imagination") in July 1954.
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Plot
The story starts from the face of the slide, is building one of their strange houses. The slider seems reasonable and genuinely likes to build his strange dwelling.
The story unfolds in a small town in the Midwest, where there are the mysterious puddles, which seem to cause mutations. Some local families are starting to emerge abnormal children – "crawlers" – with long, soft, pale, elongated bodies. They have poisonous stings (one of the slider bites a dog, who soon after dies),and their bodies secrete a glue like substance with which they create different structures. Kids-mutants love to build, and a colony of survivors (not killed by her parents) slides building a settlement near the city.
The government offers a plan providing for the resettlement of the slide on a desert island. They will live alone and build as much as they want without being harassed by ordinary people. After some time a colony of the slide lives a happy life, their settlement expanded rapidly.
The story ends with the attempted murder of the first born cub of the RAM similar to a normal person the whole colony considers a freak.
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Rake
Due to the leakage of radioactive substances from the laboratory in the town instead of the usual children begin to be born the strange creatures – crawlers. In the story they describe as:
In General, the creature resembled a slug — slimy tubular body with sense organs at one end and a lot of confused protoplasmic processes on the other.
[...]
The length of the slides were from two or three feet, some — most, probably, senior — grusnie and darker than the other. They all moved with excruciating slowness the soul, silent, silent brook, shimmering in the sun calcined the ground. Soft, devoid of the shell or carapace, the slides looked completely harmless creatures. But the face, the face of each of them... Greta stood shocked and mesmerized. Wrinkled baby face, tiny beady eyes, narrow slot mouth, ugly, twisted ears, and a few pathetic scraps of wet hair. Monstrous, obscene parody of a human face.
Instead of hand — elongated pseudopodia; soft, as if sculpted from dough sausages, they then lengthened, then shortened. Was struck by the flexibility of these creatures — stretching your body and feeling the tactile tentacles of an obstacle, floaters, instantly reduced to its original size.
[...]
they have something like a stinger. I know of a case when they stung the dog. Dog swollen, his tongue was black. Began beating in fits, and then froze. And then completely died.
Mentioned several times that the slides are very slow moving. They consume only plant foods: leaves and grass. While eye floaters alive, filled with curiosity.
Sliders love to create structures with their bodies emitted a rapid drying of mucus. Their colony fairly quickly builds a huge city under the ground.
After moving to the island, the sliders begin to be born of ordinary human children that floaters feel ugly.
Description of the slide does not match any of the known mystical creatures, but it could serve as a basis for such urban legends as "Rake".
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Links
- Дик Филип "Ползуны"
