"Andre Norton - Ross Murdock 03 - The Defiant Agents" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

thought to instinct. More than a generation earlier mankind had chosen
barren desert -- the "white sands" of New Mexico -- as a testing ground for
atomic experiments. Humankind could be barred, warded out of the radiation
limits. The natural desert dwellers, four-footed and winged, could not be so
controlled. Thousands of years earlier, the first southward roving
Amerindian tribes had met with their kind, a hunter of the open country, a
smaller cousin of the wolf, whose natural abilities had made an indelible
impression on the human mind. He appeared in countless Indian legends as the
Shaper or the Trickster, sometimes friend, sometimes enemy. Godling for some
tribes, father of all evil for others. In the wealth of tales the coyote,
above all other animals, held pride of place. Driven by the press of
civilization into the badlands and deserts, fought with poison, gun, and
trap, the coyote had survived, adapting to new ways with all his legendary
cunning. Those who had reviled him as vermin had unwillingly added to the
folklore which surrounded him, telling their own tales of robbed traps,
skillful escapes. He continued to be a trickster, laughing on moonlit nights
from the tops of ridges at those who would hunt him down. Then, in the early
twenty-first century, when myths were scoffed at, the stories of the
coyote's slyness began once more on a fantastic scale. And finally
scientists were sufficiently intrigued to seek out this creature that seemed
to display in truth all the abilities credited to his immortal namesake by
pre-Columbian tribes. What they discovered was indeed shattering to certain
closed minds. For the coyote had not only adapted to the country of the
white sands; he had evolved into something which could not be dismissed as
an animal, clever and cunning, but limited to beast range. Six cubs had been
brought back on the first expedition, coyote in body, their developing minds
different. The descendants of those cubs were now in the ship's cages, their
mutated senses alert, ready for the slightest chance of escape. Sent to
Topaz as eyes and ears for less keenly endowed humans, they were not
completely under the domination of man. The range of their mental powers was
still uncomprehended by those who had bred, trained, and worked with them
from the days their eyes had opened and they had taken their first wobbly
steps away from their dams. The male growled again, his lips wrinkling back
in a snarl as the emanations of fear from the men he could not see reached
panic peak. He still crouched, belly flat, on the protecting pads of his
cage; but he strove now to wriggle closer to the door, just as his mate made
the same effort. Between the animals and those in the control cabin lay the
others -- forty of them. Their bodies were cushioned and protected with
every ingenious device known to those who had placed them there so many
weeks earlier. Their minds were free of the ship, roving into places where
men had not trod before, a territory potentially more dangerous than any
solid earth could ever be. Operation Retrograde had returned men bodily into
the past, sending agents to hunt mammoths, follow the roads of the Bronze
Age traders, ride with Attila and Genghis Khan, pull bows among the archers
of ancient Egypt. But Redax returned men in mind to the paths of their
ancestors, or this was the theory. And those who slept here and now in their
narrow boxes, lay under its influence. The men who had arbitrarily set them
on this course could only assume they were actually reliving the lives of
Apache nomads in the wide southwestern wastes of the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. Above, the pilot's hand pushed out again,