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

but somehow he had failed to realize that the danger would
be not merely real, but seductive.
The young men took him swiftly the rest of the way to the
colony. They had been as incurious as they had been anony-
mous. Rullman was different. The look of stunned disbelief
on the scientist's face, as Sweeney was led into his high-
ceilinged, rock-walled office, was so total as to be frightening.
He said: "What's this!"
"We found him climbing the col. We thought he'd gotten
lost, but he says he belongs to the parent flight."
"Impossible," Rullman said. "Quite impossible." And then
he fell silent, studying the newcomer from crown to toe. The
expression of shock dimmed only slightly.
The long scrutiny gave Sweeney time to look back. Rullman
was older than his pictures, but that was natural; if anything,
he looked a little less marked by age than Sweeney had an-
ticipated. He was spare, partly bald, and slope-shouldered,
but the comfortable pod under his belt-line which had shown
in the photos was almost gone now. Evidently living on Gany-
mede had hardened him some. The pictures bad failed to
prepare Sweeney for the man's eyes: they were as hooded and
unsettling as an owl's.
"You'd better tell me who you are," Rullman said at last.
"And how you got here. You aren't one of us, that's certain."
"I'm Donald Leverault Sweeney," Sweeney said. "Maybe
I'm not one of you, but my mother said I was. I got here in
her ship. She said you'd take me in."
Rullman shook his head. "That's impossible, too. Excuse
me, Mr. Sweeney; but you've probably no idea what a bomb-
shell you are. You must be Shirley Leverault's child, thenbut
how did you get here? How did you survive all this time?
Who kept you alive, and tended you, after we left the Moon?
And above all, how did you get away from the Port cops? We
knew that Port Earth found our Moon lab even before we
abandoned it. I can hardly believe that you even exist."
Nevertheless, the scientist's expression of flat incredulity
was softening moment by moment. He was, Sweeney judged,
already beginning to buy it. And necessarily: there Sweeney
stood before him, breathing Ganymede's air, standing easily
in Ganymede's gravity, with Ganymede's dust on his cold skin,
a fact among inarguable facts.
"The Port cops found the big dome, all right," Sweeney
said. "But they never found the little one, the pilot plant. Dad
blew up the tunnel between the two before they landed -he
was killed in the rock-slide. Of course I was still just. a cell in
a jug when that happened."
"I see," Rullman said thoughtfully. "We picked up an ex-
plosion on our ship's instruments before we took off. But we
thought it was the Port raiders beginning to bomb, unexpected
though that was. Then they didn't destroy the big lab either,