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

The lab was cool and sweet-smelling, a window open to the moist night air. Lisa shrugged off her irritation at once again being ribbed by the guard. She pulled out her notes on analyses of snaker fecal matter.

Thrashing sounded from the snaker cage.

A snaker sat in a shallow pool of water smack up against the mesh wall. It ignored Lisa as she approached. Again it thrashed with the back half of its long body. Something was emerging. The snaker was giving birth.

Unable to believe her luck, Lisa grabbed a camcorder. She put it right against the mesh, hoping the fine carbon-filament netting wouldn't interfere too much with the picture. The snaker paid no attention. It was totally absorbed in the excruciating pushing process of mammalian birth, supplemented by a snake-like thrashing.

Finally, something emerged. Lisa gasped and almost dropped the camera.

Not possible.

A brief rest, and the snaker resumed pushing. Lisa could barely hold the camera steady. The offspring looked nothing like the parent, a phenomenon associated with reptiles and amphibians and insects. Tadpoles, larvae. Egg layers. But the snaker was a warm-blooded pseudo-mammal, and its offspring was Е

Its offspring looked orders more complex than the parent. It had long, far more developed legs, with knee joints and toes. Toes. It had a shorter body. It had Е not possible.

It had a prehensile tail.

This didn't happen. Offspring were not more evolutionarily advanced than their parents, not like this. This looked like an entirely different animal. No, that wasn't true, either. It looked like a plausible development from this animal but several million years up the evolutionary ladder.

Not possible.

But there it was, a second one, emerging from the snaker. Who then gave a last enormous thrash, curled up, and went to sleep. Apparently completely certain that her two offspring could fend for themselves.

Which they could. They leaned over and both gently bit their mother on the head. A few minutes later, they began to eat her.




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"I have a conjecture," Paul said.
It came after a long silence. The few scientists who had arrived by 5:30 A.M. looked at Lisa's video, gasped in disbelief, looked again, stampeded to the mesh cage, where there was nothing to see. The infant snakersЕno, you couldn't call them that, they were clearly something else besides snakersЕhad disappeared into the cage's lush interior. For the first time, Lisa regretted the large, ecologically correct environments lab animals got at Kenton.

Paul didn't respect the philosophy behind this, not this time. He removed the top and beat the swamp reeds and fished under the lily pads and pond scum until one of the offspring was found. Unceremoniously he hoisted it with a net into a small bench cage, and everyone had gasped a second time.

"I have a conjecture," Paul repeated. Lisa recognized the reluctance of a scientist to make a fool of himself, coupled with the honesty that was going to let him do so. "I think they were genetically engineered to do this. The entire genomeЧmaybe several genomesЧexists in the one-celled organisms released from the spacecraft. In fact, one-celled organisms may have been the only things released from the spacecraft. They had the best chance of survival in many conditions, and could subsist on the widest array of chemicals available.

"The genome is in so many pieces in the alien cells because it's so huge. It contains multiple possible evolutionary paths for future organisms, depending on what environment the craft finds itself in. And that same environment triggers which genes kick in for each subsequent generation, advancing as fast up the evolutionary ladder as biology and environment permit."

Immediately objections broke out, some of them vehement. "I didn't say it was a polished theory," Paul finally said angrily. Lisa had never heard him get angry. "I said it was a conjecture!"

More objections, more arguments. Someone else came inЧDr. ClarkЧand someone else explained to her what had happened. The birth film was run again. People ran back and forth from the bench cage containing the new creature, the totally impossible creature, which had gone to sleep. The NASA rep arrived, looking stunned as he listened to the scientists.

Amid the din, Lisa sat quietly. I believe Paul, she thought. Not because the theory was tight, or well-supported, or inevitably logical. She believed it, she realized, because if she were going to send terrestrial life to the stars, that's the way she would do it. The way that respected the unknown ecologies so abruptly intruded upon. The way with the largest possibility of success.