"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - The Tenth Planet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

was
able to choose his dig sites, and his assistants, and use university funds to
continue his research. Fortunately for him, his re-search centered on the
Native
American tribes of the Oregon Coast, and he got to spend his summers, and an
occasional winter, in what he considered to be the most beautiful place on
Earth.
But he was getting older. The morning chill got into his bones these days. In
September, he would turn sixty, and lately, he had begun to feel it. Sleeping
in
a tent, even with a thick sleeping bag and an air mattress (something he
wouldn't have considered in the old days), left him stiff and sore. It took a
few minutes of movement every morning be-fore his joints stopped creaking.
No one stirred in the dozen other tents around the small clearing.
Twenty-four
Oregon State University students had signed up for this dig, more than any
other
summer. He was having trouble just keeping them all busy. The dig site wasn't
big enough for all of them to work at once.
He grinned. He always woke before his students. On the second day of the dig,
most of them had groaned their way through the work, and he hadn't felt old
at
all. These days stu-dents got no exercise, except for the federally mandated
stuff in the public schools. Remotes, handheld computers, and the new
personal
assistants, which were little more than headless robots, ensured that anyone
who
wanted to spend his life in a chair could do so without any effort at all.
Bradshaw was an old-fashioned guy, old enough to re-member when kids spent
their
summers outside playing baseball and kick the can until their parents forced
them in-side. Old enough to remember when color television was an unusual
thing.
Old enough to remember only three television channelsтАФall freeтАФand changing
those channels by twist-ing a dial. When he was a little, little boy, it had
taken him two hands to go from one channel to the other.
Now some of his students brought their own televisions with them, tiny things
that attached to the wrist and changed channels with a soft verbal command.
On
the first day of the dig, he had Kelly Flynn, his graduate assistant, help
him
with what he called the Great Electronics Search. He confiscated most of his
students' "necessities"тАФgenerally, watches that served as small computers,
with
television, radio, gaming, and Internet capability. He wanted them to focus
on
the lives of Native Americans before white settlers found this beautiful
place.
His theory was that if his students were able to think like the tribe that
filled this area, they would do better when they searched through the earth