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

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A Del Rey Book
Rabllshed by Ballantire Books
Copyright O 1985 by Alan Dean Foster

All rights reserved under lmamational and Pan‑Aanerican, Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House,
Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited,
Toronto.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 85‑9'0718

ISBN 0‑345‑319110‑

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition: September 1985

Cover Art by Barclay Shaw
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Here's one for Don and Dana Carroll to peruse
while they're fixing Italy...
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Chapter one

A fine day it was; clear and cloudless, bright (oh, how bright!) and cheerful, a
day on which all things seemed possible. Even dying. Dying had not been on Evan
Orgell's schedule for the day, but that was the result he was on the verge of
achieving. And there wasn't a damn thing he could do to prevent it.
Because his suit was broker.
All around him the extraordinary, phantasmagorical world called Prism teemed
with life. His visit to Prism was supposed to set him up for life. Now it
appeared likely it was going to set him up for something else.
The air centimeters from his face was rich with oxygen he couldn't breathe.
Nearby burbled a stream of fresh, cool water he couldn't drink. It mowed through
a forest full of plants and animals he couldn't eat.
Prism's sun warmed his face. It was intensely bright but no hotter than the star
which circled Evan's own world, Samstead. At midday the temperature was
posiнtively benign. He could breathe the air of Prism, drink its water, eat his
own rations, and yet he was going to die. He was going to die because his suit
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 foreнseen, 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 varнiations on a familiar theme, that theme being the carbon atom. Prism