"ab Hugh, Dafydd & Linaweaver, Brad - Doom 04 - Endgame 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (ab Hugh Dafydd)

wandered we came to herd as they herded!"
Herding. . . harvesting—nomads? Farmers, just
discovering animal husbandry? I prodded the undead
Fred for another half hour, eliciting little other infor-
mation. The best I could tell was that the "Newbies"
had evidently just discovered agriculture and ranch-
ing; they were just settling down from their nomadic
life when the Fred scoutship observed and studied
them. They made contact with the Newbies and
fought a few skirmishes, just probing them.
The Freds returned to Fredworld; this was probably
three hundred or more years back, just around the
time the first Fred expedition returned from contact
with Earth. The Freds horsed around for a while, not
long, then they returned to the Newbie system, just a
couple of hundred years after they left. .. only to
find that the Newbies had gone from the beginnings of
agriculture to a heavily armed, spacefaring culture in
just two centuries!
And that's where Rumplestiltskin started to get
hazy. The rest of the interrogation was long, tedious,
boring, tedious, dull, and tedious; even Sears and
Roebuck lost interest and started monkeying with the
navigational system ... which was unlocked, now
that we'd reached the preprogrammed destination. I
figured Sears and Roebuck had never interrogated a
prisoner before; it's not a process for the impatient.
I got a story, but I had no idea whether I got the
story. This is what I finally dragged out of old Rump,
with me and Arlene making a lot of intuitive leaps
and filling in the background as best we could: when
the Freds arrived at the Newbie planet, ready to take
the "empty" square in the giant chess game between
the Hyperrealists and the Deconstructionists, they
discovered a weird, unknown piece on the board. The
Newbies must have an accelerated evolution that is as
fast compared to us humans as we are compared to
the rest of the galaxy! The Newbies were so stellar that
they tore through the Fred fleet like a cat through a
fleet of canaries.
And then—this was the part neither I nor Arlene
really bought, though it was such a lovely thought it
was hard to resist—the Newbies backtracked the
Freds and invaded Fredworld itself, utterly annihilat-
ing it in revenge for trying to conquer the Newbies!
What a beautiful picture—the Freds, in a panic,
desperately defending their homeworld against an
unknown foe who had been herding sheep and build-
ing twig-and-wattle huts just two (subjective) centu-
ries before! Arlene and I laughed long and loud at that