"Kress, Nancy - Wetlands Preserve" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

Wetlands Preserve
by Nancy Kress


The duck hunter waded through the marsh, breathing deeply of the sweet dawn air mixed with wet decay. Each lift of his high boots sucked up mud with a soft splurgling sound. Cattails rustled in conspiratorial whispers. The dog beside him flicked its tail at a dragonfly.

"Soft, girl, we're not supposed to be here," the man said, grinning. "But listen to them ducks!"

Abruptly the flock of mallards, until now out of sight, flew up. The man raised his gun, fired once, twice. A bird fell and the dog took off.

Grinning, the hunter waited. She was the best dog he'd ever had. Never missed. A beauty.

"Hey, girl, what you got, let's see it there, oh you beauty.Е" The man's wife complained that he talked more affectionately to the dog than to her. The dog dropped the duck. The man bent to pick it up from the shallow water, and the snake swam past him.

Not a snake. Green, long, but with fins. Three eyes. Three. Before he stopped to think, the man had grabbed the thing behind its head, the way you grabbed a copperhead if you had to grab it at all, and lifted it out of the water. On its underside were four short legs.

And the thing went on staring at him from two of its eyes, the two facing sideways, while the third eye stared straight up to the empty gray sky. It didn't thrash or try to bite. It just gazed steadily, interestedly.

The dog barked to draw attention to its duck. The man ignored her. He went on staring at the thing gazing so tranquilly back at him. "What Е what are you?"

Then he saw the blackened craft half submerged in the mud and water.




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Lisa still wasn't used to the guards. Security guards, yes, Kenton had always had those, although not because anyone expected trouble. The John C. Kenton Memorial Wetlands Preserve and Research Foundation in upstate New York wasn't exactly a hotbed of contentious activity. Until now, the greatest excitement at Kenton had been the struggle to keep Lythrum salicaria, purple loosestrife, from displacing native waterfowl food plants.
However, like all research labs, Kenton contained expensive equipment that no one wanted stolen, so there had always been one guard, seldom the same one for very long because the work was so boring. But now they had Army soldiers, two at the door and two in back and God-knew-how-many on patrol around the unfenced perimeter of the wetlands. None of them knew what they were guarding, although it seemed to Lisa that if they had any intelligence whatsoever they would pick on the intense, badly suppressed excitement pervading Kenton like a glittering mist.

"Identification, please," the soldier said, and Lisa handed over her new government pass. The soldier ran it through a slot on a computer and handed it back. Then he smiled. "Okay, Lisa Susan Jackson. You sure you're old enough to be in there?"

You don't look any older than I do, Lisa wanted to snap back, but didn't. She'd already learned that silent disdain was the only thing that worked, and not always that. It made no difference that she was a graduate student in fresh-water ecosystems, that she had been selected over three hundred other applicants for this prestigious and unusually well-funded internship, that she made a valuable contribution to Kenton's ongoing work. She was a small blonde woman who looked about fourteen years old, and so even this cretin in camouflage felt entitled to patronize her.

She walked past him with freezing dignity and went to the main lab. Early as it was, Paul and Stephanie were already there, and through the window she could see Hal pushing off from the dock on the flat-bottomed boat accompanied by yet another visitor. The staff always tried to arrive earlier than the visiting scientists and Washington types, even if it meant getting to Kenton at four in the morning. Lisa couldn't do that, not with Carlo.

"Lisa, the latest test results are in," said Dr. Paul Lambeth, Kenton's chief scientist. The scientists were all very considerate of her, keeping her fully informed even though she was only an intern. Even though the project was, of course, now heavily classified. Dr. Stephanie Hansen had insisted that Lisa stay on even after the Department of Defense had questioned the presence of a mere graduate student in this unprecedented situation. HalЧDr. Harold SchaefferЧhad fought to get Lisa the necessary clearances, which probably hadn't been easy because of Danilo. Never mind that she hadn't seen Danilo in over a year, or that membership in Greenpeace was not exactly tantamount to membership in China First or the neo-Nazis. The DOD was not known for its tolerance of extremist organizations, no matter how non-violent.

Of course, Lisa knew, Stephanie and Hal had been thinking mostly of protecting the whole internship program rather than her specifically. Lisa was still grateful. She just wished that gratitude didn't make her feel so constrained.

"The latest results," Stephanie repeated after Paul, and an alert shiver ran over Lisa. Stephanie, decisive and taciturn, never repeated others' words, said anything unnecessary. And Stephanie's eyes gleamed in her weather-burned face that had spent thirty years in the outdoors studying how the environment and everything in it worked together to sustain life.

Paul was always more flamboyant than Stephanie. It was Paul, of course, who would eventually announce to the media, standing side by side with the president in the Oval Office. "Do you want to sit down, Lisa? It's big."

"What is it?" she said, wishing he wouldn't play games, knowing she was reacting to his game with the strangled breathlessness he expected.

"The genetic structure is not DNA-based."

She felt her mouth open, her eyes widen, even though the statement wasn't unexpected. Ever since she'd seen the animal brought in by a man illegally duck-hunting in the Preserve, she'd wondered. They all had. It was the spacecraft that made them take the animal so seriously, rather than writing it off as just one more deformity caused by pollution. NASA had come up from Washington, run tests on the blackened outside and mysterious inside of the half-submerged object, and verified the structure as a spacecraft. Immediately it had been carted off to somewhere classified.