"Alan Dean Foster - Humanx 5 - Sentenced To Prism" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

was broken.
It shouldn't be. It was a very special suit, even by the unique standards of
Samstead. It had been built especially for this visit. The engineers and
designers had constructed it to protect him from every imaginable danger,
every
conceivable threat a world like Prism could pose. What the suit's builders did
not foresee, could not have fore-seen, was the utter alienness of Prism's
inhabitants, not to mention their insidious cleverness.
It wasn't entirely their fault, he had to admit. The engineers were used to
building survival suits for work on worlds whose lifeforms were nothing more
than var-iations on a familiar theme, that theme being the carbon atom. Prism
was different. There evolution had pro-ceeded from a different beginning to
wildly different con-clusions.
It was that evolution which had broken his suit.
The bright sun continued to beat down on his unshaded form. While the
temperature outside his artificial epider-mis remained pleasant, it was
starting
its inexorable upward climb within. Evan desperately wanted a drink of water.
He
tried to roll over. The permanently sealed servos refused to respond and he
stayed as he'd fallen, fiat on his back.
His left arm wouldn't move at all. The right groaned as he stretched for the
water. It was a radical break with procedure, but he thought he might cup some
water in his one operable hand instead of trying to draw fluid from the helmet
tap.
Assuming he could do this, though, how could he deliver the water to his mouth
through the suit's impenetrable visor? His right arm went limp and he gave it
up, exhausted by the attempt, just as he'd been exhausted by Prism ever since
he'd touched down on its glittering, disorienting surface.
It had all seemed so simple and straightforward back on Samstead. An
unparalleled opportunity for advance-ment within the company. There was no way
he could fail to carry out the assignment. He'd never failed before, had he?
Not
Evan Orgell.
Methodical, brilliant, incisive, overpowering. Also impatient, overbearing,
and
arrogant. All those descrip-tions had been applied to him from the beginning
of
his career by those who admired him as well as those who hated or simply
envied
him. All were to varying degrees accurate. Failure was not a term which
applied
to Evan Orgell.
Until now. Because his suit was broken and survival suits just didn't break.
Until now. It was something that did not happen.
As Prism shouldn't have happened.
He lay there on his back, trying to gather his remaining strength and regulate
his breathing while he considered what to try next. The first thing was to get
out of the direct glare of the sun. Using his right arm as a lever, he slipped
it beneath him and pushed. The servos whined, his body lifted, and he managed