"Thomas Easton - Organic Future 03 - Woodsman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

"Dr. Duncan," said Frederick, holding out his hand. "I never seem to find
you with a shirt on." He did not smile. It had been many years since he had
felt he had anything to smile about.

The other shrugged and set his lotion bottle on the reception counter.
"Too tight," he said, just as he did whenever Frederick made his ritual
comment. "They hurt." Once before, at an earlier meeting, he had explained
that he had given himself the gills after he had taken up scuba-diving. He had
wanted the freedom of the fish; only later had he learned that the reshaped
tissue was excruciatingly sensitive to mechanical pressure. When Frederick had
asked him why he had never changed his body back, or tried to remove the
sensitivity, he had said, "They work just fine in the water."

Now Jeremy Duncan gestured his visitors into the depths of the building
and said, "Haven't seen you for awhile."

"Not since I brought the last check." They were passing a door that opened
on a dimly lit room equipped with two nutrient-bath tanks and a large freezer.
Frederick paused, as he always did when he visited Jeremy Duncan's place of
work. The room resembled an operating room, as antiseptic in its gleaming tile
and medicinal odors as if it were meant for physical surgery. It was even
equipped with cardiac monitors and heart-lung machines. But there were no
trays of laser scalpels and hemostats. Instead, there were racks for
intravenous bottles. The bottles stood in a cabinet by the wall, together with
packets of sterile tubing and needles. The bottles held the nutrients to
supplement the bath in its sustaining of the patient while cells gained a
pseudoembryonic malleability, tissues and organs reshaped, and the body
restructured itself to obey new blueprints. In the freezer, Frederick knew,
were more bottles filled with suspensions of tailored viruses.

Similar viruses had changed Freddy's porcine form to the one he wore now.
He remembered only too well being laid in a tank filled with a thick, warm
fluid they said would nourish him through the weeks of change. But these
tanks, here and now, were empty. "You haven't been very busy," he finally
said.

Jeremy Duncan was standing in the more brightly lit doorway of his office
a few steps down the hall. "You haven't sent me many clients."

"We could send you back to the regular ESRP labs." As he spoke, Frederick
reached into the breast pocket of his green coverall. He held out an envelope.

Duncan took the envelope and shuddered. The viruses the Endangered Species
Replacement Program used had been designed to replace, bit by bit, the genes
that made a human being human with those that specified an anteater, a
rhinoceros, a giant tortoise, a..."Turning people into aardvarks and okapi? No
thanks." The ESRP had arisen when the technology of gengineering had made it
possible for humanity to do something about the guilt it felt for allowing so
many wild species to go extinct. It replaced the genes of volunteers with