"Sean McMullen - An Empty Wheelhouse" - читать интересную книгу автора (McMullen Sean)

weather.
"An animal? Do you mean like a trained searcher dog?" Neil responded eagerly, also anxious to grasp
at any neutral subject.
"No, no, I mean... well, it's this inheritance business. There was a prospector in the California gold
rush who was supposed to have had an animal that could find gold. It was a possum with webbed feet,
according to the writer."
"Probably just another tall tale. For a start, possums are marsupials, and that means they keep their
young in a pouch. How would the young breathe when they went swimming? The other thing is that gold
is almost inert chemically, that's why you find nuggets on some goldfields. It would be very hard to smell,
so an animal would have no better chance of finding gold than a human-- except that we use metal
detectors now. Who was this guy, anyhow?"
"Just some Australian ex-convict who came over for the '49 rush, struck it rich, then got himself shot."
"Australia... now that's just the place to find possums. There are dozens and dozens of species there.
Some are as small as your thumb, while brush tail possums are big and strong, and have been known to
kill even small dogs that were dumb enough to corner them. Humans don't faze them, either: all the parks
in Australia's main cities have wild possums, just like the squirrels in Central Park in New York. They're
quite a tourist attraction, except that they have to be fed by torchlight because they're nocturnal."
He hastily scoured his mind for more facts about possums as the pause began to lengthen ominously.
"There are some types that can glide through the air, using membranes of skin between their front and
hind legs. One of the large glider possums chews through the bark of trees and sucks the sap."
"A vegetarian vampire?"
"Kind of like that."
"But none of them can find gold."
"No, I guess not. To do that they would need an electric sixth sense, and the only mammals that have
that are the monotremes. They're the only ones that I know about, anyhow."
"Now wait a minute. You mean some animals really can detect electricity?"
"That's right, the platypus and the echidna, and they're also Australian. Both have organs to detect the
muscular electricity of their prey. Any animal that could also generate an electromagnetic field could act
like a biological metal detector, but-- "
"How about the electric eels of South America?"
"Well, perhaps, but eels are not bright enough to be trained. Now that you mention South America,
though... I've just remembered something from my first year at college. There is one aquatic marsupial in
the world, a type of possum called a yapok. It has a fatty layer of skin at the edge of the pouch, which
makes a waterproof seal when it dives-- and its hind feet are webbed. The trouble is that it hunts by
touch, not electric field."
"Could that prospector have had a platypus, then?"
"Nope. First thing is that a platypus looks more like a beaver with a duck's bill than a possum. Second
is that it can only detect electric fields, and metal detectors work by generating their own electromagnetic
field. Still, the idea of an animal that could find gold is not really impossible. Maybe that ex-convict guy
really did find an Australian yapok that also had electro-sensitive fingertips and a field generation
capacity. Something like that would be able to find gold in muddy riverbeds."
A pause became lengthy silence. He's worse than me, he's a worm, he needs a spine transplant, she
shouted within herself, then spent the uneasy minutes rearranging the words into a scathing put-down. It
came out as:
"Well, I must go. I've got a connect flight to Australia."
"Oh great-- er, place for a holiday."
Helen took a deep breath to relieve the spasm of grief. "I'll be in Melbourne, doing research in the
state library."
"Any idea who you're working for yet?"
"No. Do you think they might want to know if McIver's animals are still around-- if they ever