"Paul Preuss - Re-Entry" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preuss Paul)

staple part of their diet, and they were unknowingly eating an awful lot of the
little grubs with their carelessly cleaned besanтАФthereby catching the disease.
But those same grubs were providing them with their only complete proteins!
Without that animal protein they would have been just as bad off, or worse."
Holder chuckled. "We couldn't tell them that, of course. We persuaded them to
switch to a different source of besan that just happened to be crawling with
healthy bugs."
At this moment there arose repeated loud crashes in the brush, coming from the
place in the trees Holder was watching. Over the sounds of vegetation being
shredded and crushed came a different, more ominous sound, a guttural, slavering
gurgle, mingled with violent expulsions of breath.
Holder seemed oblivious to his audience's mounting tension. After all, they were
all sophisticates; they'd all seen a thousand skillfully produced sensies,
replete with the most ingenious special effects.
Almost casually he attempted to undercut the excitement. "By the way, I was
thirteen when I took this piece of film, on an expedition organized by my
father. Good old Dad. For those of you who go in for this sort of thing, it was
shot with a Leitz, with the reference beam reflectors set back there on the
trunks of those sequoias, about four meters up."
Bruneau was among those lulled into looking for the equipment Holder mentioned.
As his eyes searched the background, the branches of the redwoods whipped aside
and Bruneau found himself staring down the throat of a roaring Tyran-nosaurus
rex.
Even though he was a dozen meters from the toothy ap-
parition, Bruneau jumped. A collective gasp went up from the audience.
Holder giggled. "Oh come on, this is just a kid's home movie. In a couple of
weeks you'll be on Darwin, where you can see the real thing."
The animal stepped forward. "There! Did you see it?" Holder shouted.
He flicked the controls and froze the tyrannosaur in place, cycling on a
snorting breath. The bulk of the great beast's sixteen-meter length was back in
the brush. Its huge head was carried relatively low and thrust forward, with
rows of sharp teeth curved like Arabian daggers. Its nearly 9,000-kilogram
weight was balanced on colossal three-clawed drumsticks in a running stance:
head, body, and ridiculous stick-like forelegs ahead, massive tail out of sight
behind,
Holder answered his own question. "No, none of you were paying attention." He
reversed the film, and the forest swallowed the creature's head. "Down there, to
the right! Look!" be shouted, as he instantly switched the film to forward.
Smooth naked skin glimmered in the shadows of the underbrush.
Holder froze the image: it was a very young man only partly visible through the
foliage. He wore a necklace of long curved teeth, a coil of rope over one
shoulder, and apparently nothing else. His color was a rich, translucent bronze,
his long golden hair flew out in braids behind his shoulders, and he sported a
full blond beard and mustaches.
"The very picture of the perfect barbarian, eh?" Holder said cheerfully. "He
could be a Viking, a Celt, even a Cro-magnonтАФright down to the skin color. How
many centuries have gone by since people were that pale?" Holder walked through
the immaterial forest undergrowth until he was standing beside the frozen
figure. "How did this outlandish creature come to be here, playing anachronistic
cave man?"