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

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. HalтАФDr. Harold SchaefferтАФhad 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.