"Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - Crabs on the Island" - читать интересную книгу автора (Strugatski Arkady)

"Of course I can. I would have told you all about it even then but there was no
time."
I felt he was lying, but said nothing. Cookling stood rubbing his purple neck with
his greasy palm. He always did that when he was going to tell a lie, I knew, and now
that was quite sufficient for me.
"You see, Bud, we're going to perform an interesting experiment to test the
theories of that. . . what's his name. . .?" He hesitated and looked searchingly at me.
"That English scientist. Damn it, I've clean forgotten his name. No, I've got it-
Charles Darwin."
I went over to him and put my hand on his bare shoulder.
"Look here, Cookling. You seem to think I'm a brainless idiot who doesn't know
who Darwin was. Stop lying and tell me straight why we've landed on this blazing
scrap of land in the middle of the ocean. And please don't mention Darwin to me
again."
Cookling burst out laughing, displaying a mouthful of false teeth. Backing away a
few paces, he said, "You're an ass, Bud, all the same. Because it is Darwin we're
going to test here."
"And that's what you've dragged ten crates of old iron here for?" I demanded,
moving close to him again. Hatred for this fat sweating man began to well up inside
me.
"Yes," he said, and his smile vanished. "As for your duties, the first thing you
have to do is to open crate No. 1 and get out the tent, water, tinned stuff and the
tools to open the others."
Cookling spoke in the same tones he had used when I had first met him at the
firing-ground. He had been in military uniform then, and so had I.
"Very good," I muttered and went over to case numbered one.
Within two hours we had pitched a tent on the beach, and put a spade, crowbar,
hammer, chisel, several screw-drivers, and other tools into it. In addition we stowed
away about a hundred tins of different foods and containers of fresh water.
In spite of being the boss, Cookling worked like a bull and was, indeed, all agog
to get started. With all the work, we did not notice that the "Dove" had weighed
anchor and disappeared behind the horizon.
After supper we started on crate No. 2. It contained an ordinary two-wheeled
barrow of the kind used at railway stations to carry luggage.
 I was turning to the third crate when Cookling stopped me.
"Let's look at the map first. We've got to distribute the things at different places."
I looked at him in amazement.
"It's for the experiment," he explained.
The island was round, like a plate turned upside down, with a small bay in the
north-where we had landed. It was ringed by a sandy beach about fifty yards wide.
Behind the beach stretched a low plateau overgrown with stunted shrubs of some
kind, parched by the heat.
The diameter of the island did not exceed two miles.
A number of places on the map had been marked in red pencil-some along the
shore, others inland.
"We've got to take the things we're going to unpack now to all these places," said
Cookling. "What are they-measuring instruments of some sort?"
"No," said the engineer and chuckled. He had the obnoxious habit of laughing
when it happened that someone didn't know what he did.
The third case was incredibly heavy. It seemed to me it must contain some