"Kay Kenyon - Tropic of Creation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kenyon Kay)

It offered a quick exit. "If it will help." He excused himself and walked away from her, up the wadi, in the
di-rection of the youngster who was gathering fossils and freckles, ruining her nails and her pretty alpha
skin.

A shadow skittered over the plain, just missing Eli. Above, a cumulus cloud sailed in a massive, bleached
globule, carrying its load of moisture far out of reach. The other side of the planet must sprout these
things, Eli thought. In that great shallow ocean, animal life, marine life, might flourish. Given half a chance,
Geoff Olander would be wading in that shallow sea right now, prodding at mats of algae, sampling
pillows of bacteria, with some-thing close to rapture.

Given the hand Geoff Olander was dealt on this tem-porary stop, the parched fossils of this hemisphere
would have to do.

Eli found Geoff and his daughter in a deep, wind-scoured ravine revealing slabs of crumbling stone and,
in the near distance, the hump of another hexadron, half caved-in with age. Geoff waved to EliтАФa brief,
cheery helloтАФand bent over his work once more. Sascha held a sack half her size, the satchel of their
finds.

"How's pickings?" Eli asked Sascha.

"We have five bags of specimens," she said. "Great defi-nition, full body skeletals." She rummaged in the
satchel for an example.

Geoff shaded his eyes, looking up at Eli, with the same piercing blue eyes as his daughter. "Not reining us
in, I hope?"

"Might be best if you stayed in camp," Eli said. "A pre-caution." Against what? Against the social
taboos of an overprotective mother? But he let Geoff draw his own conclusions.
The man looked down the ravine with longing. "Best site we've found so far." He tapped at a slab of rock
with his small hammer, sloughing off a crumbling layer of mud. Then he sighed and stood up. "Couldn't
you give us a few hours?"

Feeling Sascha's eyes burn a hole in his back, Eli said, "As soon as you can, then."

Geoff snorted, but said civilly enough, "Caught be-tween two Olanders, eh?"

Eli was saved from answering by Sascha sidling be-tween them, shoving a transparent specimen bag into
Eli's hand. It contained the remains of a small creature, a jumble of dust and bones. "Nice fossil," Eli said,
playing the dolt, goading Sascha the way she seemed to love.

"It's not a fossil. It's a skeleton. Real bones. We found the whole skeleton together, and it looked rather
like a frog, ex-cept for spinules on the back." She traced the long spinules with her index finger. "I found
it, so I might get to name it. Something olanderi. Or, I could immortalize you, Captain. I could make this
one something dammondi. If you were nice and gave us an extra day to make scientific history."

Geoff raised an eyebrow, daring Eli to deny her.

Eli found himself smiling. "I'll take your request under advisement."