"Gordon R. Dickson - The Alien Way" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

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THE ALIEN WAY

Copyright ┬й 1965 by Gordon R. Dickson

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CHAPTER ONE

. .. Turning in his sleep, Jason Barchar rolled over so that the weight
of his head was upon the right side of his skull, under which the
receiver had been implanted. The area was still tender, even two months
after the operation, so that he rolled a little further, until he was
almost on his stomach, and went back to dreaming about the bears.

He was dreaming that he was again out on the hillside in the Canadian
Rockies, where he had actually been six years before. He was lying very
still in the spring sunlight, with the wide-angle binoculars at his
eyes, looking down into a small natural meadow with only a few birch and
spruce scattered through it. The stiff, broken stalks of winter-killed
grass among the new growth pricked his wrists where his leather jacket
had pulled back to expose the skin, and his elbows were sore from
contact with the rock under the damp surface skin of earth, but he paid
no attention. Below there were about two- dozen of the bears, and the
spring fury of mating and battles was on them. The brown and black cubs
were mostly already up in the trees, and the females were hanging back.
But just below him, in the weedy lists of a little open arena, two males
stalked each other, up on hind legs, necks arched snakelike and heads
thrust forward in rage.

They were lost in their rages. They did not see him up on the hillside,
or the females hanging back, or the cubs in the trees, and they did not
care. There was nothing left for either of them but the other bear
facing him. They were almost formal and completely honest, in their
advancings and their shuffling retreats. Jase's heart beat with theirs.
It was what had made him a naturalist-which like all important work was
a way of thinking, not just the application of a lot of book knowledge
as people thought-and thinking that did not understand things like this
spring fighting of the bears.

They thought the urge to fight, the fighting and the winning or losing,
was a simple matter of automatic instinct and easy reflex. But it was
not so. There was custom to it, and a complex of experience operating on
the part of each combatant. There was desire, and decision, and courage
required from each bear. There was hope and fear, and the need to tell a
bluff from a true threat. There were many factors entering into each
situation in the meadow, each combat-and no two combats were ever alike.

So Jase dreamed that he watched and learned from the bears. While the