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

knew as well. He pushed a little deeper into the mind and
learned that the dead creature had been of the same iff-group as
the survivor; in fact, it had been its mate. Garnna's horror at this
was so strong that he raced out of the mind and curled himself
up into a mental ball. Intellectually he could accept the idea of
killing, possibly even of one's mate. But emotionally the shock of
the direct experience set his mind quivering.

He existed there for minutes, waiting for the shock and
disgust to pass. Finally, his training reasserted itself and he
started observing his surroundings once more. The big creature
was now hacking at the carcass of the little one with a knife. Was
this some sort of ghastly custom? If so, these omnivores might
have to be reeval-uated with regard to their threat potential.
Even the carnivores Garnna had observed had not behaved this
obscenely.

It took all the self-control he had to enable him to make
contact with the alien's brain once more. What he saw confused
and disturbed him. For the first time, he witnessed directly an
individual planning to perform an action that would run counter
to the good of its Herd. There was guilt and shame in the mind,
which led Garnna to believe that this killing was far from a
customary practice. The herd instinct was still functioning,
though quite suppressed. And overriding everything was the fear
of punishment. The creature knew that what it had done was
wrong, and its present horrible course of action was an attempt
to evade—by what means, Garnna could not say—the
punishment that would otherwise naturally come.

This was a unique situation. Never before, to Garnna's
knowledge, had an Explorer ever become involved in an
individual situation to this extent. It was always the big picture
that mattered. But perhaps some insights could be gained by
watching this situation develop. Even as he thought this, he
"heard" a bell go off in his mind. This was the first warning that
his time for Exploration was almost up. There would be one
more in six minutes and then he would have to go back home.
But he resolved to stay and watch the drama play out as much as
possible before that happened.

He probed a little deeper into the alien's mind and witnessed
the deceit within. The creature was going to attempt to avoid its
just punishment by blaming the crime on some other innocent
being. If the original crime had been hideous to Garnna, this
compounding of it was unspeakable. It was one thing to let a
moment of passion cause one to violate the rules of the Herd, but
it was quite another to consciously and deliberately mislead
others so that a different individual would be harmed. The
creature was not only placing its welfare above that of the Herd,