"Timothy Zahn - A Coming of Age" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zahn Timothy)

suggest its creation had cost four years of blood-sweat... or that it might very well turn Tigrin society
upside down as drastically as the sudden appearance of the teekay talent had nearly two hundred
years earlier. Brown dynamiteтАФa kiloton of it in every hypo.

Feeling a tension in his jaw, he put the vial down carefully and picked up the first hypo and a
disinfectant swab. Cleaning a patch of skin on the boy's upper arm, he injected the neutralizer and
swabbed over the needle mark. Moving a couple of centimeters down, he repeated the procedure
with the second hypo. Then, his hand on the boy's pulse, he settled back to wait.

He'd preferred to err on the side of caution with the doses, with the result that it took nearly an hour
for the child to drift from his original comalike sleep into the half-awake state Jarvis needed. But
finally he was ready.

"Colin, can you hear me?" Jarvis asked softly.

The boy stirred, and his eyes opened into slits that still showed mostly white. "Uh-huh," he
murmured.

"I'm going to tell you some things, Colin, and I want you to promise me you'll remember. Okay?"

"Uh-huh."

"Okay. Open your eyes and look at me." Colin did so, and Jarvis continued, "My name is Matthew
Caleb. I'm a friend of yours and the Brimmers, and you'll be staying with me for a few monthsтАФa
sort of vacation in the woods. You're very excited and happy to be here, of course, and will want to
stay as long as you can. Will you remember all of that?"

"Okay."

There were other things Jarvis wanted to tell him, but they could wait for another day now that the
groundwork had been laid. "Good. Now, turn your head and look into the corner over there. Do you
see the red disk? I want you to try and lift it straight up along the metal bar."

Colin nodded and Jarvis turned his attention to the corner. The device there was essentially a
homemade version of a standard hive teekay tester. Twenty metal disks, each weighing one
kilogram, rested on a vertical pole that was tapered from bottom to top; the different sizes of the
disks' central holes let them rest a few centimeters apart on the pole. As Jarvis watched, the bottom
diskтАФpainted a bright redтАФwobbled once and began to rise. It picked up the disk above it without
slowing; and the next, and the next. When the pile finally came to a halt, it consisted of eight disks
and was almost able to lift the ninth.

"That's fine, Colin; very good," Jarvis said, marking the figure down in a small notebook. Average,
or perhaps a bit weak for his age, though Jarvis had no doubt a careful brain and metabolism analysis
would show the boy to be on the proper teekay curve. Again, that could wait until tomorrow. "You
can let the disk down now." The pile returned smoothly to its original configuration, and Jarvis
turned back to the boy. "Now, Colin, I'm going to give you a shot. I don't want you to feel it, though,

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A Coming of Age