"Nancy Kress - 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.тАж" 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 тАж what are you?"

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




┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖


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