"Blish, James - Bindlestiff - txt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

УDid you see the Сstiff again?Ф
УNo, sir. If they heard your Dirac warning, they probably figured the police had spotted them and scrammed-or maybe they thought there was a military base or au advanced culture here on the planet.Ф
УYouТre guessing,Ф Amalfi said gruffly. УWhat happened to Dr. Beetle?Ф
The man looked startled. УThe Myrdian in the tank? He got blown up with the city, I guess.Ф
УHe wasnТt put off in another life ship?Ф
УDoesnТt seem very likely. But I was only a pilot. Could be that they took him out in the mayorТs gig for some reason.Ф
УYou donТt know anything about his no-fuel drive?Ф
УFirst I heard of it.Ф
Amalfi was far from satisfied; he suspected that there was still a short circuit somewhere in the manТs memory. The cityТs auditors insisted that he had been cleared, however, and Amalfi had to accept the verdict. All that remained to be done was to get some assessment of the weapons available to the bindlestiff~ on this subject the manic was ignorant, but the cityТs analyst said cautiously that something might be extracted from the catatonic within a month or two.
Amalfi accepted the figure, since it was the best he had. With Moving Day so close, he couldnТt afford to worry overtime about another problem. He had already decided that the simplest answer to vulcanism, which otherwise would be inevitable when the planetТs geophysical balance was changed, was to reinforce the crust. All over the surface of He, drilling teams were sinking long, thin, slanting shafts, reaching toward the stress-fluid of the worldТs core. The shafts interlocked intricately, and thus far only one volcano had been created by the drillingЧin general the lava-pockets which had been tapped had already been anticipated and the flow had been bled off into half a hundred intersecting channels without ever reaching the surface. After the molten rock had hardened, the clogged channels were drilled again, with mesotron rifles set to the smallest possible dispersion.
None of the shafts had yet tapped the stress fluid; the plan was to complete them all simultaneously. At that point, specific areas, riddled with channel-intersections, would give way, and immense plugs would be forced up toward the crust,
plugs of iron, connected by ferrous cantilevers through the channels between. The planet of He would wear a cruel corset, permitting not the slightest flexureЧit would be stitched with threads of steel, steel that had held even granite in solution for millennia.
The heat problem was tougher, and Amalfi was not sure whether or not he had hit upon the solution. The very fact of structural resistance would create high temperatures, and any general formation of shearplanes would cut the imbedded girders at once. The method being prepared to cope with that was rather drastic, and its after-effects unknown.
On the whole, however, the plans were simple, and putting them into effect had seemed heavy but relatively simple labor. Some opposition, of course, had been expected from the local bandit towns.
But Amalfi had not expected to lose nearly twenty percent of his crews during the first month.
It was Miramon who brought in the news of the latest camp found slaughtered. Amalfi was sitting under a tree fern on high ground overlooking the city, watching a flight of giant dragonflies and thinking about heat-transfer in rock.
УYou are sure they were adequately protected?Ф Miramon asked cautiously. УSome of our insectsЧФ
Amalfi thought the insects, and the jungle, almost disturbingly beautiful. The thought of destroying it all occasionally upset him. УYes, they were,Ф he said shortly. УWe sprayed out the camp areas with dicoumarins and fluorine-substituted residuals. BesidesЧdo any of your insects use explosives?Ф
УExplosives! There was dynamite used? I saw no evidenceЧФ
УNo. ThatТs what bothers me. I donТt like all those felled trees you describe. We used to use TDX to get a cutting blast; it has a property of exploding in a flat plane.Ф
Miramon goggled. УImpossible. An explosion has to expand evenly in the open.Ф
УNot if itТs a piperazo-hexybitrate built from polarized carbon atoms. Such atoms canТt move in any direction but at right angles to the gravity radius. ThatТs what I mean. You people are up to dynamite, but not to TDX.Ф
He paused, frowning. УOf course some of our losses have just
been by bandit raids, with arrows and crude bombsЧyour friends from Fabr-Suithe and their allies. But these camps where there was an explosion and no crater to show for itЧФ
He fell silent. There was no point in mentioning the gassed corpses. It was hard even to think about them. Somebody on this planet had a gas which was a regurgitant, a sternutatory and a vesicant all in one. The men had been forced out of their masksЧwhich had been designed solely to protect them from volcanic gasesЧto vomit, had taken the stuff into their lungs by convulsive sneezing, and had blistered into great sacs of serum inside and out. That, obviously, had been the multiplebenzene ring Hawkesite; very popular in the days of the Hruntan Empire, when it had been called УpolybathroomfloorineФ for no discoverable reason. But what was it doing on He?
There was only one possible answer, and for a reason which he did not try to understand, it made Amalfi breathe a little easier. All around him, the jungle sighed and swayed, and humming clouds of gnats made rainbows over the dew-laden pinnae of the fern. The jungle, almost always murmurously quiet, had never seemed like a real enemy; now Ainalfi knew that that intuition had been right. The real enemy had declared itself, stealthily, but with a stealth which was naяvetщ itself in comparison with the ancient guile of the jungle.
УMiramon,Ф Amalfi said tranquilly, УweТre in a spot. That city I told you aboutЧthe bindlestiffЧis already here. It must have landed before we arrived, long enough ago to hide itself thoroughly. Probably it came down at night in some taboo area. The men in it have leagued themselves with FabrSuithe, anyhow, that much is obvious.Ф
A moth with a two-meter wingspread blundered across the clearing, piloted by a gray-brown nematode which had sunk its sucker above the ganglion between the glittering creatureТs pinions. Amalfi was in a mood to read parables into things, and the parasitism reminded him anew of how greatly he had underestimated the enemy. The bindlestiff evidently knew, and was skillful at, the secret of manipulating a new culture; a shrewd Okie never attempts to overwhelm a civilization, but instead pilots it, as indetectably as possible, doing no apparent
harm, adding no apparent burden, but turning history deftly and tyrannically aside at the crucial instantЧ Amalfi snapped the belt switch of his ultraphone. УHazleton?Ф
УHere, boss.Ф Behind the city managerТs voice was the indistinct rumble of heavy mining. УWhatТs up?Ф
УNothing yet. Are you having any trouble out there?Ф УNo. WeТre not expecting any, either, with all this artillery.Ф УFamous last words,Ф Amalfi said. УThe СstiffТs here, Mark.Ф There was a short silence. In the background, Amalfi could hear the shouts of HazletonТs crew. When the city managerТs voice came in again, it was moving from word to word very carefully, as if it expected each one to break under its weight. УYou imply that the Сstiff was already on He when our Dirac broadcast went out. Right? IТm not sure these losses of ours canТt be explained some other way, boss; the theory . . . uh
lacks elegance.Ф
Amalfi grinned tightly. УA heuristic criticism,Ф he said. УGo to the foot of the class, Mark, and think it over. Thus far theyТve out-thought us six ways for Sunday. We may be able to put your old plan into effect yet, but if itТs to work, weТll have to provoke open conflict.Ф
УHow?Ф
УEverybody here knows that thereТs going to be a drastic change when we finish what weТre doing, but weТre the only ones who know exactly what weТre going to do. The Сstiffs will have to stop us, whether theyТve got Dr. Beetle or not. So IТm forcing their hand. Moving Day is hereby advanced by one thousand hours.Ф
УWhat! IТm sorry, boss, but thatТs flatly impossible.Ф Amalfi felt a rare spasm of anger. УThatТs as may be,Ф he growled. УNevertheless, spread it around; let the Hevians hear it. And just to prove that IТm not kidding, Mark, IТm turning the City Fathers back on at that time. If youТre not ready to spin by then, you may well swing instead.Ф
The click of the belt-switch to the УOffФ position was unsatisfying. Amalfi would much have preferred to conclude the interview with something really finalЧa clash of cymbals, for instance. He swung suddenly on Miramon.
УWhat are you goggling at?Ф
The Hevian shut his mouth, flushing. УYour pardon. I was hoping to understand your instructions to your assistant, in the hope of being of some use. But you spoke in such incomprehensible terms that it sounded like a theological dispute. As for me, I never argue about politics or religion.Ф He turned on his heel and stamped off through the trees.
Amalfi watched him go, cooling off gradually. This would never do. He must be getting to be an old man. All during the conversation he had felt his temper getting the better of his judgment, yet he had felt sodden and inert, unwilling to make the effort of opposing the momentum of his anger. At this rate, the City Fathers would soon depose him and appoint some stable character to the mayoraltyЧnot Hazleton, certainly, but some unpoetic youngster who would play everything by empirics. Amalfi was in no position to be threatening anyone else with liquidation, even as a joke.
He walked toward the grounded city, heavy with sunlight, sunk in reflection. He was now about a thousand years old, give or take fifty; strong as an ox, mentally alert and Уclear,Ф in good hormone balance, all twenty-eight senses sharp, his own special psi faculty-orientationЧstill as infallible as ever, and all in all as sane as a compulsively peripatetic star man could be. The anti-agapics would keep him in this shape indefinitely, as far as anyone knewЧbut the problem of patience had never been solved.
The older a man became, the more quickly he saw answers to tough questions; and the less likely he was to tolerate slow thinking among his associates. If he were sane, his answers were generally right answers; if he were unsane, they were not; but what mattered was the speed of the thinking itself. In the end, both the sane and the unsane became equally dictatorial.
It was funny; before death had been conquered, it had been thought that memory would turn immortality into a Greek gift, because not even the human brain could remember a practical infinity of accumulated facts. Nowadays, however, nobody bothered to remember many things. That was what the City Fathers and like machines were for; they stored facts. Living men memorized nothing but processes, throwing out
obsolete ones for new ones as invention made it necessary. When they needed facts, they asked the machines.
In some cases, even processes were thrown out, if there were simple, indestructible machines to replace themЧthe slide rule, for instance. Amalfi wondered suddenly if there were a single man in the city who could multiply, divide, take square root, or figure pH in his head or on paper. The thought was so novel as to be alarmingЧas alarming as if an ancient astrophysicist had seriously wondered how many of his colleagues could run an abacus.
No, memory was no problem. But it was very hard to be patient after a thousand years.
The bottom of a port drifted into his field of view, plastered with brown tendrils of mud. He looked up. The port was a small one, and in a part of the perimeter of the city a good distance away from the section where he had intended to go on board. Feeling like a stranger, he went in.
Inside, the corridor rang with bloodcurdling shrieks. It was as if someone were flaying a live dinosaur, or, better, a pack of them. Underneath the awful noises there was a sound like water being expelled under high pressure, and someone was laughing madly. Alarmed, Amalfi hunched his bull shoulders and burst through the nearest door.

SURELY there had never been such a place in the city. It was a huge, steamy chamber, walled with some ceramic substance placed in regular tiles. The tiles were slimy, and stained; hence, oldЧvery old.