"Norton, Andre - Galactic Derelict" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/Andre%20Norton%20-%20GALACTIC%20%20DERELICT.htm

GALACTIC DERELICT


Copyright й, 1959, by Andre Norton

An Ace Book, by arrangement with The World Publishing Company.

hot--it sure was stacking up to be a hot one today. He'd better check on the spring in the brakes
before the sun really boiled up the country ahead. That ╖was the only water in this whole frying pan of
baking rock--or was it?
Travis Fox hitched forward in his saddle to study the pinkish yellow of the bare desert strip between
him and that faint, distant line of green juniper against the buff of sage-brush which marked the cuts of
the brakes. This was a barren land, forbidding to anyone not native to its harshness.
It ╖was also a land in which time was frozen into one color-streaked mold of unchanging rock and
earth, and in that it was probably now unique upon the rider's planet. Elsewhere around the world
deserts had been flooded, through man's efforts, with sea water freed of its burden of salt. Ordered
farms beat ancient sand dunes into dim memories. Mankind was fast becoming no longer subject to the
whim of weather or climate. Yet here the free desert remained unaltered because the nation within
which it lay was still rich enough not to need all of its soil under cultivation.
Someday this, too, would be swept away, taking with it the heritage of such as Travis Fox. For five
hundred years, or perhaps close to a thousand now--no one could rightly say when the first Apache
clan had come questing into this ter-ritory--these canyons and sand wastes, valleys and mesas had
been dominated by a tough, desert-born breed who could travel and fight, and live off bleakness no
other race dared face without supplies laboriously transported. His ancestors had waged war which
lasted almost four centuries across this country. And now the survivors wrested a living from the same
region with a like determination.
That spring in the brakes . . . Travis' brown fingers began to count off seasons in taps on his saddle
horn. Nineteen . . . twenty . . . This was the twentieth year after the last big dry, and if Chato was
right, that meant the water which should be there was due for a periodical failure. And the old man
had been correct in his prediction of an unusually arid summer this year.
If Travis rode straight there to find the spring dry, he'd lose most of the day, and time was important.
They had to move the breeding stock to a sure water supply. On the other hand if he cut back into the
Canyon of the Hohokam on just a hunch and was wrong-- then Whelan would have every right to
lay into him for being a fool. Whelan stubbornly re-fused to follow the Old Ones' knowledge. And in
that his brother was himself a fool.
Travis laughed softiy. The White-eyes-- deliberately he used the old warrior's term for a traditional
enemy, saying it aloud, "Pinda-lick-o-yi"-- the White-eyes didn't know every-thing. And a few of
them were willing to admit it once in a while.
Then he laughed again, this time at himself and his own thoughts. Scratch the rancher-- and the
Apache was right under the surface of his sun-dried hide. Only there was a bit-ter note in that second
laugh and Travis booted his pinto into a lope with more force than was necessary. He didn't care to
follow the trail of those particular thoughts. He'd make for the place of the Hohokam and he'd be
Apache for today; there was nothing to spoil that as his other dreams had been spoiled.
Whelan thought that if an Apache lived like the White-eyes, and set aside all the old things, then he
would gain all their advantages. To Whelan there was nothing good in the past, and even to consider
the Old Ones, what they did and

why they did it, was a foolish waste of time. Travis bit again on disappointment, to find it as fresh and