"William Tunning - Survivability" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tuning William)

"Damn it!"
The words exploded softly from the slender man who knelt in the snow. "Another dead one," he said
bitterly.
With a single gesture—half help-less, half compassionate—he reached down and closed the star-ing
eyes of the dead Yeep.
Olie Struan finished pulling the tissue sample and got to his feet, still looking at the woolly Yeep. A
small drift of snow had piled up on the windward side of the body, and was beginning to blow over the
top of it, skittering in eddies along the slick ice.
After several minutes, Olie lifted his head and stared out across the glare-ice of Botany Bay. His
Vi-king-blue eyes moved steadily over the bleak landscape, following the curve of the old shoreline.
Even though he knew where it was, the land was so desolate as to be hardly distinguishable—for
prac-tical purposes—from the iced-over bay. Green technicians at Botany Bay had to go out with an
experi-enced hand to avoid losing their bearings when they got out of sight of the station. Even with a
homing scanner—compasses didn't work on Flannigan—a new man might, and often did, stubbornly
insist he was going the right direction when the scanner told him the opposite.
"Sure is a funny place," Olie said to himself.
He ran his eyes over the ice, looking carefully at the large, bushy puffdocks, most of which drooped
down tiredly onto the ice. The puffdocks, a large, lichenous algae, were dying off. They would turn a
slicky, nacreous white and lay down into the snow and ice. The Yeep, with their narrow-range,
starch-oriented metabolism, depended almost entirely on the puffdocks for a food supply. Their bodies
couldn't draw proper nour-ishment from anything more complicated—not enough to stay alive—unless
they stayed awake around the clock and ate constantly, which they would not do.
Now, the Yeep were still dying off, in spite of everything Olie Struan and the Terrans at the Bot-any
Bay station could do. With the apparent onset of a shift pattern in the life forms of Flannigan, it had not
been set out in the program to merely make a short-term cure of the ailment that was killing off the
puffdocks. The project had been programmed to mutate the Yeep by broadening their metabolic
functions so their food-chain re-quirements could expand. That had been simple enough, but now, mi-nor
genetic drifts had apparently diminished the Yeep's ability to cope with the extremes of climate on
Flannigan.
They were dying off faster than ever.

The Botany Bay project was be-ginning to look like a write-off. Or, so it seemed at this moment to
Olie, who was tired and discouraged.
He looked carefully from one fallen puffdock to another, knowing he would see more dead Yeep.
Sure enough, there was another telltale drift of snow, which prob-ably concealed another dead
Yeep. The pattern was depressingly con-sistent. Frozen feet, followed by the freezing of ears and other
ex-tremities. Then, gangrene. Finally, death.
The Yeep were an extraordi-narily stupid species.
Olie Struan took a last look at the dead Yeep lying at his feet. The drifting snow had almost buried it
now. One shiny, black horn stuck up in clear view, like a crooked grave marker, glistening wetly in
contrast to the white snow and ice that was all around.
The wind tore at his thoughts and seemed to throw back mocking parodies of his words whenever he
spoke aloud to himself.
He felt a heavy sense of failure.
He started for the place where he expected to find the next dead Yeep. He moved at a rapid sliding
shuffle—a pace that let him main-tain some speed over the slick ice without danger of slipping and
fall-ing.
"Slick ice," he said to himself. The ice on Flannigan was extremely slippery. Probably some variant
species of leptothrix, Olie thought idly as he covered the dis-tance between him and the next dead
Yeep. Someday, maybe I'll have time to break it down and see. We already know that the water