"The Planners by Kate Wilhelm" - читать интересную книгу автора (1969)

maintained wilderness, completely enclosed with thirty-foot-
high, smooth plastic walls. A transparent dome covered the
area. There were one-way windows at intervals along the
wall. A small group stood before one of the windows: the
committee.
Darin stopped and gazed over the interior of the compound
through one of the windows. He saw Heloise and Skitter
contentedly picking nonexistent fleas from one another. Adam
was munching on a banana; Homer was lying on his back
idly touching his feet to his nose. A couple of the chimps were
at the water fountain, not drinking, merely pressing the pedal
and watching the fountain, now and then immersing a head
or hand in the bowl of cold water. Dr. Jacobsen appeared
and Darin joined the group.
"Good morning, Mrs. Bellbottom," Darin said politely.
"Did you know your skirt has fallen off?" He turned from
her to Major Dormouse. "Ah, Major, and how many of the
enemy have you swatted to death today with your pretty little
yellow rag?" He smiled pleasantly at a pfmply young man
with a camera. "Major, you've brought a professional peeping
torn. More stories in the paper, with pictures this time?" The
pimply young man shifted his position, fidgeted with the
camera. The major was fiery; Mrs. Bellbottom was on her
knees peering under a bush, looking for her skirt. Darin
blinked. None of them had on any clothing. He turned toward
the window. The chimps were drawing up a table, laden with
tea things, silver, china, tiny finger sandwiches. The chimps
nporo all ilfpnrincr flowp.rod shirts and dresses. Hortense had on
a ridiculous flop-brimmed sun hat of pale green straw. Darm
leaned against the fence to control his laughter.
"Soluble ribonucleic acid," Dr. Johnson was saying when
Darin recovered, "sRNA for short. So from the gross begin-
nings when entire worms were trained and fed to other
worms that seemed to benefit from the original training, we
have come to these more refined methods. We now extract
the sRNA molecule from the trained animals and feed it, the
sRNA molecules in solution, to untrained specimens and
observe the results."
The young man was snapping pictures as Jacobsen talked.
Mrs. Whoosis was making notes, her mouth a lipless line, the
sun hat tinging her skin with green. The sun on her patterned
red and yellow dress made it appear to jiggle, giving her
fleshy hips a constant rippling motion. Darin watched, fasci-
nated. She was about sixty.
". . . my colleague, who proposed this line of experimenta-
tion, Dr. Darin," Jacobsen said finally, and Darin bowed
slightly. He wondered what Jacobsen had said about him,
decided to wait for any questions before he said anything.
"Dr. Darin, is it true that you also extract this substance
from people?"