"Dafydd ab Hugh, Brad Linaweawer DOOM: Endgame (english)" - читать интересную книгу автора"Other half? S and R, this thing was alone under
there . . . that's all there is; it's not a double-entity like you." They stared at me for a few moments, but I'm not sure they really got it. Sears and Roebuck were Klave, and the Klave were always paired . . . always paired. Normally, they couldn't even deal with individualsЧ they literally couldn't see them! If you were alone, they would usually see a phantom second person; if you showed up as part of a triadЧA, B, and CЧthe Klave would see three pairs: A and B, B and C, A and C . . . something we found out before Hidalgo bought it on the beam-in. But Sears and Roebuck wasЧwere?Чan ambassa- dor of sorts, and lately they'd gotten much practice coping with singles. Even so, sometimes they forgot. They looked offended and pained. They lugged the corpse to the operating table and began the process of first figuring out what had "killed" the Newbie, then fixing it; that was all it took to revive anything in the galaxy . . . except a human being. Sears and Roebuck spent a long time hunting for organic damage, finding nothing; at last, they an- nounced the mystery solved: the Newbie had died of malnutrition! Evidently, it had been left behind acci- pills. As its last action, it went and lay down right on the LZ, hoping to be found and revived, and that was what nearly got the thing scrunched flatter than an armadillo on a tank tread. Another few meters to one side, and splat! Alas, that was a tough problem to cure. None of us had any idea how malnutrition affected Newbies. Sears and Roebuck did a biochemical analysis and thought they had isolated the essential nutrients. They compared them to what you could find on Fredworld, figuring out what was missing, then they had to guess what systems that would destroy. The upshot was that Arlene and I were ordered to take a hike for a day or two; we spent it exploring the ship, mapping all the "object-oriented" divisions of the ultraindividualist Freds. Strange, I never in my wildest nightmares thought I would be fighting along- side the ultimate collectivist Klave to defeat the ultraindividualist Freds! But a Marine is not there to make policy, just to enforce it. We checked back frequently. I wouldn't put it past Sears and Roebuck to revive the Newbie without bothering to wait for me and Arlene. But at last they said they were ready. They had been washing various |
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