"Michael Swanwick - Triceratops Summer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

"What's so goddamn funny?" Gretta wanted to know. But I could only point and shake my head
helplessly, tears of laughter rolling down my cheeks.

It was the frills. They were beyond garish. They were as bright as any circus poster, with red whorls and
yellow slashes and electric orange diamonds—too many shapes and colors to catalog, and each one
different. They looked like Chinese kites! Like butterflies with six-foot wingspans! Like Las Vegas on
acid! And then, under those carnival-bright displays, the most stupid faces imaginable, blinking and
gaping like brain-damaged cows. Oh, they were funny, all right, but if you couldn't see that at a glance,
you never were going to.

Gretta was getting fairly steamed. She climbed down out of the cab and slammed the door behind her. At
the sound, a couple of the Triceratops pissed themselves with excitement, and the lot shied away a step
or two. Then they began huddling a little closer, to see what would happen next.

Gretta hastily climbed back into the cab. "What are those bastards up to now?" she demanded irritably.
She seemed to blame me for their behavior. Not that she could say so, considering she was in my truck
and her BMW was still in the garage in South Burlington.

"They're curious," I said. "Just stand still. Don't move or make any noise, and after a bit they'll lose
interest and wander off."

"How do you know? You ever see anything like them before?"

"No," I admitted. "But I worked on a dairy farm when I was a young fella, thirty-forty years ago, and the
behavior seems similar."

In fact, the Triceratops were already getting bored and starting to wander off again when a battered old
Hyundai pulled wildly up beside us, and a skinny young man with the worst-combed hair I'd seen in a
long time jumped out. They decided to stay and watch.

The young man came running over to us, arms waving. I leaned out the window. "What's the problem,
son?"

He was pretty upset. "There's been an accident—an incident, I mean. At the Institute." He was talking
about the Institute for Advanced Physics, which was not all that far from here. It was government-funded
and affiliated in some way I'd never been able to get straight with the University of Vermont. "The verge
stabilizers failed and the meson-field inverted and vectorized. The congruence factors went to infinity
and…" He seized control of himself. "You're not supposed to see any of this."

"These things are yours, then?" I said. "So you'd know. They're Triceratops, right?"

"Triceratops horridus," he said distractedly. I felt unreasonably pleased with myself. "For the most
part. There might be a couple other species of Triceratops mixed in there as well. They're like ducks in
that regard. They're not fussy about what company they keep."

Gretta shot out her wrist and glanced meaningfully at her watch. Like everything else she owned, it was
expensive. She worked for a firm in Essex Junction that did systems analysis for companies that were
considering downsizing. Her job was to find out exactly what everybody did and then tell the CEO who
could be safely cut. "I'm losing money," she grumbled.