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

give warning if the cement was going rotten. Its reading stabilized, staying rock steady at the new set
point. I was about to relax my watch when a second gauge, located in the same sector, showed an
upward drift.
I called Nelson, the construction engineer and had him out to the sector to probe the hardening cement
and do chemical tests. Everything indicated that the pour was hardening as it should within the forms.
Nelson suggested, none too diplomatically, that I should recheck my instruments.
I scratched my thinning hair beneath my hard hat. Should I be alarmed about such slight deviations? The
instrument readings had kept to their expected levels ever since I'd installed the first strain gauge in the
rising foundations of the dam. Why should they change now?
I spoke first to another engineer who'd had training
in the new technology of instrumenting construction projects such as this one. He only scratched his head
beneath his hard hat and said that my readings were within acceptable bounds. My boss looked at the
traces and said I worried too much. The concrete engineers told me to have faith-after all, it was they
who were building Black Canyon.
I'm a guy who knows when worrying is counterproductive, so I shrugged my shoulders and quit
sweating. I started reading the paper again during lunch instead of spending the time trying to analyze my
data. I didn't expect much out of the local scandal sheet, but I was surprised to find an interesting column
by a guy who bylined himself Ernie Pyle. His writing was terse and to the point, not high-flown or fancy.
It seemed he had taken a few years off to roam around the Southwest, describing his experiences in little
squibs that he sent to the syndicate. They were refreshing to read after all the bad news about Europe
and the threat of impending war.
Other guys on the site took to reading Pyle and I remember my boss saying that this fellow would make a
good war correspondent, if it came down to that. The writer really made himself popular with our crew
when he did his "Dambuilders" column, describing his impressions of the men at another construction site
just north of Black Canyon. I thought that if Ernie had been impressed with the hard hat he'd seen who
rode the cable hook from gorge to rim without giving the trip a second thought, what might flow from his
pen on meeting not only an Indian worker with a similar disregard for the hazards of height, but a bobcat
who shared his attitude and his place on the end of a high-scaler's line?
Well, Ernie went on to the other end of the state to write about rutted roads and Navajos and Mike's
Tonochpa never found immortality in the lines of his column. Ernie did serve one purpose and that was to
get me thinking I hadn't paid the two a visit lately.
By that time, the tower crew had nearly finished the inlet gate foundations. They rerouted the
Monkeyslide to stop at the rock ledge instead of the overhead plankwalk. When I got off, I found Mike
with a gang of other high-scalers, amusing them with the bobcat. Mike put her at one end of a coolant
pipe that seemed impossibly small for her and took bets on whether she'd make it through.
I'd seen housecats pull some amazing contortions in getting themselves in and out of tight spots, but this
bobcat put them all to shame. Although two or three times the size of a regular cat, she could shinny in
and out of the tiniest places. She seemed to be able to elongate herself into a big furry caterpillar, for no
sooner had her stub tail disappeared down one end than her whiskers appeared at the other. Mike was
raking in a pile when I sauntered up.
"Aren't you afraid she'll get stuck?" I asked him.
He grinned and shook his head, his eyes glinting in his dark face beneath the battered steel hard hat. "She
knows. If she can't get through, she won't go. Never got stuck yet."
He shooed the other men away, picked up Tonochpa and went with me to the shade cast by a boulder.
There we could sit and look out over the rising dam. Mike's mood seemed to change, becoming pensive.
He asked me what work I did, what all the equipment in the recorder shack was for. Carefully I
explained the study of stresses and strains within the structure and how they must be monitored to ensure
the strength of the completed dam.
He looked at me piercingly from beneath the rim of his hard hat. "I did not know that you are a medicine
man."