"Kelly,_James_Patrick_-_Ninety_Percent_of_Everything" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

"They bark. So does Lassie."
"Can I interest you in a short ride?"
"You might, but you haven't. Look, Mr. Wetherall, I've got a Curriculum Committee meeting in five minutes, and a graduate seminar on Primate Sexology in an hour and a half. I've got three thesis advisees backed up outside my door and no time to waste giving you a crash course in exobiology."
"I just bought ten square miles of salt flats near Eastline, Nevada," Wetherall said.
"I'll be right down."
* * * *
As with Ramsdel Wetherall, there was too much speculation and too few facts concerning the shitdogs.
To start, we did not know where they came from. Astronomers spotted the ship that brought the shitdogs to us only eighteen hours before it went into orbit. It made just three revolutions of the earth before splitting into five vehicles which entered the atmosphere and made soft landings in barren salt flats: Chile's Atacama Desert, Australia southeast of Lake Disappointment, the Tsagan Nor basin of the Gobi Desert, the Danakil Plain in Ethiopia. And Eastline, Nevada.
What followed was well documented at all five landing sites. In the United States, fighters from Edwards Air Force Base scrambled and followed the mushroom-shaped lander to touchdown. The Marines arrived shortly after and cordoned off the area. It was fifty-three minutes before the head of the first shitdog poked out of the lander. The Marines assumed that it was coming through some kind of hatch. It wasn't until all five shitdogs had emerged from different exits that the onlookers understood.
The shitdogs were eating their spaceship.
* * * *
On my way out I ran into Saintjohn Matthewson, the chair of the department.
"Oh, Liz, I'm glad I caught you before the meeting. I'm going to need that justification for the new curriculum by next Tuesday; the provost's breathing down my neck. And the corporate sponsors for the freshman chip implant program want to do some more pix of the experimental classroom to include in their annual corporate report."
"But you said I had another month. Registration hasn't even turned in the enrollment figures."
"I have every confidence in you, Elizabeth. That's why I appointed you." He turned toward the conference room, then paused to admire his profile reflected in the window. "By the way, have you noticed the springs are broken on the sofa in the faculty lounge? Almost as if someone's been jumping up and down on it. Have the Building Committee order a new one, and keep the cost down."
"But Saintjohn -- "
"Oh, and could you be an angel and get the coffee going before we sit down? I'm afraid this is going to be a long session."
He cruised ahead of me into the room. I stood outside the door for a moment and took a deep breath. Then I turned and went down the stairs and out onto the quad.
The pix of Judy Jolly Freeze on the side of the van waved and chuckled at me. "Please step to the rear door, Liz."
As I walked round to the back, pixes of Charley Cone and Billy Bar called out to me in childish voices, "Buy me! Buy me!" The heavy rear door swung open and I peered into the van. It was dim and cold -- not freezing, but chilly enough to make me wish I'd brought a sweater.
"Come in, come in."
As my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw another Wetherall avatar sitting behind a dark wooden desk. A hologram. Unlike the first avatar, this one was wearing data spex. I saw its breath in the cold air -- very lifelike. I was impressed. It mumbled something I couldn't quite hear.
"I'm sorry," I said. "What was that?"
Yellow and blue lights ghosted across the lenses of its spex. The avatar frowned. "The P/E is eleven," it said. "I'm not offering a ruble more than twenty-six."
I wondered if Saintjohn was worried yet. Good old Liz was never late for a meeting. "Maybe I'd better come back later."
"Absolutely not. Under no circumstances." It made a swiping motion across the desktop; I doubted it heard me. "I'm not interested in a limited partnership."
If I was looking to get ignored, I could do it as easily in the department as here. "Nice place you've got here," I said. "All you need is a few penguins."
"You're cold?" Its head jerked in surprise. "I find that the body works at peak efficiency when the air temperature is -- _E il presso migliore che mi puo fare, Giacomo_? Liz, I'm sorry, you should sit down."
I settled reluctantly into the plush chair facing the desk. It was as warm as a baby's hand.
"Yes, Murk, I'll get her to sign a release, don't worry. Yes, I agree." It nodded, then its voice dropped a register. "I'm sorry, darling, I'm spread a little thin at the moment. How about eleven? I'll send the limo."
"And all I get is the Jolly Freeze van?" I stood. "Good-bye, Mr. Wetherall. We'll have to not talk again real soon."
The avatar shot out of its chair. "Liz, please." It pulled off the spex and dropped them on the desk. "I'm finished. I promise there will be no further interruptions."
Something about the way the spex bounced against the wood caught my attention. I leaned forward and flicked my forefinger against them. They were real. "You're you, aren't you? Ramsdel Wetherall."
He shrugged. "So they tell me."
I sank back in my chair and chuckled in disbelief. "Aren't you going to make me sign something?"
"That's Murk's obsession -- my lawyer." He resumed his seat and did something behind his desk that brought the lights up in the van. For a moment he studied me, as if noticing for the first time that I was a woman. "Should I?"
I may not be Dawn Zoftiggle, but I have my pride. People tell me I'm attractive -- smart people, lots of people. On the other hand, I didn't want to give him the impression that I was harboring some romantic design on him. He was Ramsdel Wetherall, after all. "You can't buy the shitdogs," I said, feeling my face flush in the cold air.
"I don't want them." He opened a desk drawer. "I want their jewels."
I couldn't help it; I laughed at him. He laughed with me.
"Ice cream?" he said.
He had a Strawbetty Billy Bar and I had a Chuncolate Charley Cone. The van pulled out of the parking lot and I could hear its synthesizer chirp the first four measures of Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" over and over again.
"Wait a minute!" I said. "I've got responsibilities. Classes. A meeting to sleep through."
"I love ice cream." Ramsdel Wetherall licked a Strawbetty smear from the corner of his mouth. "It's all I eat these days. Of course, it has to be properly fortified and nutritionally balanced, but that's why I bought Jolly Freeze in the first place. You've seen jewels up close, right? At the Eastline site?"
I made myself sit back in the chair. "Sure," I said. "I've even seen them die."
* * * *
When the shitdogs ate their ship, nobody tried to stop them. At that point it was assumed that they were intelligent. They must have perfectly good, if completely alien, reasons for eating their ship. And of course, there was also the problem of the big stink, which kept even the toughest Marine at a considerable distance.
With the landers gone, we had no clue as to the origin of the shitdogs or the purpose for which they were sent to earth -- other than the beasts themselves.
Most of my colleagues agreed that the shitdogs were beasts; the stubborn few who contended that we hadn't yet recognized their intelligence because it was so different from our own were trapped in a circular argument.
As had been reported any number of times, the shitdogs were not dogs nor were their castings shit -- strictly speaking. From direct observation we could see that they were quadrupeds, ranging in hue from powder blue to near indigo. We estimated they weighed almost 3000 kilograms. The largest was fifteen meters in length; none were shorter than fourteen. They functioned without difficulty in earth's gravity. Their forelegs were long and particularly well suited to digging. Each of their three toes culminated in a razor-sharp crystalline claw, hard enough to scratch diamond. They used their short, powerful rear legs to propel them as they burrowed through salt flats and the piles of their castings. Their faces were composed of a circular maw which could dilate to as much as a meter and a half in diameter. Above that were two external organs the size of tennis balls -- eyes, we supposed. An orifice just above the rear legs could iris completely shut, or open to eject a continuous casting approximately twenty-five centimeters in diameter.
We'd been observing shitdog behavior for six years. It consisted mostly of eating and excreting -- or intake and output, depending on your model. There was no way to tell whether they were natural or created; it was entirely possible they were some kind of organic mechanisms. In any event, they tunneled through the salt flats, gorging on a variety of materials, pushing others aside. When they emerged, usually after a period of eight to ten days, their bodies were grotesquely distended. They lay pulsing and inert in the fierce desert sun, digesting -- or processing -- for as long as a month. During this time, they periodically vented small amounts of chlorine gas. At the end of this rest cycle, they would crawl to the casting deposit area, climb or tunnel to an appropriate spot, and release their casting in such a way that it coiled into the conical pile.