"Stephen Goldin - Herds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goldin Stephen)

with her hands while she was talking or listening. Men at least
were lucky enough to have pockets. Outside she could hear the
car crunch its way up the gravel to the very door of the cabin and
stop. A car door opened and slammed shut. A man's footsteps
clomped up the three front stairs. The door flew open and her
husband walked in.
***

This was to be the eleventh solar system he had personally
explored, which meant that, to Garnna iff-Almanic, the task of
finding and examining planets had gotten as routine as a job
that exotic could become. The Zartic had trained for years before
even being allowed on the Project. There was, first of all, the
rigorous mental training that would allow the combination of
machines and drugs to project his mind away from his body and
far out into the depths of space. But an Explorer had to have
more training than just that. He would have to chart his course
in the void, both hi attempting to locate a new planet and in
finding his way home again afterwards; that required an
extensive knowledge of celestial navigation. He had to classify in
an instant the general type of planet he was Investigating, which
called for up-to-the-minute expertise in the growing science of
planetology. He would be called on to make a report on the life
forms, if any, that the planet held; that necessitated a knowledge
of biology. And, in the event that the planet harbored intelligent
life, he had to be able to describe the level of their civilization
from little more than a glanceтАФand that required that he be
made as free of personal prejudices and fears as possible, for
alien societies had different ways of doing things that could send
a normal Zartic into hysterical fits.

But most of all, he had had to overcome the instinctive Zartic
fear of the Offas├╝, and that required the hardest training of the
lot.

His mind hovered above this new solar system, inspecting it
for possibilities. It was the farthest Exploration made to date,
well over a hundred parsecs from Zarti. The star was average, a
yellow dwarfтАФthe type frequently associated with having
planetary systems. But as to whether this system had planetsтАж
Garnna made a mental grimace. This was always the part he
hated most.
 He began to disperse himself through the space immediately
surrounding the star. His mental fibers spread like a net,
becoming thinner and thinner as he pushed his fragments of
mind outward in all three dimensions in his quest for planets.

There! He touched one almost immediately, and discarded it
just as quickly. It was nothing but an airless ball of rock, and not
even within the star's zone of habitability for protoplasmic life.