"01 - The Demons at Rainbow Bridge UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

bent-
It was a fact that all scouts were mad; the debate still raged
as to whether the demands of the job drove them mad or whether
they were mad at the start. In their pasts, most races had seemed
to have a very small number of the breed no matter how different
they otherwise were; these were the pathfinders, the wilderness
explorers, the ones who pushed on alone into blanks on the
maps. It had been suspected that some factorЧanything from
genetic engineering to just too much civilizationЧwould breed
them out of existence, and it was true that a few races now
dominated the field, but, somehow, whenever someone discov-
ered a new blank on some map, a scout always seemed to be
there.

This one happened to be named Cymak, a bipedal creature of
the basic Class II shape, with two arms and two legs and a thick
torso. He also happened to have lumpy, mottled skin the color
of rotted sewage, which was so thick some bullets wouldn't pen-
etrate it, and a triangular-shaped head that seemed to bob about
as if it were on a spring rather than a segmented neck. His
ancestors, before the age of synthetics, had fed on giant insect-
like creatures by punching holes in them while they still lived
and sucking out the fluids. He called himself and his physical
race Xymanths, which, of course, basically translated as "human
being," like most of the exotic names that intelligent life forms
called themselves. For terms like racial origin and planetary
names the interstellar tongue deferred to the local one. Other- S
wise there would be several hundred "human beings" who con-

THE DEMONS AT RAINBOW BRIDGE 3

sidered all but their own kind "nonhuman," and almost all of
them would refer to the mother worid of their races as "Earth."

The triangular head bobbed and weaved like an unattended
jack-in-the-box in the wind, as it looked over the data digests on
the screens. So far, the data looked good. So far, in fact, it
looked too good. Worlds well within the carbon-based life zone
that contained a readily balanced oxygen-nitrogen mixture within
half a per cent of optimum along with the proper water balance
were quite rare. Normally you took what you found and then
brought in an Exploiter Team to reengineer the world into some-
thing useful, or, even more frequently when these kinds of worlds
were found, there was already some form of higher life calling
it home.

Not here. There were vast forests and dense jungles all right,
and high mountain ranges, and it was perhaps a tad too volcanic
for absolute perfection, but so far the surveys had shown no
signs of an indigenous race of sentient beings. Oh, you could