"Andre Norton - Cat Fantastic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

in securely. Then she put the living kittens on her towel in the top of the backpack and held it open for
their mother. She sat.
"Hmm," Judith murmured. "You'd rather see where you're going than where you've been?"
Feathers nodded.
"Let's see what I can do."
Judy slung on the pack, then covered her left shoulder with the folded beach towel and leaned down. The
cat jumped up and crouched beside her ear. "Good girl." Judy rubbed her head against the cat's feathery
side. "On we go," she said. They started off in the direction of the blue-green light, Judith laying out a
path that would allow them safely to avoid the areas where the red-orange and sick yellow-green flared.
She supposed it should bother her that she'd been told few other ... inhabitants ... of this reality could see
the lights, but it didn't. Aside from having one-sided conversations with cats-and Bookmobiles-she had to
have some reason for being the one they said was "called." Somewhere on the route between here and
the light, she'd been told, would be food and shelter and whatever else she was going to earn or be
granted by this world. She hoped that the five percent maybe would be worth it.
She sighed, a long, anticipatory sigh. It really doesn't matter, she thought. She'd made existing in reality
but living in fantasy enough back in her old world. She could make herself believe it to be enough here, if
she had to.
Feathers spat.
Judy smiled. "Nope, it's already better," she agreed, leaning her head into the black-and-gray fur. It has
to be, she thought. Her mind brought back the sight of the three little bodies whose deaths had paid her
way, and their mother's, safe, into their world. Not far me. For them.
The cat purred loudly against her left ear.
? The Damcat
by Clare Bell

The young folks don't think much of dams these days. I mean the big dams-Grand Coulee, Shasta,
Hooverthe ones that went up in the first half of this century. Back in the thirties, when I was an engineer
on the Black Canyon project, we were heroes. Our dams provided the water and power needed to feed
a growing West. Now all you hear about is silt backup that may turn the big dams into waterfalls in less
than a century. Why, there's even talk of tearing them down and letting nature reclaim the flooded lands.
Maybe it's a good idea and maybe it isn't. We did push the dam-building too far and we overlooked
things we should have paid attention to. But, as for tearing down the dams, well, they better not try it with
Black Canyon. Tell 'em that from old Dale Curtis.
You think I'm just a sentimental, senile cuss who can't forget that he worked on one of the greatest dams
in the world. Well, there's some of that feeling there, I'll admit. But, like it or not, that dam is here to stay.
She won't be knocked down. The fellows with the dynamite and the bulldozers will find out if they try.
Hell, yes, it's a good dam. We built 'em strong back then. But that's not the reason Black Canyon will
never fall. You know why? Because that dam is protected and I do mean with a capital "P." Magic.
Now I know you want to find out why, so just have yourself a sit over there and mind the splinters. It's a
strange story about some Indians and some queer things that happened while we were building Black
Canyon. And the bobcat....
People say the dam would never have been completed without that cat. The truth is, not only would
Black Canyon have remained incomplete, it would have broken when the reservoir was still filling.
There's a plaque at the dam site telling about Tonochpa and the cable she pulled through a conduit too
small far a man to crawl through. That's what it says on the brass inscription, but I know better. What
that little wildcat hauled through the tunnel was more than a bundle of wires.
The reason I got involved in the whole thing was because the government contract said that the dam
would not be considered technically complete unless it was instrumented. The Feds wanted all kinds of
measurement devices such as strain gauges, contraction joint meters, thermometers and so forth installed
in the dam and monitored during construction. Now all these instruments had to be wired to a power