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

companied by the polite and beautifully uniformed private po-
lice of the Greater Earth Port Authority, but they rarely lasted
very long. Even among the psych cadre there was always a
peculiar tension, a furious constraint which erupted periodi-
cally into pitched shouting battles. Sweeney never found out
what the shouting was about because the sound to the outside
was always cut as soon as the quarrels began, but he noticed
that some of the participants never showed up again.
"Where's Dr. Emory? Isn't this his day?"
"He finished his tour of duty."
"But I want to talk to him. He promised to bring me a book.
Won't he be back for a visit?"
"I don't think so, Sweeney. He's retired. Don't worry about
him, he'll get along just fine, I'll bring you your book."
It was after the third of these incidents that Sweeney was
let out on the surface of the Moon for the first time
guarded, it was true, by five men in spacesuits, but Sweeney
didn't care. The new freedom seemed enormous to him, and
his own suit, only a token compared to what the Port cops had
to wear, hardly seemed to exist. It was his first foretaste of the
liberty he was to have, if the many hints could be trusted,
after his job was done. He could even see the Earth, where
people lived.
About the job he knew everything there was to know, and
knew it as second nature. It had been drummed into him from
his cold and lonely infancy, always with the same command
at the end:
"We must have those men back."
Those six words were the reason for Sweeney; they were
also Sweeney's sole hope. The Adapted Men had to be recap-
tured and brought back to Earth or more exactly, back to
the dome on the Moon, the only place besides Ganymede where
they could be kept alive. And if they could not all be recap-
tured -he was to entertain this only as a possibility he must
at least come back with Dr. Jacob Rullman. Only Rullman
would be sure to know the ultimate secret: how to turn an
Adapted Man back into a human being.
Sweeney understood that Rullman 'and his associates were
criminals, but how grievous their crime had been was a ques-
tion he had never tried to answer for himself. His standards
were too sketchy. It was clear from the beginning, however,
that the colony on Ganymede had been set up without Earth's
sanction, by methods of which Earth did not approve (ex-
cept for special cases like Sweeney), and that Earth wanted it
broken up. Not by force, for Earth wanted to know first what
Rullman knew, but by the elaborate artifice which was Sween-
ey himself.
We must have those men back. After that, the hints said
never promising anything directly Sweeney could be made
human, and know a better freedom than walking the airless