"Stephen Goldin - Herds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goldin Stephen)

didn't let the darkness affect their lives to any great extent. There
were parts of the cities that were lit up as bright as daytime.
There was one place in one of the cities where throngs of the
creatures gathered in seats to view the action that was taking
place between a smaller number of the creatures down on a
specially laid-out field. The pattern was similar to what had been
seen on numerous other worlds, particularly where omnivores
and carnivores were dominant—institutionalized competition.
Instead of dividing what there was evenly for the good of the
Herd, as would have been done on Zarti, these creatures felt
compelled to compete, with the winners getting all and the losers
nothing. Try as he would, Garnna could not fully comprehend
what such competition would mean to these creatures.

He moved on. He observed the buildings of the natives and
found them in many ways structurally superior to those on Zarti.
The machines for transporta-tion were also advanced, being
both efficient and capable of traveling at great speeds. But he
noticed, too, that they burned chemical fuels in order to propel
themselves. That, for the moment, removed these beings from
the threat list. They obviously would not use chemical fuels if
they had discovered an efficient means of utilizing nuclear
energy, and no race could hope to build a workable interstellar
drive utilizing chemical fuels alone. These creatures might know
of the existence of nuclear power —in fact, to judge from their
very ample technology, Garnna would have been surprised if they
didn't—but it was too large a jump from there to an interstellar
drive; the Zarticku would not need to worry about this race
posing a threat in the near future. Even the Zarticku hadn't
perfected an interstellar drive yet—but of course, there had been
extenuating circumstances.

He spent most of his time gathering the material he thought
he would need for his report. As always, there was an
overabundance of data, and he had to carefully eliminate some
very interesting details to make room for trends which would
help him build in his own mind a cohesive picture of this
civilization. Again, the whole took precedence over its parts.

He finished his investigation and realized he still had a little
time to spare before he was required to return to his body. He
might as well use it. He had a small hobby, a harmless one. Zarti,
too, had seacoasts, and Garnna had been born near one of them.
He had spent his youth near the sea and had never tired of
watching waves come in and break against the shore. So,
whenever he found himself with spare time on an alien wor'd, he
tried to fantasize back to his childhood at the edge of the ocean.
It helped to make the alien seem familiar and caused no harm to
anyone. So he glided gently along the seacoast of the enormous
ocean on this strange world, watching and listening to the black,