"Christopher Stasheff - Rogue Wizard 07 - A Wizard In Midgard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stasheff Christopher)

dally a while, to stroll down the road and take his time pitching camp. The
woman would make an excellent ally, after all, if he could win her friendship.
On every planet on which he'd landed, he had always tried to team up with a
local-how else was he going to learn all the details that had developed since
the last computer entry about the world? In most cases, that last datum had been
entered hundreds of years before, and almost everything had changed since.
He definitely needed a local, and the woman was at least aware that he was on
her side-if he could find her. In addition, if he really wanted to try to heal
the wounds of this world, she might be the key to the puzzle of making peace
between the three nations-dwarf, giant, and Midgarder.
He remembered how the situation had looked from the bridge of his spaceship in
orbit, when he and Herkimer had been surveying the world via telephoto scanners,
and he'd still been thinking of himself as Magnus. They'd watched Vikings
battling giants, then dwarves battling Vikings, all in so short a period of time
that Gar could only think the warfare was constant.
"So we have a land of pseudo-Teutonic Viking-type people of normal height," he'd
summarized to Herkimer, "with a land of dwarves to the west and a land of giants
to the east, tundra to the north and an ocean to the south."
"The Teutons seem to outnumber both other nations by a considerable margin,"
Herkimer pointed out, "even if we don't count their slaves."
"Rather odd to leave your biggest men at home when you go off to war," Magnus
mused, "but the Teutons might figure that the big ones would be apt to desert to
the giants-not surprising, considering how they're treated at home. By the way,
Herkimer, what was the name of this planet? Other than Corona Gamma Four, that
is."
"The records of the plans for the original expedition are more scanty than
usual," the computer told him, "but they do include the information that the
intended local name for the planet was Siegfried."
"So somebody was planning on the Teutonic theme from the beginning," Magnus
said. "Were they planning on breeding three separate sub-races, or was that an
accident?"
"It could hardly have been an accident, Magnus," Herkimer reproved. "The Terran
government insisted on very stringent safety precautions for colonial
expeditions, including having a gene pool large enough to prevent inbreeding."
"Yes, even private expeditions had to pay lip service to the regulations, at
least," Magnus agreed. "If they didn't have enough colonists, they had to bring
frozen sperm and ovabut once they had landed on a new planet, there was no one
to guarantee they would use what they had brought."
"Surely you don't think the original colonists actually planned this state of
affairs!" "No, I think it far more likely that they had a horrible accident,"
Magnus said, "something that killed off half the colonists or wiped out the gene
bank-or that in spite of their precautions, genes linked up to cause unusual
effects."
He thought of his home planet, whose original colonists had contained an
extremely high proportion of latent telepaths and other kinds of latent espers,
though nobody had realized it at the time. Because of that, their descendants
had more operant psi talents than all the rest of the Terran Sphere combined.
Magnus was proof of that himself. "Nature has strange ways of achieving
remarkable surprises, and you can't always foresee every problem. I'm voting for
no malice intended by the original colonists, just inbreeding reinforcing