"Andre Norton - Warlock Trilogy - Storm over Warlock" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

vicious as the wolverines when they were aroused to rage.

Then there were the “dreams,” which had afforded the prime source of camp discussion and dispute. Shann
brushed coarse sand from his boots and thought about the dreams. Did they or did they not exist? You
could start an argument any time by making a definite statement for or against the peculiar sort of dreaming
reported by the first scout to set ship on this world.

The Circe system, of which Warlock was the second of three planets, had first been scouted four years ago
by one of those explorers traveling solo in Survey service. Everyone knew that the First-In Scouts were a
weird breed, almost a mutation of Terran stock—their reports were rife with strange observations.

So an alarming one concerning Circe, a solar-type yellow sun, and her three planets was no novelty. Witch,
the world nearest in orbit to Circe, was too hot for human occupancy without drastic and too costly world-
changing. Wizard, the third out from the sun, was mostly bare rock and highly poisonous water. But
Warlock, swinging through space between two forbidding neighbors, seemed to be just what the settlement
board ordered.

Then the Survey scout, even in the cocoon safety of his well-armed ship, began to dream. And from those
dreams a horror of the apparently empty world developed, until he fled the planet to preserve his sanity.
There had been a second visit to Warlock to confirm this—worlds so well adapted to human emigration
could not be lightly thrown away. But this time the report was negative. There was no trace of dreams, no
registration of any outside influence on the delicate and complicated equipment the ship carried. So the
Survey team had been dispatched to prepare for the coming of the first pioneers, and none of them had
dreamed either—at least, no more than the ordinary dreams all men accepted.

Only there were those who pointed out that the seasons had changed between the first and second visits to
Warlock. That first scout had planeted in summer; his successors had come in fall and winter. They argued
that the final release of world for settlement should not be given until the full year on Warlock had been
sampled.
But pressure from Emigrant Control had forced their hands, that and the fear of just what had eventually
happened—an attack from the Throgs. So they had speeded up the process of declaring Warlock open.
Only Ragnar Thorvald had protested that decision up to the last and had gone back to headquarters on the
supply ship a month ago to make a last appeal for a more careful study.

Shann stopped brushing the sand from the tough fabric above his knee. Ragnar Thorvald . . . He
remembered back to the port landing apron on another world, remembered with a sense of loss he could
not define. That had been about the second biggest day of his short life; the biggest had come earlier when
they had actually allowed him to sign on for Survey duty.

He had tumbled off the cross-continent cargo carrier, his kit—a very meager kit—slung over his thin
shoulder, a hot eagerness expanding inside him until he thought that he could not continue to throttle down
that wild happiness. There was a waiting starship. And he—Shann Lantee from the Dumps of Tyr, without
any influence or schooling—was going to blast off in her, wearing the brown-green uniform of Survey!

Then he had hesitated, had not quite dared cross the few feet of apron lying between him and that compact
group wearing the same uniform—with a slight difference, that of service bars and completion badges and
rank insignia—with the unconscious self-assurance of men who had done this many times before.

But after a moment that whole group had become in his own shy appraisal just a background for one man.
Shann had never before known in his pinched and limited childhood, his lost boyhood, anyone who