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

But Paul Lambeth had fought to keep research into the animal, and the other animals soon found exactly
like it, as a joint project between Kenton and Washington's hand-picked labs. Paul had won, but not
because Kenton was such a well-equipped research lab (although it was; John C. Kenton had left an
endowment so generous it was the envy of even places like Harvard). Kenton had kept primary research
responsibility because that's where the wetlands were, and who knew what else had come off that
spacecraft? The Kenton Preserve, immediately quarantined, had become the mountain toward which the
eminent scientific Mohammeds went, since the entire wetlands ecosystem could not go to them. So
Kenton did the in situ research, and the CDC, Harvard, and Cold Harbor did the genetics and zoological
work.

NonтАУDNA-based. Alien.

"What тАж" Lisa was annoyed to find her voice coming out too high. "тАж what will they do with it?"

"Nothing, yet," Paul said, and even in his slick media-loving voice she heard the hidden awe. "We're not
done searching the ecosystem, even. Did you finish those water sample tests?"

"Not yet," Lisa said. Yes, work, that's what she needed, routine methodical work. To ground her. But
she couldn't do it. "Can I see the report?"

"Sure," Paul said, smiling, and there was that condescension again, that egotistical pleasure in his own
generosity at sharing this historic moment with such a very junior colleague. Lisa pushed the perception
away. She darted for the report and began to read hungrily, wanting to know everything, to gulp it down
all at once.

NonтАУDNA-based. Alien.

From the stars.




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After the initial elation came the questions. The animal was not DNA-based, yet it was eating
DNA-based plants. Lisa could see one of the snakers (the catchy name was Paul's) in the oversized
cage, munching contentedly on sedges. How was it metabolizing plant food it had not evolved to
metabolize? And how had such fully developed animalsтАФwarm-blooded, multi-stomached, large if
unfathomable brain tissueтАФsurvived the trip through space? They might have been in some sort of cold
sleep; Lisa had not seen the inside of their small craft. So small! How many had made the journey?
They couldn't have been here more than a few years, at the most. Someone would have seen them
before now. The twenty-square-mile Kenton Preserve was supposedly off-limits to hunters and bird
watchers, but in fact both seeped in all the time, at least on the vast wetland's edges.

The CDC/Harvard report said the genetic material seemed to be concentrated not in the cell nucleus but
rather scattered throughout the cell. That was characteristic of very simple organisms like prokaryotes,
but not of complex ones. The cells themselves were full of structures. Some had already been catalogued,
at least in a preliminary survey, as analogous to ribosomes or mitochondria or receptors. They broke