"Gordon R. Dickson - Jean Dupres" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

JEAN DUPRES
by Gordon R. Dickson

Anything that man can imagine is theoretically possible. We have made the first giant-step of
space flight to the moon. The planets will be next and thenтАФthe stars? We have the feeling that,
unreasonable as it appears to be in the light of present knowledge, this voyage will someday he
possible. What will we find there? What kind of life forms? These are classic science fiction
questions that have been answered in exhausting detail down through the years. Yet very rarely is
the more important question asked: What will happen when our culture brushes up against an
alien culture? "Jean Dupres" is a well-considered, moving answer to that question. For there will
be people who will form a bridge between ours and theirs.




The way I met Jean Dupres for the first time, I was on independent patrol with a squad of six men,
spread out, working through the green tangle of the Utword jungle. I came up to the edge of a place
where the jungle was cut off sharp, and looked through the last screen of scroll-edged, eight-foot ferns at
a little room of pounded earth, the vestibule of a larger, planted field I could see beyond. Near the
opening in the larger field sat a riding macerator with no one in its saddle; and right before meтАФnot five
feet beyond the fernsтАФa boy not more than four years old stood leaning on a rifle that was such a good
imitation of the real thing that I could hardly believe that it was a fake.
Then I saw it was not a fake.
I went through the last screen of ferns with a rush and took the gun away from the boy even as he
tried to swing it to his shoulder. He stood staring at me, blinking and bewildered, trying to make up his
mind whether to cry or not; and I looked the rifle over. It was a DeBaraumer, capable of hurling out
anything and everything, from a wire-control rocket slug to any handy pebble small enough to rattle
through its bore.
"Where did you get this?" I asked him. He had decided not to cry and he looked up at me with a
white face and round, desperate eyes.
'My daddy," he said.
"Where's your daddy at?"
Without taking his eyes off my face, he half-turned and pointed away through the opening into the
larger field.
"All right," I said. 'We'll go see him about this." I unclipped the handmike from my belt and told my six
men to close up and follow me in. Then I set my telemeter beacon and turned to go with the boy to find
his daddyтАФand I stopped dead.
For there were two of the Klahari young men standing just inside the edge of the small clearing about
twenty feet off. They must have been there before I stepped through the last ferns myself, because my
scanner would have picked them up if they had been moving. They were seniors, full seven feet tall, with
their skins so green that they would have been invisible against the jungle background if it hadn't been for
the jewels and weapons and tall feather headdresses.
When you were this close it was obvious that they were humanoid but not human. There were
knifelike bony ridges on the outer edge of their fore and upper arms, and bony plates on their elbows.
Their hands looked attenuated and thin because of the extra joint in their fingers. Although they were
hairless their greenish-black crests were rising and quivering a bit. Whether from alarm or just excitement
I couldn't tell. They were nothing to bother me, just two of them and out in the open that wayтАФbut it
gave me a shock, realizing they'd been standing there listening and watching while I took the gun from the
boy and then talked to him.
They made no move now, as I nudged the boy and started with him out of the clearing past them.