"William Tunning - Survivability" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tuning William)

on Flannigan is full of an adipose ba-cillus. Harmless enoughтАФdoesn't in-terfere with our tapping
local water suppliesтАФbut, when the water freezes, it leaves a residue in the ice made up of the oily
parts of the bacillus. Creates very slippery, almost greasy ice. Slick ice.
Following a route that took him in a wide loop out over Botany Bay, Olie worked his way across the
surface of Flannigan, finding more and more dead Yeep from which he took tissue samples, until his
course brought him back in sight of Botany Bay station.
He quickened his pace as much as he could without risking a fall on the slick ice. He was anxious to
do his lab analyses on the tissue samples he had takenтАФanxious to confirm his own suspicionsтАФanxious
to tromp into Elsa's office and tell her that he had been right and she had been wrong.
The anachronism of Botany Bay station always made him smile. Three large structure pods
surrounded by inflatable sheds made up the station. It always looked lu-dicrously out of place to Olie
whenever he came on it suddenly. On the barren surface of Flannigan, it reminded him of nothing so
much as a plum sticking out of an enormous albino pudding.
The structures themselves were incredibly sophisticated, holding as they did a complete biostation.
They would have taken years to build from scratch on the surface. Instead they had appeared almost
overnightтАФalready complete.
All of the Terran research stations were carried the same way. They were closed-cycle units,
in-serted piggyback into the hull of a starship. When the destination planet or space station was raised,
the proper number of the proper units were simply detached from the ship and de-graved down to the
surface, complete with their own power supplies and food-chain sources.
Needless to say, the abrupt ap-pearance of a research station had a profound effect on any intelligent
native life which happened to dwell on a place like Flannigan.
The establishment of Botany Bay station had done the same for the primitive natives of Flannigan,
who called themselves Gratchii and were organized into simple, no-madic tribes. It had been quite easy
to convince the Gratchii that the Terrans were beings with whom it would be wise to cooperate.

In the shirt-sleeve environment of the station's main pod, Rudolf Altborg clasped his hands behind his
head and leaned back in his chair.
As the project's biochemist, he was obliged to chart trends, ride herd on the work of biomedgen
technicians like Olie Struan, and condense information into reportsтАФsuch as the one he was dictating into
the message chip at this mo-ment.
"Conclusion-wise," he said into the pickup, "we have effectively dilated the metabolic spectrum of the
Yeep in such a way that this species, Ovis Flanax, will easily be able to operate on a more diversified
diet. The almost exclusive de-pendence by the local indigenous population on the Yeep should be
relieved by the successful con-clusion of the project. However, while it is not within my area to draw
economic conclusions, it ap-pears at this juncture that the fact of the natives' dependence on the Yeep, or
on any single animal spe-cies, forтАФ" Altborg ticked them off on his fingersтАФ "food supply, fiber from the
animal's wool, and mone-tary units essential to their com-mercial trade among themselves, offers an
indication that an eval-uation would be in order toward the possible end of assigning an econ team to
widen the systems of merchandise and exchange used by the Gratchii. Not only could the progress of
civilization on Flanni-gan thus be accelerated, but such crises as the one currently being dealt with on
successful levels by this project might easily be pre-vented from recurrence in the fu-ture.
"Bio-section expects to shortly complete tests on the mutated strain of Yeep developed here, and we
are confident of a successful conclusion of our assignment. Us-ing adaptations of advanced techniques,
we have . . ."
Olie Struan slammed the door. Altborg slowly spun his chair to face Olie, who was still shivering
from the outside cold.
"They're still dying," Olie said flatly.
Altborg pursed his lips. "Why?"
"Same as I said." Olie stared at Altborg with unblinking blue eyes.