"Frank Herbert - Seed Stock" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

How odd it was, because the people who planned and conceived profound thoughts had held such
hopes forthis place. The survey reports had been exciting. This was a planet without native land animals.
It was a planet whose native plants appeared not too different from those of Mother Earth-in some
respects. And the sea creatures were primitive by sophisticated evolutionary standards.

Without being able to put it into those beautifully polished phrases which others admired, Kroudar knew
where the mistake had been made. Sometimes, you had to search out a problem with your flesh and not
with your mind.

He stared around now at the motley rags of his men. They werehis men. He was the master fisherman,
the one who had found thetrodi and conceived these squat, ugly boats built within the limitations of native
woods. The colony was alive now because of his skills with boat and net.

There would be more gaps in thetrodi runs, though. Kroudar felt this as an awareness on the edges of
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his fatigue. There would be unpopular and dangerous things to do then, all necessary becausethinking
had failed. The salmon they had introduced, according to plan, had gone into the ocean vastness. The
flatfish in the colony's holding ponds suffered mysterious attrition. Insects flew away and were never seen
again.

There's food here, the biologists argued. Why do they die?

The colony's maize was a sometime thing with strange ears. Wheat came up in scabrous patches. There
were no familiar patterns of growth or migration. The colony lived on the thin edge of existence,
maintained by protein bulk from the processedtrodi and vitamins from vegetables grown hydroponically
with arduous filtering and adjustment of their water. Breakdown of a single system in tie chain could bring
disaster.



The giant orange sun showed only a small arc above the sea horizon now, and Kroudar's men were
stirring themselves, lifting their tired bodies off the sand, pushing away from the places where they had
leaned.

'All right now,' Kroudar ordered. 'Let's get this food inside on the racks.'

'Why?' someone asked from the dusk: 'You think the falcons will eat it?'

They all knew the falcons would not eat thetrodi. Kroudar recognized the objection: it was tiredness of
the mind speaking. The shrimp creatures fed only humans-after careful processing to remove dangerous
irritants. A falcon might take up a frond-leggedtrodi, but would drop it at the first taste.

What did they eat, those waiting birds?

Falcons knew a thing aboutthis place that humans did not know. The birds knew it in their flesh in the
way Kroudar sought the knowledge.