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

he thought, that he had not yet started spinning down his series of sam-ples. Otherwise, he would have
had to stick with the machine.
 At this moment, he was the most anxious man in Botany Bay station to answer the security alarm, but
not because of number-ten shed.
As soon as he cleared the station pod, he sprinted toward number-twelve shed.
The Gratchii—the hairy, bow-legged humanoid inhabitants of Flannigan—had finally figured out how
to ground a portion of the stun-field barrier that had been put around Botany Bay station. They had
simply built a ramp of hard-packed snow that let them walk over the barrier, which was set on
straight-line force fields. Once the outside ramp was complete, they stood on top of it and feverishly
poured more snow pack over its crest into the compound. By work-ing rapidly, they built a bridge
across the stun-fence, though the force field continued to operate in the tunnel it had melted through the
packed snow ramp. Perhaps a hundred of the Gratchii, quite ac-customed to using the harsh winter
climate of Flannigan to their ad-vantage, had thrown up the bridge before security could detect its
con-struction, and they were swarming over it at the rear of the station area, running at the peculiar,
bobbling trot which let them move rapidly over the slick ice and snow fields.
The Terrans spread out from the three tall pods of the station to protect the inflatable sheds which
housed the breeding stock of Yeep and the experimental flocks of both the new and old strains.
Olie Struan sprinted along with a group from his pod until he got close to the threatened sheds. Then
he veered away and made for shed twelve.
Once inside the shed, Olie slammed the hatch and leaned against the bulkhead, sucking in great gasps
of air until he began to get his wind.
The air in the shed was cold, but not nearly as icy as that outside. The shed interior was sheltered
from the wind, and the body heat of the animals kept it to a more tolerable temperature than outside.
Olie drew the c-w pistol he had snatched up when he left his lab. He thought it was charged, but he
couldn't really remember, so he stripped out the power and checked it while he got his breath.
A quick visual inspection of the shed showed that it was operating and intact. The sheds themselves
were longish, semicylindrical affairs with double walls of vyathane film. Between the walls, a pressure of
one and a half atmospheres kept the structure rigid, but allowed it to ripple enough so the stormy winds
of Flannigan didn't damage it. On the outside, tie-downs anchored to dead-men buried in the frozen
ground helped hold down the otherwise lightweight structures. On the inside, a system of web baffling
helped the leeward side of the structure hold its shape in a wind-storm by giving the skin walls something
to tug against.
The inflatable sheds came down with the station pods, packed in ca-nisters, and were erected by
pulling a ring lanyard which activated a gas cell. The canister itself con-tained a small compressor and a
set of sensors. When it was patched into the power supply of the sta-tion, it continued to operate as a
regulator that maintained proper pressure between the vyathane walls and flashed an alarm if the pressure
dropped below an opti-mum level or if the skin of the walls was breached.
Shed twelve was a back-up shed, used to house short-run control groups of Yeep. Normally, no one
ever needed to enter it, except the organic mechanic who was doing the mutation runs on the Yeep.
That person was Olie Struan.
Olie made his way to the rear of the shed, where a web fence, run-ning across from one wall to the
other, partitioned off the control group of Yeep about which he had been so concerned.
They didn't look like the old strain of Yeep, nor did they look a great deal like the new strain—the
new strain which was failing, as far as Olie could see, just as miserably as had the old Yeep that were
de-pendent on the puffdocks. The old Yeep had stubby ears, a pair of curved, black horns, were
covered with a thick, gray wool, and had four stubby legs which terminated in four-toed, manlike feet.
The new Yeep had essentially the same ap-pearance, but were decorated with large, floppy,
cocker-spaniel ears, long, fluffy tails, and even larger anthropoid feet.
The Yeep in Olie's secret flock were somewhere in between, but with some minor
exceptions—ex-ceptions which Olie believed would make them a viable species, even in the changing