"Andre Norton - The X Factor 1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

And the man with him—

Diskan closed his eyes, licked his lips before he swallowed again, willing himself not to—no, no!

That man, lithe, of middle height, all feline grace and ease, his fine body well displayed in the
brown-green uniform of Survey, the silver comet of a First-in Scout on his breast! The stranger had
looked so clean, so close to the ideal of Diskan's haunted dreams that he had simply stared at him, not
answering Ulken's shouted orders—until he saw that blackness on the Scout's face, just before the Scout
had turned on Ulken. The overseer had shriveled and backed off. But when the Scout had looked at
Diskan once more, Ulken had grinned, maliciously, before he slouched away.

"You are—Diskan Fentress?" Disbelief, yes, there had been disbelief in that, enough to awaken in
Diskan some of the old defiance.

He had waded out of the water, pulling up fistfuls of coarse grass to rub the slime from him.

"I'm Fentress."

"So am I. Renfry Fentress."

Diskan had not really understood, not for a whole moment of suspended time. He had gone right on
wiping his big clumsy body. Then he answered with the truth as he had known it.

"But you're dead!"

"There's sometimes a light-year stretch between presumption and actuality," the Scout had replied, but
he continued to stare. And a small hurt, hidden far inside Diskan's overgrown frame of flesh and bone,
grew.

What a meeting between father and son! But how could Renfry Fentress have sired—him? Scouts,
assigned for periods of time to planet duty, were encouraged to contract Service marriages. This grew
from the need to breed a type of near mutant species necessary to carry on the exploration of the galaxy.
Certain qualities of mind and body were inherited, and those types were encouraged to reproduce their
kind. So, Renfry Fentress had taken Lilha Clyas as his wife on Nyborg, for the duration of his assignment
there, a recognized and honored association, with a pension for Lilha and a promising future for any
children of their union.

In due time, Renfry Fentress had been reassigned. He then formally severed the marriage by Decree of
Departure and raised ship, without knowing whether there would be a child, since his orders were a
matter of emergency. Eight months later Diskan had been born, and in spite of the skill of the medics, it
had been a hard birth, so hard that his mother had not survived his arrival.

He did not remember the early days in the government creche, but the personality scanner had reported
almost at once that Diskan Fentress was not Service material. Something had gone wrong in all that
careful planning. He was like neither his father nor his mother, but a retrocession, too big, too clumsy, too
slow of thought and speech to be considered truly one of a space-voyaging generation.

There had been other tests, many of them. He could not recall them separately now, only that they were
one long haze of frustration, mental pain, discouragement, and sometimes fear. For some years, while he
had been a small child, he had been tested again and again. The authorities could not believe that he was