Odnośniki
- Indeks
- Frederik Pohl & Jack Williamson Starchild Trilogy
- Benford, Gregory Galactic Center 3 Great Sky River
- Flint, Eric Ring of Fire SS anth Grantville Gazette Vol 6
- James Herbert Fuks
- Donna's Loving Brothers
- H164. Landon Juliet Kupiona narzeczona
- Harrison Harry Rebelia W Czasie
- Diana Castilleja [Aiza Clan 02] A Trust Earned (pdf)
- śąeromski S. ZamiećÂ
- Macomber Debbie Przepis na śÂwićÂta
- zanotowane.pl
- doc.pisz.pl
- pdf.pisz.pl
- szostka.htw.pl
He put down his spoon. "I wonder if they were house pets of ours, long before
star travel?"
"I wouldn't have them messing up my house. "
Adult humans weighed little more than pans, but were far weaker. A pan could
lift five times more than a well-conditioned man. Human brains were three or
four times more massive than a pan's. A human baby a few months old already
had a brain
"To make anybody believe that, you'll have to show that they're intelli-
gent enough to have intricate interactions. "
"What about their foraging, their hunting?" he persisted.
"Vaddo says they couldn't even be trained to do work around this Ex-
cursion Station. "
"I'll show you what I mean. Let's master their methods together. "
"What method?"
"The basic one. Getting enough to eat. "
She bit into a steak of a meaty local grazer, suitably processed and "fat-
flensed for the fastidious urban palate, " as the brochure had it. Chewing
with unusual ferocity, she eyed him. "You're on. Anything a pan can do, I
can do better. "
Dors waved at him from within Sheelah. Let the contest begin.
The troop was foraging. He let Ipan meander and did not try to harness the
emotional ripples that lapped across the pan mind. He had gotten better at it,
but at a sudden smell or sound he could lose his grip. And guiding the blunt
pan mind through any-
thing complicated was still like moving a puppet with rubber strings.
Sheelah/Dors waved and signed to him: This way.
They had worked out a code of a few hundred words, using finger and
What there? he signed to Sheelah/Dors.
Pans ambled up to mounds, gave them the onceover, and reached out to brush
aside some mud, revealing a tiny tunnel. Termites, Dors signed.
Hari analyzed the situation as pans drifted in. Nobody seemed in much of a
hurry. Sheelah winked at him and waddled over to a distant mound.
Apparently termites worked outside at night, then blocked the entrances at
dawn. Hari let his pan shuffle over to a large tan mound, but he was rid-
ing it so well now that the pan's responses were weak. Hari/Ipan looked for
cracks, knobs, slight hollows and when he brushed away some mud, found
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nothing. Other pans readily unmasked tunnels. Had they memorized the hundred
or more tunnels in each mound?
He finally uncovered one, Ipan was no help. Hari could control, but that
blocked up the wellsprings of deep knowledge within the pan.
The pans deftly tore off twigs or grass stalks near their mounds. Hari
carefully followed their lead. His twigs and grass didn't work. The first lot
was too pli-
ant, and when he tried to work them into a twisting runnel, they col-
lapsed and buckled. He switched to stiffer ones, but those caught on the
tunnel walls, or snapped off. From Ipan came little help. Hari had managed him
a bit too well.
He was getting embarrassed. Even the younger pans had no trouble
turning his wrist to navigate it down the twisty channel. Then he had to
gently vibrate it. Through Ipan he sensed that this was to attract termites to
bite into the stick. At first he did it too long and when he drew the stick
out it was half gone. Termites had bitten cleanly through it. So he had to
search out another stick and that made Ipan's stomach growl.
The other pans were through termite-snacking while Hari was still fum-
bling for his first taste. The nuances irked him. He pulled the stick out too
fast, not turning it enough to ease it past the tunnel's curves. Time and
again he fetched forth the stick, only to find that he had scraped the lus-
cious termites off on the walls. Their bites punctured his stick, until it was
so shredded he had to get another. The termites were dining better than he.
He finally caught the knack, a fluid slow twist of the wrist, gracefully ex-
tracting termites, clinging like bumps. Ipan licked them off eagerly. Hari
liked the
FOUNDATION'S FEAR
387
morsels, filtered through pan tastebuds.
Not many, though. Others of the troop were watching his skimpy har- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]