"Larry Niven - Legacy of Heorot" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

So where were the problems?
"Snow up there," Cadmann said, shading his eyes as he gazed up into the eternal clouds at the top. Skis. We didn't bring skis. We have plastics. Carlos can make me a pair of skis.
Sylvia handed him back his camera. Voice carefully neutral, she said, "You don't have to go to the continent, Cadmann. There's plenty for you to do around the camp."
"Nothing that any other able body couldn't do."
"You're not a geologist. You'd be doing grunt work anyway." She looked down at him, sighed in exasperation and gave him her hand for balance as he stood. "Do you just want to go hunting dinosaurs?"
"Sure! What boy doesn't want to bag a brontosaurus?" He slipped the camera back into its holster at his side. "Sometimes I wish we'd brought fetuses for a kodiak, or a few mountain lions . . ."
He was smiling as he said it, but Sylvia wondered.
Cadmann brushed his hand through thick black hair. There was no gray in it, but his face was sun-cured leather. His body was as young as a daily hour of intensive exercise could make it. He could remember when he hadn't needed regular exercise to maintain the natural tone. Now, at the adjusted age of forty-two, he was seriously considering nudging that up to an hour and a half. I'm slowing down, he thought. She's carrying another man's baby, and I'd rather be with her than . . . Mary Ann Eisenhower? He thought of four or five women who had made their intentions clear. Phyllis McAndrews. Jean Patterson, willowy blond agronomist rumored to give the best massage on the planet. He just wasn't interested. Time wounds all heels. The glands must be drying up.
Sylvia grinned back. "Only real gentlemen refuse to notice when a lady is slowing them down." Ernst stood carefully out of earshot. His intelligence was gone, but not his manners. She jerked her thumb at the pair of freshly caught silver-and-black torpedo shapes hanging over Ernst's back. Fifteen and twenty pounds, at a guess. One still gaped; the gills still fluttered, too far back on its body . . . they didn't look that much like earthly salmon, but no other creature of Earth fit either . . . "Tell you what. I'll fix dinner tonight. Everybody to the beach for a samlon roast."
She linked her arm with Cadmann's as they marched down the side of the hill. He grinned maliciously. "Are you sure Terry won't mind that?"
"Oh, come now. I'm just a poor pregnant lady biologist who appreciates the presence of a strong man--and Terry's known you for years."
"I may not be as safe as you think."
She snorted. "Fat chance. When I'm sure you want my body and not my mind, I'll faint."
He looked at her appraisingly. "Which way will you fall?"
"Hush."
They laughed. The sun shone more brightly than usual.
"Golden fields. Silver rivers."
Cadmann laughed. "I suppose. I see a year-round water supply and fertile croplands."
"You would."
Somebody 'd better.
The stream flowed past the camp and over the bluff above Miskatonic River, the greatest body of running water on the island. Eight kilometers to the south the grasslands ended in a burnt, blackened semicircle of firebreak and beyond that the crest of giant brambles began. The colonists had chosen a beautiful place to start a new world, lovely enough to make him feel . . . almost at peace. Times like this confused him. It was a fight not to shut down his thoughts and find some project totally involving, and preferably a little risky.
Slender fingers dug into his arm. "Hey, big guy. Don't go brooding on me. This was supposed to be our walk day. Stay with me for a while, hmm?" He was still quiet. "Tau Ceti Four. Avalon." She rolled the words over her tongue.
"It's a good name."
"But?"
"Don't know."
"Not poetic enough?"
He helped her over a rock. It took effort to focus on the game she was inviting him to play. "I've read poetry--"
"Kipling." She laughed. "It's all right. I know you're better read than me. And I'll keep your secret. I don't know, Avalon's all right. But there are others. Beautiful, exciting places from history, or legend. Shangri-La, Babylon . . ."
"Xanadu?"
"Sure. Pellinore."
He shook his head. "You must mean Pellucidar. Pellinore was a king. One of Arthur's Knights of the Round Table."
"Well . . . maybe so. But I don't mean Pellucidar, either. There aren't really any predators on the island. Except for the turkeys and other critters we've seeded, there just isn't a damn thing bigger than an insect. Even the plant life. Low grass and thorn trees. It's like a blank slate. Or a park. Cadmann--"
He asked, "Does that bother you?"
"Well, the worst we can do is mess up one island. It isn't like we'd turned all those Earth creatures loose on the mainland."
"I meant too perfect. Why do you care?"
"Well--"
Ernst ran up, pointing. "Birds. Big Birds." Two of the fan-winged shapes swooped past. Cadmann watched as they circled out over the plain, then vanished in the mist that reached halfway down the face of Mucking Great Mountain. "Nest there?" Ernst asked. "Why there?" He frowned again.
"See? We do have company."
"The pterodons? They're way more frightened of us than we are of them. And the biggest of them is hardly strong enough to carry off a good-sized samlon, let alone a sheep."
"How about a baby?" he asked.
She took it seriously. "I don't think so. To tell you the truth, I haven't seen anything much bigger than a sea gull, and that bothers me. The ecology is just too damned simple. Take out the pterodons and all you've got is small insects and these big local fish."
"The samlon."
"Of course they aren't really fish. What with the trout and the catfish and the turkeys, we've added more animals than we found. Spooky." Sylvia turned thoughtful as they picked their way down a steep slope. "You know, there's something funny about the pterodons."
"What's that?"
"Well, remember the one we saw hunting samlon in the pool?"
"Sure. Reminded me of albatross in the South Pacific." Sailing aboard Ariadne with a fair wind north, a million years--no, not a million years, but a lot more than a million miles ago. With luck we'll build schooners here before I'm dead.
"Didn't that look funny to you? I can't quite put my finger on it, but it reminded me of an old Walt Disney nature film, with the action run in reverse, to be comical."
"Reverse?"
"A bird hits the water hard and fast, makes its grab, then takes off at its leisure. That bird hit the water slow and took off fast, almost as if . . ." She frowned, shaking her head like someone trying to rattle cobwebs off a thought. "Never mind, I'm trying to force something."
"Or see something that isn't there. You'd love to put some mystery into this system."