"Campbell, John W Jr - Who Goes There" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell John W Jr)

think we should all hear. Blair has described the microscopic life-forms biologist find living, even in this cold and inhospitable place. They freeze every winter,
and thaw every summer -for three months -and live.


"The point Norris makes is -they thaw, and live again. There must have been microscopic life associated with this creature. There is with every living thing
we know. And Norris is afraid that we may release a plague -some germ disease unknown to Earth -if we thaw those microscopic things that have been frozen there
for twenty million years.


"Blair admits that such micro-life might retain the power of living. Such unorganized things as individual cells can retain life for unknown periods, when
solidly frozen. The beast itself is as those frozen mammoths they find in Siberia. Organized, highly developed life-forms can't stand that treatemnt.


"But micro-life could. Norris suggests that we may release some disease form that man, never having met it before, will be utterly defenseless against.
"Blair's answer is that there may be such still-living germs, but that Norris has the case reversed. They are utterly non-immune to man. Our life-chemistry probably
-"


"Probably!" The little biologist's head lifted in a quick, birdlike motion. The halo of gray hair about his bald head ruffled as though angry. "Heh. One look -"


"I know," McReady acknowledged. "The thing is not Earthly. It does not seem likely that it can have a life-chemistry sufficiently like ours to make cross-infection
remotely possible. I would say that there is no danger."


McReady looked toward Dr. Copper. The physician shook his head slowly. "None whatever," he asserted confidently. "Man cannot infect or be infected by germs
that live in such comparatively close relatives as the snakes. And they are, I assure you," his clean-shaven face grimaced uneasily, "much nearer to us than
that."


Vance Norris moved angrily. He was comparatively short in this gathering of big men, some five-feet-eight, and his stocky, powerful build tended to make him seem
shorter. His black hair was crisp and hard, like short, steel wires, and his eyes were the gray of fractured steel. If McReady was a man of bronze, Norris was all
steel. His movements, his thoughts, his whole bearing had the quick, hard impulse of steel spring. His nerves were steel -hard, quick-acting, swift-corroding.


He was decided on his point now, and he lashed out in its defense with a characterstic quick, clipped flow of words. "Different chemistry be damned. That
thing may be dead -or, by God, it may not -but I don't like it. Damn it, Blair, let them see the monstrosity you are petting over there. Let them see the foul
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thing and decide for themselves whether they want that thing thawed out in this camp.
"Thawed out, by the way. That's got to be thawed out in one of the shacks tonight, if it is thawed out. Somebody -whos's watchman tonight? Magnetic -oh, connant.
Cosmic rays tonight. Well, you get to sit up with that twenty-million-year-old mummy of his.


"Unwrap it, Blair. How the hell can they tell what they are buying if they can't see it? It may have a different chemistry. I don't know what else it has, but I
know it has something I don't want. If you can judge by the look on its face -it isn't human so maybe you can't -it was annoyed when it froze. Annoyed, in fact,
is just about as close an approximation of the way it felt as crazy, mad, insane hatred. Neither one touches the subject.