"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-
dentally and eventually ran out of dietary supplement
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