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

surface of the Moon with five guards.
It was usually after one of these hints that one of those
suddenly soundless quarrels would break out among the staff.
Any man of normal intelligence would have come to suspect
that the hints were less than well founded upon any. real ex-
pectation, and Sweeney's training helped to make him sus-
picious early; but in the long run he did not care. The hints
offered his only hope and he accepted them with hope but
without expectation. Besides, the few opening words of such
quarrels which he had overheard before the intercom clicked
off had suggested that there was more to the disagreement
than simple doubt of the convertibility of an Adapted Man.
It had been Emory, for instance, who had burst out unex-
pectedly and explosively:
"But suppose Rullman was right?"
Click.
Right about what? Is a lawbreaker ever "right?" Sweeney
could not know. Then there had been the technie who had
said "It's the cost that's the trouble with terra-forming"
what did that mean? -and had been hustled out of the mon-
itoring chamber on some trumped-up errand hardly a minute
later. There were many such instances, but inevitably Sween-
ey failed to put the fragments together into any pattern. He
decided only that they did not bear directly upon his chances
of becoming human, and promptly abandoned them in the
vast desert of his general ignorance.
In the long run, only the command was real the com-
mand and the nightmares. We must have those men back.
Those six words were the reason .why Sweeney, like a man
whose last effort to awaken has failed, was falling head first
toward Ganymede.
The Adapted Men found Sweeney halfway up the great col
which provided the only access to their cliff-edge colony from
the plateau of Howe's H. He did not recognize them; they
conformed to none of the photographs he had memorized;
but they accepted his story readily enough. And he had not
needed to pretend exhaustion -Ganymede's gravity was nor-
mal to him, but it had been a long trek and a longer climb.
He was surprised to find, nevertheless, that he had enjoyed
it. For the first time in his life he had walked unguarded,
either by men or by mechanisms, on a world where he felt
physically at home; a world without walls, a world where he
was essentially alone. The air was rich and pleasant, the
winds came from wherever they chose to blow, the tempera-
ture in the col was considerably below what had been allow-
able in the dome on the Moon, and there was sky all around
him, tinged with indigo and speckled with stars that twinkled
now and then.
He would have to be careful. It would be all too easy to
accept Ganymede as home. He had been warned against that,