"Mary Rosenblum - Jumpers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rosenblum Mary)

Although I kill the snakes." She flashed a quick grin, then frowned. "The frogs and snakes will not harm
your nets, will they?"

"I don't know. I don't think so." He began to unpack the spare sensor net. Silvano must have left his main
net behind when he had loaded Joaquin's equipment. "I don't know how I'm going to get this spread out."
He eyed the huge limbs that formed the floor of this green world, the curtains of lianas and flowering vines
that strung all together. "I'll probably fall and break my neck. It will just prove Father rightтАФthat the
minute he stops babysitting me I go and kill my precious self."

"Is it a square? A circle? Does it need to lie level among the trees, or can it be uneven?" She reached for
the carefully bundled fibers with her longтАФfingered hand, sniffed at it. "The thicker strand is the edge,
no?"

"Yes." He kept expecting her to think like a child or some kind of halfwitted primitive. He still thought of
her as an intelligent animal, and his cheeks heated at that realization. "It's in the shape of тАж a hexagon."
He sketched the shape for her and showed her how to open the folds without tangling them. "These are
the connects for the leads. I've only got about ten meters of lead, so it has to be close to the platform, I
guess."

"Ha." She tucked the folded net into the waist of her shorts and leaped from the edge of the platform,
arm stretched to snag a slender liana. The vine tore loose from some of its supports, so that she dropped
three meters as she swung. Twigs and leaves showered down, and Joaquin stopped breathing until her
hand closed around a small branch. She used that one to swing herself higher and then pushed off from a
thicker limb to do the liana thing all over again.

Tarzanning. It was scary as hell to watch. Apparently satisfied with her location, she clung to a swaying
limb with her feet while she attached the net to a lower branch. Her long brown toes, curled like fingers
around the branch, jarred him. She looked more monkey than human like that. But as she unfurled his net
into a perfectly level hexagon, he stopped noticing.

It was dark before he plugged the leads from the net into his softly humming system. The power indicator
was low, but he should have enough battery for tonight. Worry about the solar panels in the morning. He
powered up the net and started as Zlia leaned over his shoulder.

"What will they look like?" she whispered. "The ghosts?"

"They're not ghosts. You don't need to whisper, you can't scare them away." But he was whispering, too.
"You won't really see them. They're not really here like you and I are here. The machines will detect their
passage through our universe, that's all. The computer will create an artificial image from the input."

"What if they do not come?"

"I'll keep listening until they do." He shrugged. "Czenko reported that the concentration of dark matter is
higher in this region than anywhere else in the world. He didn't know why."

"Of course they come here." Her eyes shone like a cat's eyes in the dark. "This is a good place to hide. It
is the only place left, Silvano says. He may be right." She shrugged. "I have never left here."

Yeah. Joaquin stared at the blank monitor screen where the image of the jumpers would appear. Perhaps
it was the only place left to hide.