"Larry NIven - The Legacy of Heorot" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

biology, and brighter than hell. You could watch it at cocktail parties: everyone else talking,
and suddenly Ernst would say maybe two sentences, and half the room would go silent as the rest of
them digested the implications. That was ten light-years ago. Ernst had come out of frozen sleep
with the mind of a child.
Sylvia scanned the valley, gave a sigh of pleasure.
"Terrific shot, isn't it?" Cadmann's voice, ordinarily a hoarse rumbling sound, was quietly
thoughtful. "National Geographic will love it." He squatted next to her. "Are you all right?"
"Just fine," she murmured. She turned, warming him with her smile. "But I'll be happy to get
back home."
She was almost twenty years younger than he. Sylvia was all quick wit and golden eyes that
glowed with life above a galaxy of freckles. Her pregnancy changed nothing. It was wonderful, it
was frustrating: being with her made him forget the years and the aches. It's the eyes. She's
plain except for the eyes. God help me.
The pass they traversed was at the base of the tallest mountain on the island. The highest of


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its double peaks was just above thirty-two hundred meters. Both were shrouded with mist. The
delicate bat shapes of the pterodons glided in and out of the cloud cover with barely a flutter of
their membranous wings. Ernst stared up at them, his face a mask of puzzled concentration. What
would Dr. Ernst Cohen have made of them? They aren't really pterodons. There are other oddities.
He'd have loved it here--
"They woke him twice," Sylvia said. "Maybe if they'd just left him cold--"
"We did need him. We did," Cadmann said. But Ernst wasn't crew. He could have slept through,
but they had a problem with one bank of frozen embryos and woke him, and he'd solved that, and
they'd chilled him again, and then there was another problem--And as good a man as ever lived
follows me around to carry samples. Son of a bitch--
A square kilometer of plastic-coated solar cells glittered silver on the hills above the
Colony. Today's sunshine meant independence from the fission power plants of the landers. An
actual fusion plant would be constructed within the next four months. Then the Colony would be
fully established, and the spread of man across the face of Tau Ceti Four could really begin.
--Across Camelot, anyway. Eighty kilometers of stormy ocean separated the island from the
mainland. A New Guinea-sized island was quite ambitious enough for humankind's first interstellar
colony. Zack had known what he was doing. Isolate the problems . . .
So where were the problems?
"Snow up there," Cadmann said, shading his eyes as he gazed up into the eternal clouds at the
top. Skis. We didn't bring skis. We have plastics. Carlos can make me a pair of skis.
Sylvia handed him back his camera. Voice carefully neutral, she said, "You don't have to go to
the continent, Cadmann. There's plenty for you to do around the camp."
"Nothing that any other able body couldn't do."
"You're not a geologist. You'd be doing grunt work anyway." She looked down at him, sighed in
exasperation and gave him her hand for balance as he stood. "Do you just want to go hunting
dinosaurs?"
"Sure! What boy doesn't want to bag a brontosaurus?" He slipped the camera back into its
holster at his side. "Sometimes I wish we'd brought fetuses for a kodiak, or a few mountain lions
. . ."
He was smiling as he said it, but Sylvia wondered.
Cadmann brushed his hand through thick black hair. There was no gray in it, but his face was