"James Patrick Kelly - Ninety Percent of Everything" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

way that it coiled into the conical pile.
The odor of a fresh shitdog casting was legendary. The Marines said it
was like having barbed wired shoved up your nose. It smelled nothing like the
excrement of any animal on earth; rather it was biting and bleachy, with just
a hint of burning brakes. The castings were composed of long chain polymers,
which, when first expelled, were one of the most adhesive substances ever
known. The castings cured to a rubbery consistency in about a week, after
which time their stench was slightly ameliorated. Because the shitdogs
returned again and again to the same area to excrete, some suggested that
their behavior was purposeful and that their piles were in fact 'buildings',
constructed in much the same way the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids. I
found this theory to be unsupported by the evidence. They had built two
roughly conical piles at the Eastline site in the last six years. Each was
approximately thirty meters tall; they were now at work on a third. There were
similar piles at the other sites.
Public interest in the shitdogs peaked when the first 'finished' pile
of castings sprouted a two meter tall crystalline growth at its peak -- the
so-called jewels. Outwardly this formation resembled quartz in that it
crystallized in the trigonal trapezohedral class of the rhombohedral subsystem
of hexagonal symmetry. In their brilliancy, prismatic fire and color
variation, the jewels were nothing like quartz. After long and rancorous
debate, a team of scientists tried to retrieve the jewels from the first
Ethiopian pile, using lasers manipulated from a helicopter platform. However,
as soon as the jewels were taken from the pile, they dissolved into a slurry
of shitdog casting. Subsequent attempts, including one in Nevada in which I
myself participated, met with similar results. The jewels appeared to be
artifacts of the internal chemistry of a finished pile. When you cut them off,
they melted, and the pile began to regenerate a new formation. No one knew
why.
We in the shitdog studies community suffered from severe fact
deprivation. No shitdog had ever died, and to destroy one for the purposes of
dissection was unthinkable. Besides, no one had devised a way to catch a
shitdog, much less kill one. Attempts had been made to herd them offsite to
field laboratories but, when confronted with manmade obstacles, they emitted a
string of their famous barks and retreated. The Chileans captured one once,
using a flying crane and a specially constructed claw-shaped cage. They
lowered the cage onto a shitdog which was in a digestive stupor and the claw
swung shut. This roused the beast and it began to bark piteously and hurl
itself against the cage with a vigor not previously observed in any of its
kind. Its actions were so violent that the helicopter was unable to lift the
cage off the ground safely. Ten minutes later the shitdog had eaten its way to
freedom.
Unfortunately, except for devotees of xenophobic mediants, a scattering
of conspiracy-addled loons, and few scientists like myself, the world had lost
interest in the shitdogs. Funding dried up. And why not? Their behavior was
inscrutable, their origin a mystery, their nature repellent and their treasure
ephemeral.
So why was Ramsdel Wetherall buying salt flats near Eastline, Nevada?
****
"I take it you've seen the jewels in person?" I said.