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

"Not on paper," Struan said. "But that's what it is, just the same. There's more to it than freezing feet,
too. Our new strain of Yeep is also stupider than the old strain. And nearsighted. We're going the wrong
direction. We've got to de-velop a new strain in order to cover our bets."
"This all sounds very familiar," Altborg said wearily. "I think I've heard it before, somewhere. You
prove your theory, and I'll be the first one to approve a new strain of Yeep. But without something to
hang our hat on, Elsa is never go-ing to buy it."
"Not as long as you keep send-ing up sugar-coated reports to her—no."
"Well." Altborg smiled his nas-tiest smile. "Next time you're in the sack with her, maybe you could
plead your case. And while you're at it, you can explain what a son of a bitch I am."
They stood across the console from each other for a full minute and glared.
"All right." Olie broke the si-lence. "This is getting us nowhere, and we're both losing our tem-pers."
"I expect we are," Altborg re-marked dryly.
Olie turned and started for the door. "I'll spin these down, first. I'll let you know." He left before
Alt-borg could say anything else.
Between Altborg's office and the lab, Olie's temper began to subside, and he sifted through the
reasons for his friction with Altborg. There was, he thought, certainly no rea-son to bring personal
relationships into the picture. The fact that Elsa Spitzen was the engineer in charge of the Botany Bay
project had no bearing on her personal relation-ship with Olie. In this kind of a closed environment where
Terrans had to work together, but also had to live together in some kind of community harmony, on-duty
titles couldn't be allowed to have any-thing to do with off-duty friend-ships. Altborg, Olie thought,
appar-ently was upset that Elsa had made such an arrangement—an arrange-ment that omitted the
person be-tween them in the chain of com-mand. Altborg. It was silly for Altborg to be irritated by that,
Olie thought. But, it was getting plainer all the time that he was. He never missed a chance to get a dig in
about it, and the friction was get-ting to a point that it endangered the project itself.
Olie sighed as he entered his lab. Maybe, if this hump with the ge-netic drift in the Yeep could be
gotten over, things would smooth out. After all, Altborg was getting some heavy pressure from upstairs,
and it was only natural for him to get rid of it by passing it down to the next man in line. Unfortunately,
thought Olie, the next man in line happens to be me.

Altborg, in his own office, was winding up his report. "And, so, while there are some minor genetic
drifts that present some operational difficulties in the new strain of Yeep, we expect to have made
ad-justments for them before the next generation is born. These adjust-ments, followed by a testing
period, should conclude our successful adaptive mutations of the Yeep."
He rubbed his eyes and leaned back in the chair for a moment. Then he punched an alert circuit and
removed the message chip from the pickup.
He sat, staring at the console, and absently tapping the message chip against the palm of his hand.
The records specialist who shortly came into his office was a willowy redhead. "Yes, Dr. Altborg?"
He looked up. "Hi, sweetie. Say, who was the genius that programmed this project so that all the
records specialists were female?"
She gave a sophisticated little shrug.
"Here, Jill," Altborg said. "File this and kick a copy upstairs."
As she bent to take the chip from his hand, he expertly pinched her, just hard enough to elicit a slight
squeal.

The security alarm buzzed with a rasp that was unmistakable. Red lights flashed in all compartments
of the station, and the monitor's voice came booming over the auto-matic gain speakers.
"Alert! Alert! Perimeter breach near number-ten shed! All person-nel on duty to the area of
number-ten shed! Gratchii have broken into perimeter. Security personnel—se-cure station pods. Alert!
Alert!"
Olie Struan quickly switched off his bio-analyzer and sprang toward the door of his lab. Good thing,