"Blish, James - Seeding Program" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

much. Sweeney's history contained almost nothing that was
manipulable by any system of psychotherapy developed to
help human beings. Nor were the members of the cadre ever
able to agree among themselves what the prime goal of such
therapy should be: whether to help Sweeney to live with the
facts of his essential inhumanity, or to fan instead that sin-
gle spark of hope which the non-medical people on the Moon
were constantly holding out toward Sweeney as the sole rea-
son for his existence.
The facts were simple and implacable. Sweeney was an
Adapted Man -adapted, in this instance, to the bitter cold,
11
the light gravity, and the thin stink of atmosphere which pre-
vailed on Ganymede. The blood that ran in his veins, and
the sol substrate of his every cell, was nine-tenths liquid am-
monia; his bones were Ice IV; his respiration was a complex
hydrogen-to-methane cycle based not upon catalysis by an
iron-bearing pigment, but upon the locking and unlocking of
a double sulfur bond; and he could survive for weeks, if he
had to, upon a diet of rock dust.
He had always been this way. What had made him so had
happened to him literally before he had been conceived: the
application, to the germ cells which had later united to form
him, of an elaborate constellation of techniques-selective
mitotic poisoning, pinpoint X-irradiation, tectogenetic micro-
surgery, competitive metabolic inhibition, and perhaps fifty
more whose names he had never even heard -which collect-
ively had been christened "pantropy." The word, freely re-
translated, meant "changing everything" and it fitted.
As the pantropists had changed in advance the human pat-
tern in Sweeney's shape and chemistry, so they had changed
his education, his world, his thoughts, even his ancestors. You
didn't make an Adapted Man with just a wave of the wand,
Dr. Alfven had once explained proudly to Sweeney over the
intercom. Even the ultimate germ cells were the emergents of
a hundred previous generations, bred one from another be-
fore they had passed the zygote stage like one-celled animals,
each one biassed a little farther toward the cyanide and ice
and everything nice that little boys like Sweeney were made
of. The psych cadre picked off Dr. Alfven at the end of that
same week, at the regular review of the tapes of what had
been said to Sweeney and what he had found to say back, but
they need hardly have taken the trouble. Sweeney had never
heard a nursery rhyme, any more than he had ever experi-
enced the birth trauma or been exposed to the Oedipus com-
plex. He was a law unto himself, with most of the whereases
blank.
He noticed, of course, that Alfven failed to show up when
his next round was due, but this was commonplace. Scientists
came and went around the great sealed cavern, always ac-