"The Summer Of The Seven" - читать интересную книгу автора (Melko Paul)

An image flitted across from Bola of the ducklings poking at the edge of the pond with their bills. They were still covered in yellow fluff that wasn’t quite feathers yet.
“See? One of them saw that patch of moss and the others came over right away!”
Maybe she signaled with sound.
Maybe it was random.
We’d mounted pheromone detectors around the pond to pick up any intrapod memory-sharing among the ducks. So far, we’d measured nothing, so we were using observation to try to prove that the ducks were thinking as one.
“Here, ducky, ducky!”
“Candace!” Meda yelled.
The duck, about to climb into her hand, scattered with its siblings.
“What?”
“Will you leave our experiment alone?”
“I was just going to hold it.”
“We want them to be wild, not bonded to a human.”
“Fine.” She turned and left, and, in disbelief, we watched her go. This was supposed to be where we spent our summers. This was our farm.
It’s going to be a long summer, Strom sent.
* * * *
We went swimming by ourselves that day, and, when we got back, we found Candace in the lab building her own duck.
Great.
“Look!” she cried. “I’m building a duck too!”
We didn’t want to look, but I suggested we at least feign interest.
She showed us the gene sequence she was using, a modified string used with the beavers.
“We’ve tried that already,” Meda said.
“Yeah, I know. I looked at your notes. But I’m adding a different olfactory sequence.”
She looked at our notes! Our notes were on our locked desktop.
I advised calm, but Meda’s face twitched with rage.
“Good luck,” she grated, and we left.
In the barn, Meda railed, too angry for chemical thoughts. Her emotions filled the loft and caused the pigs Mother Redd was building to oink and stamp at us. “She’s stealing our project, and she’s stealing our notes. She has got to go!”
“She just wants to fit in,” I said.
No one else was buying that.
“We should give her the benefit of the doubt,” I said.
Manuel growled, and snaked his fury through the air.
“Anyone can enter the gengineering competition at the Fair,” I said.
We need to do something.
What?
No one was looking at me.
We need more ducks.
How many more?
A lot.
They all turned to me, and I smelled the consensus like fresh bread. I could have held out, but I didn’t. I wanted to win the competition too.
“Fine.”
* * * *
We snuck all the incubators we could find from the lab into the barn. Candace had already tagged a couple for herself. Then we built a dozen more from spare parts.
For the genes, we begged cutting-edge sequences from Professor Ellis at the Institute—mammalian, reptilian, avian—anything that we could jam into the anatine DNA. We cooked eggs instead of doing our chores. We even cooked while we studied. By the time we were done cooking, we had over a gross of duck eggs incubating.
We figured that at least some of them would show something interesting that we could report at the Fair. Candace couldn’t keep up with our volume of output either. We had her licked, no problem.
* * * *
“Which egg has which genes?”
“Um,” Meda said. Mother Redd was surveying the rows of duck eggs. We’d hidden the incubators in the empty stalls, but you couldn’t miss the electric wires we’d strung across the rafters.
One of her eyed the code violations and tsked.
“None of these are marked,” she said.
“Um,” Meda said.
“Where’s your control variable? Where’s your lab books?”