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

explanation. I was a little angry at him for using my own uncertainties to stampede me toward a ridiculous
conclusion.
"I'm sorry," I said to him, a little more curtly than I meant to. "I don't think we're talking the same
language, sport. Look, I have to get back to my job."
"It is all right. You must wait and watch. Then you will see."
I only hunched my shoulders and walked away from him, his strange ideas, and his damned bobcat.
It was just past noon on the following day when a worker fell from his scaffold into wet concrete that had
just been dumped by the bucket. Rescuers stirred and probed the heavy cement, but the scaffold was so
high that the fall took the victim far under the surface and suffocated him before he could claw his way to
the top. They could not even recover the body before the cement in the form began to harden.
Though a few roustabouts cursed, the rest shrugged their shoulders and went on with their labor. I knew
that men were expendable to Black Canyon; the project consumed them as it did explosives and cement.
There was no pause in the work and no investigation.
Two days later a cement pour atop the dam refused to harden. While people were scrambling around
trying to figure out why, a scaffold broke and two men fell to their deaths. The only thing anyone found
was a strange ring woven of yucca fibers and feathers that floated atop the still-heaving mass of concrete.
And another strain gauge left its previous value and started to drift up.
For some reason, Mike stopped by my recorder shack the next day during lunch. As always, he had
Tonochpa with him. Watching him feed her bits of baloney sandwich made me remember the
shinny-through-the-pipe game he played with her at the tower site. Something tickled my mind. Hadn't a
concrete engineer said he'd laid a pipe through which coolant had been pumped while the concrete
around it was curing? Now the run of pipe lay empty and could serve as a conduit for my instrument
cable, if I could feed the cable through. Trouble was that the pipe ran from one end of the dam to the
other, but only had a fourteen-inch diameter. A man couldn't get through; but a compact creature like
Tonochpa.. . .
I asked Mike if she could do it. I said I'd pay him for her services.
"Sure." He grinned.
"Is she strong enough? We'll run a rope first and tie it to the cable, but a few thousand feet of rope is
going to be heavy."
"Only way to know is to try," said Mike. He stroked the bobcat, who arched her back against his hand.
"Okay," I said. "How about a week from today? We'll do it when everyone's eating lunch." I didn't
mention that having a bunch of my colleagues observing this stunt wouldn't add much to my reputation,
especially if the idea didn't work.
Mike became interested in the recorder traces and raised his eyebrows at me knowingly.
"You really think that this is being caused by ... magic?" I blurted and added, "Don't get the idea I believe
such mumbo jumbo."
He just shrugged his shoulders. "To me, this is magic," he said, indicating the banks of recorders and their
wiggling pens. "To you it is the way the world works. Perhaps the same is true of what you call Indian
magic. It is all part of the way the world works." He paused. "Are you worried about the dam?"
"Hell, yes! Aren't you? You've put sweat into it."
"And I have gotten out of it what I want," he said. "A living. And that will end when they no longer need
us high-scalers on the tower sites."
I stared at him; unsure of what he meant. I'd seen how hard he worked and the pride he took in his job. I
thought he was like the rest of us, eager to see the dam completed and the river harnessed for power and
agriculture. But I could see that my assumption was completely wrong. It occurred to me that Black
Canyon might not be a boon to the Indians, but instead a means by which more of their land might be
wrenched from them.
"If that's how you feel, why are you worried that the dam might collapse?" I challenged.
"I have an uncle who has settled with his relatives in the Imperial Valley," he said quietly. "You know how
much water will be backed up behind this dam."